"The Role of Advertising in the Obesity Epidemic"
The opening words of the Institute of Medicine’s report
on the potential threat posed by food ads were:
“Marketing works.”
Yeah, there's a large number of well-conducted
randomized studies I could go through showing advertising exposure
and how other marketing methods can change your eating behavior
and get you to eat more, but what do you need to know beyond
the fact that the industry spends tens of billions of dollars a year on it.
To get people to drink their brown sugar water, do you think
Coca-Cola would spend a penny more than they thought they had to?
It’s like when my medical colleagues accept “drug lunches”
from pharmaceutical representatives and take offense
that I would suggest it might affect their prescribing practices.
Do they really think drug companies are just in the business
of giving away free money for nothing?
They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.
To give you a sense of marketing’s insidious nature, though,
let me share an interesting piece of research
published in the world’s leading scientific journal:
“In-store music affects product choice” documented an experiment
in which either French accordion or German Bierkeller music
was played on alternate days in the wine section of a grocery store.
On the days the French music was playing in the background
people were three times more likely to buy French wine,
and on German music days shoppers were about three times
likely more to buy German wine.
Despite the dramatic effect— not just a few percent difference
but a complete three-fold reversal— when approached afterwards,
the vast majority of shoppers denied the music had any influence on their choice.
We all like to think we make important life decisions
like what to eat consciously and rationally.
However, if that were the case, we wouldn’t be
in the midst of an obesity epidemic.
Most of our day-to-day behavior does not appear to be dictated
by careful, considered deliberations.
Rather, we tend to make more automatic,
impulsive decisions triggered by unconscious cues and habitual patterns,
especially when we’re tired, stressed, or preoccupied.
The unconscious part of our brain is thought to guide
human behaviors as much as 95 percent of the time.
This is the arena where marketing manipulations do their dirty work.
The part of our brain that governs conscious awareness
may only be able to process about 50 bits of information per second,
which is roughly equivalent to a short tweet.
Our entire cognitive capacity, on the other hand,
is estimated to process in excess of 10 million bits per second.
Because we’re only able to purposefully process a limited amount
of information at a time, if we’re distracted or otherwise
unable to concentrate, our decisions can become even more impulsive.
An elegant illustration of this “cognitive overload” effect
was provided from an experiment involving fruit salad and chocolate cake.
Before calls could be made at a touch of a button or the sound of your voice,
the seven-digit span of phone numbers was based in part
on the longest sequence most people can recall on the fly.
We only seem able to hold about seven chunks of information
(plus or minus two) in our immediate short-term memory.
OK, so here’s the setup: randomize people to memorize
either a seven-digit number or a two-digit number
to be recalled in another room down the hall.
On the way, offer them the choice of a fruit salad or a piece of chocolate cake
Memorizing a two-digit number is easy
and presumably takes few cognitive resources.
Under the two-digit condition, most chose the fruit salad.
Faced with the same decision, most of those trying to keep
the seven digits in their heads just went for the cake.
This can play out in the real world by potentiating the effect of advertising.
Have people watch a TV show with commercials for unhealthy snacks
and, no surprise, they eat more unhealthy snacks,
(compared to those exposed to non-food ads).
Or maybe that is a surprise.
We all like to think that we’re in control and not so easily manipulatable.
The kicker, though, is that we may even be more susceptible
the less we pay attention.
Randomize people to the same two-digit or seven-digit memorization task
during the show, and the snack attack effect was magnified
among those who were more preoccupied.
How many of us have the TV on in the background or
multi-task during commercial breaks?
This research suggests that it may make us even more impressionable
to the subversion of our better judgement.
There’s an irony in all this.
Calls for restrictions on marketing are often resisted
by invoking the banner of freedom.
What does that even mean in this context, when research shows how
easily our free choices can be influenced without our conscious control.
A senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation even went
as far as to suggest that given the dire health consequences
of our unhealthy eating habits, insidious marketing manipulations
“should be considered in the same light as the invisible
carcinogens and toxins in the air and water
that can poison us without our awareness.”