Counter-Advertising May Reduce Parent's Susceptibility to Front-of-Package Promotions on Unhealthy Foods

Can counter-advertising diminish persuasive effects of conventional and pseudo-healthy unhealthy food product advertising on parents?: an experimental study

“…Our findings among a sample of parents exposed to a videobased counter-ad that presented inoculation-style messaging in a narrative format echo those of Mason et al, who found text-based inoculation messages offered an effective strategy for helping to protect young adults' health conscious attitudes and made them resistant to potentially deceptive nutrition-related advertising claims [43]. They also correspond with earlier research suggesting counter-ads can help bolster parents' resistance to influence by common front-of-pack promotions used to promote unhealthy foods [37]. Further, these findings are consistent with meta-analyses which found narrative health communications can be persuasive, especially when delivered in an audio-visual format [53] and inoculation messages can be an effective strategy to induce resistance to persuasion [42].…”

“…Counter-advertising is one such potential technique, whereby advertising and health communication strategies are used to reduce demand for unhealthy products by exposing the motives and marketing activities of their producers [36]. In previous research, we found that parents shown online counter-advertisements debunking potentially misleading marketing claims were less influenced by front-of-pack promotions on unhealthy foods and more accurately evaluated how nutritious the promoted food products were than parents who did not see such counter-advertising [37]. However, this strategy showed mixed efficacy with pre-adolescent children, since only children who understood the counter-ads responded as intended, whereas children who misunderstood the counter-ads were not protected from the influence of the front-of-pack promotions on unhealthy foods [38].…”

Factors influencing the frequency of children's consumption of soft drinks

“…Research suggests that exposure to food marketing makes parents' attitudes more positive and increases the likelihood that the products will be purchased for children (Dixon et al, 2011;Grier, Mensinger, Huang, Kumanyika, & Stettler, 2007). Along with more effective advertising regulation, another, albeit more costly, strategy is to invest in counter messages that promote healthy diets and inform both parents and children of the tactics employed by those seeking to increase sales of unhealthy foods and beverages (Dixon et al, 2014;Pettigrew et al, 2014). The results of the present study relating to the effect of weekend television viewing on attitudes to soft drinks suggest that counter messages are likely to have the most positive impact if disseminated primarily at weekends.…”

Social countermarketing: brave new world, brave new map

“…These authors characterised "advocacy advertising" as being focussed on promoting policy rather than on products, and similarly argued that the primary purpose of "counter-advertising" was to challenge the dominant view that public health problems reflect personal health habits (Dorfman and Wallack, 1993). The term "counter-advertising" was also used by Dixon et al to describe their innovative food marketing studies with pre-adolescent children (Dixon et al, 2014a) and parents (Dixon et al, 2014b). The researchers acknowledge the "food marketing defense model" (Harris et al, 2009), but mainly locate their research within the conceptual framing of Dorfman and Wallack, that is, emphasising public policy as the solution rather than the placing the onus on individuals to develop skills and resilience in the face of a barrage of unhealthy product marketing.…”