Purpose -Health is becoming an increasingly important issue in the UK as well as the rest of Europe. Emphasis on the importance of healthy eating is ongoing for many reasons, including the growing concern about childhood obesity resulting in the ban of advertising of unhealthy foods to children in the UK in April2007. However, although legislation has been placed upon the advertising of unhealthy food products, no such restrictions have been placed on the packaging of children's foods despite the influence of packaging on consumer buyer decisions. This paper aims to investigate the effect of packaging on children's product preferences and its ability to influence parents' buyer decision in-store.Design/methodology/approach -The study was approached from the parents' rather than the children's perspective. A quantitative approach was adopted in data collection, using a 28 item Likert scaled questionnaire administered to 150 parents, with over 95 percent response rate.Findings -The study shows that packaging does affect the product preferences of children. Also, children are particularly interested in influencing the purchase of unhealthy foods. However, parents within the study claimed that they did not succumb to their children's requests for the purchase of unhealthy food, which contradicts evidence from previous findings.Research limitations/implications -The claim by parents that they did not succumb to their children's requests for unhealthy food contradicts findings from previous research. This therefore leads to a recommendation for further studies as social desirability bias may have influenced the outcomes of the findings.Practical implications -Findings from this study can be applied within the retail and service marketing sector to provide the practitioner with information relevant to decision making on children's influence on parents buyer behavior in-store. Outcomes of the study are also important when considering the future of children's food marketing and tackling the issue of childhood obesity.Originality/value -The paper demonstrates that there is a relationship between packaging and children product preferences and children's influence on parents' buyer decision in-store. IntroductionCurrent shifts in food trends have led to changes from normal, day to day food marketing to a focus on healthy food marketing, hence impacting on consumers' behavior. The impact of the change is more apparent on consumer perception, tests and needs, including change on products (foods) that are being manufactured and their subsequent positioning (Blackman, 2005). These changes have increased consumer awareness of and demand for healthy foods and information on the content of the foods they consume. It is now common for packaging and communications to contain tags such as ''less than 5 percent fat" or ''with no added sugar" as marketers look to reassure consumers that their offerings will have no negative impact on consumers and their family's health. Blackman (2005) emphasised the importance of healthy eatin...

This article introduces the new Australian Alcohol Advertising Review Board (AARB) Code and assesses television advertising practices against its advertising content provisions. The Code is administered by independent experts to provide an alternative to the industry‐led Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code Scheme that has attracted substantial criticism. The new Code aims to balance the alcohol industry's right to promote a legal product against critical protections for young people and public health. To assess whether the new Code will require substantial changes to alcohol advertising practices, a content analysis was conducted of alcohol advertisements aired prior to its introduction on all four free‐to‐air commercial television channels over two months. A majority of the analysed advertisements (48 of 64) contained at least one element that could be construed as a breach of the AARB Code. The largest numbers of potential breaches were for the provisions relating to the association of alcohol with success and using appeals that are likely to be attractive to young people. The results demonstrate that the Australian alcohol industry will need to reassess current advertising practices to achieve compliance with the new Code. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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In Australia, Saturday morning is generally considered a children's television viewing timeslot, and several broadcaster Codes of Practice dictate that programs shown on Saturday mornings must be appropriate for viewing by audiences of all ages. Despite this, our findings show that music video programs aired on Saturday mornings contain a considerable level of drug-related content.