Lecture 2-Consumer Food Choices 1 Flashcards
What do we mean by “food choices”? What are different ways to look at or consider food choices? How does this help or matter to food marketers?
Food choices refers to how people decide on what they buy and what they eat. When we say food choices what we mean is the daily food decisions we make. Researchers found that we make on average 200 daily food decisions. Some food decisions are habitual, routine, ingrained in our every day script. An example of a food choice: a consumer choosing between two brands, where to shop for groceries, serving yourself another portion of a meal, the kind of oil you will use. This helps marketers because the consumer nowadays is more and more demanding. This means they want companies to be as transparent as possible. A food marketer may decide to include on their product a symbol indicating free trade, this may cause a consumer to choose their brand over another.
Describe and discuss the influence that family can have on one’s food choices.
Family status and habits influence one’s food choices. For example if a family decides to eat every single night in front of the tv (built environment) this may lead a child into mindless eating habits. However if a family has a designated spot where they eat dinner such as the dinner table where there are no distractions this leads to mindful eating.
Give examples of “bottom up” and “top down” influences that can shape or influence someone’s food choices.
Bottom up meaning peripheral factors includes factors that are born out of the environment and body. Impulses that are picked up by our senses and travel to the brain. Example: Your stomach grumbles, this travels to the brain telling you to eat. Another example: You walk by a bakery and smell the warm bread. You’re not exactly hungry but the scent puts you in a ready to eat mode.
Top down meaning the central factors includes the things you have learned & that are encoded in your memories. A learned way of responding to a stimulus. This then influences your response and perception of various factors. An example of top down would be seeing a fair trade logo and purchasing the product because it supports the farmers. We evaluate foods and are more delicious when we consume them at gatherings rather than when we consume them alone.
Explain the notion of the “citizen-consumer”. Why and how should this matter to food marketers?
Consumers have become more than consumers, there has been a movement towards becoming a food citizen. With the socio cultural/socio political tensions there has been a desire for a change of behaviour at different levels. The power of the consumer is limited to making buying choices, while a citizen will feel more responsibility for how food is produced, not merely reading a label but enquiring more deeply into the food chain. For example: Nutella is your favourite company, you then read that they use palm oil and that it is harmful towards the environment and some of these things cause harm to others. Kraft then introduces its own “version” of Nutella free of palm oil! A food citizen will then make the shift towards Kraft. Food companies will have people buy into the the purpose (instead of just the product) and create a longer lasting relationship. Marketers should be asking citizens to pitch towards the purpose and contribute rather than asking to “buy”
What relationship do you see between traditional market segmentation approaches and food choices?
NEED TO FILL
