Ask anyone about what they like to eat and you'll probably hear excitement and passion about a favorite subject and pastime. When asked about nutrition, however, people typically lose their enthusiasm—and appetite—as they express a variety of negative emotions.
Why the disconnect between food and nutrition? "It's really not surprising," reported Sylvia Rowe, president and chief executive officer of the International Food Information Council (IFIC). "Consumers are deluged with conflicting advice, they're confused about who to listen to, and perhaps most important, they're tired of the instructions—of being lectured to on what they should and shouldn't eat."
Further evidence that we're losing consumers in our communications efforts is evidenced by the emotions that consumers convey when discussing their diets. During focus groups conducted by IFIC, consumers confessed that they feel guilt, worry, fear, anger, and helplessness when it comes to nutrition and their diets. While The American Dietetic Association's Nutrition Trends Survey 2000 found that nutrition is personally important to at least 85 percent of American consumers. Despite this, only 28 percent say that they have made significant changes to achieve a healthful diet.
Some of the country's leading experts on consumer trends, consumer behavior, the culinary arts, and consumer research, marketing, and advertising recently gathered for a roundtable discussion to talk about the state of nutrition communications and an approach to the development of nutrition messages with consumer input. A nutrition roundtable, held in Washington, D.C., on August 24, entitled A New Conversation with Consumers, was sponsored by the IFIC Foundation and Dietitians in Business and Communications, a practice group of The American Dietetic Association.
The Consumer's Point of View
The path of nutrition communications often follows a one-way street. Communicators talk "to" consumers with little understanding about how—or even if—these messages have an effect. "We've learned that successfully communicating and motivating behavior requires knowing what consumers are thinking and feeling about their food choices, why they make the choices they do, and how they respond to nutrition messages," said Susan Borra, RD, senior vice president and director of nutrition at IFIC. "To do this, we need to begin a new conversation—to talk with consumers rather than at them."
Advertisers and marketers often use a five-step process to obtain consumer input about a potential product or campaign. "It makes sense to apply this technique to nutrition communications," said Peter Mitchell, an expert in qualitative research and senior vice president and group head for Strategy One/Edelman Public Relations. "In fact, it has been used successfully to develop nutrition messages that really work—the "It's All About You" campaign of the Dietary Guidelines Alliance is an excellent example." At the core of this message development process is a dialogue with consumers.
Step 1: Define the issues.
This critical step entails getting to know what your audience thinks and why so you understand what motivates them. Go beyond the demographics of your audience to the psychographics—information about their lifestyles, family structures, activities, interests, goals, concerns, and barriers. This qualitative research step, involves gathering information through focus groups or by less formal methods, such as talking with various members of your audience.
Step 2: Develop the initial message concepts.
Initial messages are developed on the basis of information gathered in step 1 and the specific actions or behaviors you want the nutrition message to achieve. See the sidebar Take-Home Messages for pointers.
Step 3: Assess the message concepts.
Share your messages with members of your actual audience. Again, this can be accomplished through focus groups or by less formal methods such as discussions with colleagues. The following key questions should be answered: "What does this message mean to you?" "Does this message motivate you?" "Does it fit with other things you want in life?"
Step 4: Fine-tune the messages.
If your messages are on target, fine-tuning may be minimal. However, if you find in step 3 that your messages are missing the mark, you may need to go back to step 2.
Step 5: Validate the messages.
This step involves quantitative testing of the messages to confirm that your message resonates with your audience on a broader level. This can be done using a research approach, such as a phone survey, or less formally by presenting the messages to a larger audience and collecting feedback data.
Nutrition communicators should no longer simply provide information to consumers and hope for change. To enable the behavior changes you want to achieve, pull up a chair, have a conversation with consumers, listen, listen, listen—and learn. Then deliver your messages with confidence knowing that the messages have been developed with consumer input.
Consumer's Reaction to Negative Nutrition Messages ("Avoid" and "Eliminate") from Man-in-the-Street IFIC Video
"Sometimes you want to just give up because you don't know what to do anymore."
"If I listened to every message "experts" gave me, I probably would just eat bread and water."
"Because of all the rules, eating has become not as fun as it should be and eating should be fun."
"I am the gatekeeper of my mouth."
Excerpts from Experts
Experts in trends, human behavior, and culinary arts offer the following words of wisdom in regard to nutrition communications.
"The challenge is change."
"Consumers are a moving target," said Michael Sansolo, senior vice president of the Food Marketing Institute and an expert on monitoring trends. "They're constantly changing the way they eat—how and where they're buying their food, where they're eating meals, and how they're preparing their food. And their sources of nutrition information are changing too. It's clear that we can't effectively communicate our messages if we don't know our audience."
"It's about the food."
"Food is to be enjoyed and celebrated, not feared and isolated," stressed David Feder, editor of Lightstyle magazine, who is also a registered dietitian and chef. "In reality, the concept of good food and bad food sells—newspapers, TV spots, magazines, food products. The gray area of science is what's harder to sell. But science should never get in the way of eating well and healthfully. It can't be said enough that we need to communicate nutrition with good taste. If we forget to talk about the food, even the most interested and motivated consumers will tune out."
"Understand the consumer psyche."
"Consumers often create their own 'shortcuts' or rules of thumb for making choices when faced with an overload of information," said Paul Rozin, Ph.D., professor of psychology and researcher of human food choice at the University of Pennsylvania. "For instance, if a food contains a nutrient or ingredient that can cause harm (if it is consumed) in large amounts, then some believe that it is better not to eat it, even in small amounts. The consumers' desire to dichotomize the world into good and bad foods is probably an outcome of information overload and confusion."
"Channel the demand."
"Take the time to understand underlying consumer motivations behind the trends," said Myron Lyskanycz, executive vice president of Leo Burnett USA. "Once you learn what drives consumers and what they want to know, you can create messages that channel their nutrition demands to appropriate solutions or actions. In the advertising world, consumers must 'approve' any campaign or promotion before it goes to market. The same should hold true for nutrition messages."
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Take-Home Messages for Developing Consumer Messages that Work
Use these pointers to develop insightful messages that affect consumer behavior.
- Speak in a language that is straightforward, relevant, and compelling to the audience.
- Show consumers how to incorporate nutrition knowledge into everyday life by providing practical, easy-to-implement strategies.
- Customize messages by giving specific reasons, meaningful to the audience, for changing behaviors. For example, talk about the benefits of taste, convenience, fun, culture, or feeling good.
- Offer choices for making behavior changes. Consumers are empowered when they can make their own choices.
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