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In this program of work, we look at childhood obesity.
And we look at this important challenge for two major reasons.
First, childhood obesity is not just a problem for
developed countries like we tend to believe.
It is actually a great challenge for developing countries as well.
And this is because children in developing countries tend to be both under nutrition
and over nutrition.
What it means is that, they don't have access to whole grain,
great proteins options, vegetables and fresh fruits.
But at the same time, they have easy access to fast food and
sugary drink and those options tend to be cheap and available everywhere.
The second reason why we want to study this is because childhood obesity actually
has a long term negative consequence.
For the children who are obese when they are young,
they tend to be obese as adults as well.
This affects their long term health, but also, their psychological health, their
performance at school, and potentially, their social interactions with others.
Obese children tend to be bullied at school or
have a harder time making friends and that could affect their well-being and
their relationship building.
And because of all these reasons,
we want to study childhood obesity in this project.
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I work in advertising before and I'm now a faculty specialized in marketing and
I'm very aware that marketing has been taken the bad name for
facilitating childhood obesity.
So we see a lot of fast food or sugary drinks,
all these famous brands using marketing to influence adults and children's behavior.
But what we are trying to do in this project is to take a novel perspective and
to really think about what marketing is.
Essentially, what market is trying to do is to communicate certain messages and
to influence people's choice.
So we could potentially use marketing for the greater good of the society.
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So we look at children in elementary school from the first grade to
the sixth grade.
So usually that means they are 6 to 12 years old.
Why we chose the school is because school is actually the environment for
these children for the very first time to make their own choice.
At home, they may not have a choice of what they want to eat, their parents may
decide for them, but in school, these children carry cash with them.
They get to actually make a decision of what kind of lunch they
want to eat today or what kind of snack they want to purchase today,
without the immediate influence from their teachers or their parents.
So we believe that shaping their behavior is important
because it is a very autonomous, empowering decision for children
when they are choosing their own food or drink for the first time at school.
So this is a great place to educate them what kind of choices they
should be making that may be better for them.
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So in this research program, what we did is we teamed up with UNICEF.
So we work for several years together.
We launched a five different field experiments in various schools in
elementary schools in Panama.
And that allow us to enter the school and
try to communicate what is healthy choice to children there.
So what we did in one program is that we basically used the print ad concept and
we used print ads to communicate what is drinking clean water.
So we educate and promote clean water to children in Panama.
What we found is that by telling it as is,
basically educating them that drinking clean water is good for their health.
Potentially, just having print ads in school back grounds could be quite
effective in increasing their water consumption.
And as a result, it could help to reduce the consumption of sugary product.
In another program, what we try to do is to use a very typical marketing tool,
price promotion, to help promote healthy choices.
And this is because we tend to have a perception that all healthy
products are cheaper.
So when we are trying to save money, we may go with fast food or a cheap soda.
And we tend to perceive healthy products as pricier.
Well, this might be true in some cases, it is not always true.
So we try to use price promotion as a way to provide another incentive or
motivation for children to pick healthier snacks at school.
So we give them limited time price promotion on healthy snacks, and
we track how much children actually redeem those coupons to get healthy snacks and
as a result, purchase fewer unhealthy snacks.
And importantly, we found that price promotions can even be effective for
very young children age of six to eight.
Even for them,
they understand what it means to have limited time to actually use a coupon.
They understand the concept of a good deal.
And they may end up choosing or
purchasing a healthy snack at school because this is on discount right now.
And hopefully by trying the healthy option, they gradually built the habit and
preference for healthier options in general.
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This line of work can inspire and motivate scientists from all disciplines to join
us, because for me, I come from a background of advertising marketing and so
that is my tool for trying to shape healthy behavior but
we believe that long term change requires more than marketing.
We might be able to have price promotions in a short run but eventually,
if we want to make sure healthy options remain affordable and accessible,
we actually need more structural changes on pricing the marketplace, tax, and
government regulation.
So we actually need scientist from all different areas to help us accomplish this
and actually improve children's health in the long run.
So I hope that this serves an inspiration to start a dialog on what we can do
to help tackle this challenge.
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