The power of advertising and promotion in shaping consumer attitudes toward food

This contribution seeks to explore the emerging frontiers of advertising and promotion in support of healthy and sustainable consumer behavior, and to understand how companies can effectively guide food choices. To this end, a multidisciplinary approach is required, combining knowledge from different fields, including shopper marketing, or marketing oriented towards purchasing behavior, social marketing, defined as a set of actions to influence and represent food choices that companies and public operators undertake to improve the well-being of the population, and behavioral economics, that is the body of knowledge produced by applying cognitive psychology and neuroscience to economics. The integration of these disciplines gives rise to the concept of ‘Nutrition Shopper marketing’, a notion that is reinterpreted through the lens of ‘nudging’. Nudging is understood to mean “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”. This concept has been shown to be highly effective in the field of nutrition shopper marketing, given the emotional and inter-temporal nature of food choices. The objective of Nutrition Shopper Marketing is to nudge individuals towards the consumption of healthy products consistent with the principles of proper nutrition, without requiring cognitive effort and sacrifice. This chapter therefore aims to explore the different shopper marketing levers in support of proper nutrition.