Posted by Dave Lundahl on August 4, 2010
Summary of Dr. Dave Lundahl’s recent talk given at the IFT 2010 Annual Meeting:Three Steps for Changing Consumer Nutrition Behavior
How do you reconcile the need to change consumers’ nutrition behavior with developing wellness-related food products that sell? In recent years, this is a question industry experts have been struggling with - as obesity in the U.S. continues to be one of the highest in the world.
Thus far, efforts in the health and wellness community to improve diet have largely focused on changing the consumer. Food science has given innovators the ability to bring more healthy food to market. However, these efforts have had only marginal success in motivating a change in consumer buying behavior. In order to bring about real change in the kinds of foods that consumers buy, fundamentals of human behavior need to be uncovered.
The food industry can learn a lot from politicians when it comes to motivating behavior change. In my upcoming book, “Behavior Driven Innovation: Discovering and Applying Behavioral Insights to Make Ideas Successful,” I cite three lessons to be learned from Obama’s successful 2008 campaign to change behavior through innovation.
LESSON #1 – UNDERSTAND HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Understand human nature to change human eating behavior.
According to 2009 online article in TIME, Obama hired a team of 30 leading behavioral psychologists to develop a campaign strategy around emerging theory from behavioral economics. Their strategy was to “nudge” voters along in changing voting behavior and get people out to vote early. The message; Heavy voting is expected. The subtext; Everybody is doing it!
Psychologists are now saying that 95% of all behaviors are habitual, driven by the unconscious mind. These habits can be re-written through eliciting one of the four anticipation emotions – hope, desire, fear, and intrigue. For healthy brands these emotions can translate into hope for wellness, desire for youthfulness, fear of health risks and intrigue in what the product promises.
LESSON #2 – PUSH VS. PULL STRATEGY
Change how we learn from consumers.
Obama successfully used a community-based pull strategy to shape his 2008 campaign around “the change that people were hoping for.” This pull strategy is very different from the push strategy that most food companies use to drive food innovation.
A push strategy involves developing more healthy food and then mass marketing their value through awareness campaigns. Research methods to drive development and marketing decisions typically involve one-way communications with consumers. A pull strategy is different. It involves building communities around brands, sustaining those communities by delivering healthy food experiences that those consumers seek. The research methods within a pull strategy involve dialogue between consumers and researchers and new listening and observing techniques to learn from how consumers dialogue within those communities.
LESSON #3 – RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
Change behavior by designing and developing more healthy foods for emotional impact.
Obama used his understanding of human behavior and insights from a pull strategy to shape his campaign to inspire hope - one of four key anticipation emotions that make people “action ready.” Uncovering fundamentals of behavior form a pull strategy that discovers how to conceptually design food products to elicit the anticipation emotions of fear, hope, intrigue, or desire!
It also provides the basis for the design and development of foods that are not only healthier, but that elicit emotions such as enjoyment, product love, relief, admiration, and pride that stimulate and surprise during food experiences. These emotions provide a framework for learning how to break bad eating habits, while motivating and sustaining improved eating habits.
CASE STUDY
This case study involves the development of a healthy granola with fruit product. It involves taking a new product concept and understanding how to translate its promise into an experience that impacts consumers on an emotional level. I prefer using a topology involving 18 discrete experience emotions (some listed earlier in the paper). My key point is not so much what are these 18 emotions, but that by strategically focusing on a small subset of these emotions, healthy food can be designed and developed for emotional impact.
In this study, an integrated research design was applied that involved engaging consumers to step through a sequence of six appraisals of different aspects of a product experience. The order of what participants were exposed to was how they might naturally come to know a new food product, i.e. concept exposure, naming exercise, packaging appraisal, product preparation experience and finally a product consumption appraisal. Each involved a short online survey with open-ended comments. The appraisal ratings of the naming exercise were monitored to pull out consumers for focus groups. Preparation appraisals were observed and consumption appraisals monitored to select candidates form one-on-one interviews.
In the end, information was learned about how different aspects of the product design delivered on the promise made by the concept. The ultimate name selected was based upon comments made in the focus group. The research discovered cues from the concept, package design and preparation experience that elicited expectations and anticipation emotions. This integrated approach to research also lead to guidance into package and food formation changes to better exceed established expectations.
CONCLUSION
Food innovators can learn how to change behavior from political strategy . This creates an understanding of human nature, using a pull strategy to learn from communities built around brands. Knowledge can be applied throughout the innovation process to design and develop products for emotional impact, leading to a three step process for success:
- STEP ONE: changing healthy eating behaviors to develop innovation strategies that evolve brands to be known as healthy.
- STEP TWO: identifying opportunities where healthier foods fulfill important, yet unfulfilled jobs-to-be-done.
- STEP THREE: involves applying “integrated research design” to design for anticipation and develop healthy food experiences that elicit emotional impact.
These three steps require an integrated and holistic approach to innovation which takes creative and up-front thinking. It may require changes to an organization and implementation of strategy, utilizing a more integrated approach to research with listening and dialoging to learn how to motivate consumers to adopt a more healthy food consumption lifestyle.