اثرات اقتصادی و بهداشتی تبلیغات میوه و سبزیجات : مدارک و شواهد از آزمایش های آزمایشگاه

This study investigates consumer response to various types of advertising for fruits and vegetables—a food category which health officials uniformly agree is significantly under-consumed in the United States. Using an adult, non-student subject pool of 271 participants in an economic experiment, consumers’ response to different types of fruit and vegetable advertising is measured empirically. This study finds that broad-based advertising, which is generic advertising for the entire fruit and vegetable category, increases consumer willingness to pay by an average of 24.6%. The simulation model shows that broad-based advertising for fruits and vegetables, either alone or as a hybrid with individual commodity-specific campaigns (e.g., apple advertising), would reduce average caloric intake per person by approximately 1800 kcal per year. The results of this study may contribute to new public policy initiatives that aim to reduce diet-related illnesses and obesity, which have become increasingly prevalent in the United States.

The United States has the highest obesity rate of any country in the world with 26.7% of the population being classified as obese (OECD Health Data, 2005 and Doheny, 2010). Moreover, obesity rates have significantly increased: nearly doubling in adults and tripling in children in the past 30 years (Cutler et al., 2003, Hill et al., 2003 and Grady, 2010). Some have called this increase a medical crisis (Hensrud and Klein, 2006). Medical science has shown that being obese or overweight poses significant health risk for serious diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, and certain types of cancer (Andreyeva et al., 2004). A recent article indicates that the costs of this problem in the United States are immense, approaching $150 billion a year to deal with medical costs associated with these illnesses (Lillis, 2010). A key factor mentioned for contributing to obesity is the steady decline in consumption of healthy foods like fruits and vegetables. Per capita fruit and vegetable consumption has declined by 12.5% and 7.6%, respectively, in the past 15 years (USDA, Economic Research Service, 2010). Health providers and nutritionists agree that reversing or mitigating this trend in fruit and vegetable consumption may be an effective means to lessen the obesity problem.

There is a significant body of literature examining the causes of obesity and documenting the related health and monetary costs. In this article, we examine one of the potential causes in the United States, the negligible amount of advertising used to promote fruits and vegetables relative to unhealthy food groups, and look at how a well-developed advertising campaign might influence fruit and vegetable consumption. By using experimental methods, we investigate the effectiveness of two different types of advertising used for such products – broad-based and commodity-specific. We find strong support that broad-based advertising has a significantly higher effect than commodity-specific advertising on consumers’ WTP for fruits and vegetables. Our results are consistent with the findings of broad-based advertising program field experiment implemented over a 3-year (2002–2005) period in Australia. The Go for 2&5 promotional campaign included a wide range of marketing activities, including television, radio, and print advertisements, point-of-sales promotions, public relations campaigns, nutritional school activities, and a website (Pollard et al., 2008). Our results, and the findings on the Australian program, suggest that both industry stakeholders and government health agencies should carefully consider adopting a broad-based promotional strategy.