Netherlands Nutrition Centre goes viral with ecological foot print guru

Yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised by a personalized video message of the Voeroe, a guru that knows everything about your ecological foot print. At the website of the Nutrition Centre you can calculate your own food print. At Twitter, you can ask a question to the guru and if you are lucky, he will answer you personally.

I think this is a very innovative way to involve consumers beyond the traditional website. When done in the right way, they help organizations to really connect with consumers and get the message across. It is not easy, however, to create a successful campaign. In 2010, Old Spice developed a social media campaign in which 'The Old Spice Guy' responded to questions posed by fans, celebrities and bloggers in more than 180 personalized videos. This campaign was extremely successful (25 million views!) and inspired many other companies to use viral marketing to promote their products.

Tippex campaign: tell the hunter what to do

Since then, a lot has been learned on how to best create these virals. Basically, they should provide unique, funny and high quality content, otherwise people will not share it. And social media is all about sharing.


My all-time favourite is the Tippex Bear; it is really interactive, hilarious and entertaining! Try it yourself and you will not be bored the coming fifteen minutes.





Six principles of a good Choice Architect - inspiration for nudging consumers towards healthier food choices

Nudging is hot, as I described in an earlier blog post. Nudges are simple, low-cost interventions to move consumers towards healthier choices without banning (food) products or telling them how to live.

A freely available paper of Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein and John Balz sketches the six principles of good choice architecture. A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.

The principles in the paper form the acronym NUDGES:

• iNcentives - make consumers aware of the incentives they face. For example, make the costs saved of certain things salient, such as the cost per hour of lowering the temperature a few degrees or the calories burned by doing certain activities.
• Understanding mappings - help consumers to improve their ability to map and hence select options that will make them better off. For example, make information more comprehensible and transparent (which is absolutely not the case with costs of mobile phone use or credit cards).
• Defaults - a large number of people end up with the default option, the choice that you will get if you do nothing. Changing the defaults regarding the way food is served and presented could also change consumer choices for the better.
• Give feedback - provide feedback on the performance of people (clever feedback systems).
• Expect error - leaving the gas tank cap or bank card behind when done are examples of such predictable errors. This is called the 'postcompletion error'. As consumers make mistakes, a well designed choice architecture assumes that people make mistakes and takes this into account.
• Structure complex choices - consumers are likely to go for a simple choice strategy when decisions are complex. So, the more complex a decision is, the more choice archictecs have to do their best to structure and organize the options.




Nudging study: changed default snack assortment



These principles are an inspiration for empirical research into nudging consumers toward healthier food choices. At the staff canteen of a Dutch hospital, we recently changed the default assortiment of snacks (both healthy and unhealthy snacks) and measured how much we sold. Student Kai Otten will soon reveal the results of this interesting field study. Keep an eye on this blog.

More student nudging projects can be found at the page of this blog called 'Student thesis info: do consumer research yourself'.

The Multivitamin Paradox: taking a supplement gives a license to indulge, relax and smoke

Recent research has suggested that taking multi-vitamins can shorten your life. And this suggestion is not based on a single study, but on a review of 68 studies with more than 232.000 participants.The authors of this review state that there could be several explanations for this increase in the risk of early death. One of them is that multivitamins may interfere with the natural defense system of the body.

This could indeed be the underlying physiological mechanism. However, a recent paper of Chiou and colleagues in Psychological science an interesting psychological mechanism of consumers taking multivitamins. In two studies, they show that taking a simple pill (which participants believed was a multivitamin) generated a psychological license to exercise less and indulge in unhealthy food choices. Taking vitamins gives you 'permission' to do something bad, while still feeling good about yourself.

Vitamins; a license to indulge in Dutch Spice Nuts (pepernoten) 

To make it worse, another recent study in Addiction showed that taking dietary vitamins decreased the motivation to smoke less, giving smokers an 'illusion of invulnerability'.

Maybe this explains why the huge popularity of dietary supplements has not translated in healthier people.

Do increased serving bowl sizes influence how much we eat?

It is often stated that that the increasing size of food portions is a strong factor contributing to the incidence of overweight and obesity. Numerous studies have shown it again and again: larger portion sizes, serving devices and packages lead people to eat more, often without them realizing it. In particular, individual serving devices such as plates, spoons and bowl have been shown to influence food intake. However, what has not been shown is whether the most central focus of the dinner table, the main serving bowl, has a similar magnifying effect. When one is eating at home and eating out in buffet restaurants, food is often available in serving bowls from which individual portions are distributed.

This month, the paper 'Serving bowl biases the amount of food served' I wrote together with Mitsuru Shimizu and Brian Wansink came out in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. This paper reports our study in which we wanted to determine how serving bowls filled with food for many persons influence serving behaviour and consumption. We expected that the larger the size of a multiple-serving bowl, the more people will serve and consume. In the study, 68 participants were randomly assigned to a group serving pasta from a large-sized bowl (almost 7 litre capacity) or a medium-sized bowl (almost 4 litre capacity). When given a large bowl, diners served 77% more pasta compared with the diners serving from the medium-sized bowl. They ate more, even though the food was not rated tastier or otherwise notable different.


Bowl size matters, so fill your largest bowl with salad



We wondered about the reasons for our findings. It could be that more 'social' reasons inhibit an individual from taking too much food from a smaller common bowl. Perhaps people use the size of serving bowl filled with food for multiple persons as an indication of how much they can best serve themselves. It could even seem greedy to take more food from a smaller bowl.

In any case, small increases in food intake may lead to substantial additional caloric intake over a longer time period and even weight gain. Just like larger package sizes, large serving devices seem to suggest to people that large portions are appropriate to consume.

These findings again highlight the role that external cues play in food consumption and show the importance of considering serving bowl size in nutrition education. Maybe our findings can be used to turn bad habits around; just put your salad in bigger bowls.