RBF consists of perfectly safe ingredients which are destined for the dump because of aesthetic flaws, oversupply, or another reason. A Swedish food purveyor markets their use of RBF by saying, “(W)e realized that a third of the world’s food goes right into the garbage.”
The intent is to appeal to our environmental stewardship and position the food provider as socially responsible. However, when the researchers adapted such RBF taglines to test the effects, what they stimulated in many study participants was mental images of rotting produce—surefire appetite suppressors.
This wasn’t uniformly true, though. In my email exchange with the lead researcher, Anna de Visser-Amundson, she explains, “We found that when the marketing appeal for RBF was free of waste associations by, for example, emphasizing the social benefits of the RBF purchase rather than the environmental value, customers wanted to buy the RBF food as much as they wanted to buy the conventional food.”
In fact, in a field study at a soup buffet on a Netherlands university campus, customers even preferred an RBF soup to a conventional soup. Signage when the RBF offering was the soup-of-the-day sometimes featured the environmental benefit of reduced landfills and at the other times, the social benefit of helping farmers.
The RBF soup sales levels between these two types of signage differed in interaction with the color of the soup bowl available. All bowls were white on the inside, while at times, they were also white on the outside, while at the other times, they were a shade of green generally associated with environmentalism.
During the times of social benefit signage, bowl color made no difference. During the times of environmental signage, the likelihood of choosing the RBF soup was lower when a green bowl was in use than when a white bowl was in use. The researchers’ explanation is that the combined effect of multiple environmental cues (i.e., environmental benefit signage and green bowls) tipped mental associations toward images of waste and thus negatively impacted soup sales.
In your marketing of foods containing rescue-based components, head off consumer rejection by emphasizing the social benefits of RBF use.
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Waste Not with Misshapen Produce
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