The Consumer vs. Food Company Food Fight
Monday, June 22, 2009SUSIE GHARIB: You may not know it, but there's a war going on in the aisles of your local grocery store. You're on one side, deciding what products to buy. Food companies are on the other, using strategies to make you buy their products. As Jeff Yastine reports, one key battlefield: it's not what's in the box, but what's on the box.
JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Last year, Americans spent more than $7 billion on packaged cookies and crackers. We look at the price and the brand, but few of us really spend that much time looking at the logos, pictures, words and colors on the package. But Barbara Kahn is not one of those people.
BARBARA KAHN, DEAN, SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMIN., UNIV. OF MIAMI: Something like this, with tastiness, chewiness would seem better, the cookie would seem richer if it was in the heavy location. Where the cracker which you might want to think of as healthy, like it says whole grain here, zero trans fat, I want it to be healthy, then it being in a light location would seem to be better.
YASTINE: Walking with her down a supermarket aisle.. for us, we walk along. We just see food in packages. To you, it seems like it's a whole secret language, in a sense.
KAHN: We do study them a lot. Here is another thing that is interesting we started to look at. There is this big emphasis on obesity issues. You are starting to see a lot of these 100 calorie packages. And there's been some research that came out that shows that this could boomerang. Sometimes for people who are on diets, when they think they are eating a hundred calorie package, they tended to eat more.
YASTINE: It all has to do, she says, with where the picture of the food is on the package. Food images near the top of a package are perceived as lighter. The further to the left it is, the lighter it is. Push the image to the bottom, and it's perceived as heavier. Push it to the right, and it becomes even weightier in the minds of food shoppers. That's nice to know, if, as she points out to us, you're trying to sell a box of guilty pleasures like Nabisco double-stuff cookies.
KAHN: So that this, being at the bottom right, is a very heavy location.
YASTINE: Kahn, who is now the dean of the University of Miami business school, says some food companies have known for years that certain arrangements of food packaging worked, but they didn't know exactly why. Now they do. What I find amazing about this research is how much it seems to indicate our choice in what we buy is influenced by all these very unconscious factors of which most of us would never ever think about.
KAHN: Absolutely. I mean that's what brand is all about. Why do we buy Coke over Pepsi? Do you think it is systematic? You get used to that brand.
YASTINE: So if you're a food shopper, forewarned is forearmed. Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Miami.
