Advertising healthy eating to young consumers: insights from English and Swedish adolescents

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to ascertain how to advertise healthy eating to adolescents in a bid to respond to global childhood obesity. Using an interpretivist research design, a three-year, bi-national study was conducted with English and Swedish participants aged 12-14. Creative research methods explored their relationship to food advertising, consumer self-perception and their own creative recommendations. By taking the adolescents’ perspective, the paper reports on creative strategies likely to increase their receptiveness to healthy food advertising, e.g. use of visual statistics, branding and a departure from the healthy-versus-unhealthy dichotomy. The paper recommends additions to social cognitive theory, an underutilised theory within marketing, by infusing the model with a social marketing orientation intent upon increasing its utility when advertising healthy eating to adolescents.