|
|
Every time you enter the supermarket, you're being manipulated. By design,
all of the basics you're just dropping by to pick up lie on the far side of a
sea of temptation: the eggs, milk, and bread are blocked by fruit snacks, those
fancy new chips, and a display of artisanal beef jerky. If that wasn’t enough,
your kids are targets too: all the cereal at the eye level of a child sitting in
a shopping cart is pasted with cartoon blandishments, the better to lure them in
with.
But could we be manipulated for the better? The average food manufacturer
has little reason to divert us from their high-fat, high-sugar,
high-deliciousness products. Yet given that we are already being influenced, one
can wonder whether stores might eventually see the benefit – perhaps
administered through public health-related tax cuts – to making the produce
section into a wonderland that has the kids screaming for kale.
Even within our current stores, it isn't difficult to nudge people in a
better direction, at least in the short term. Esther Papies, a professor of
social psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, found that handing
out recipe flyers at a store entrance that included words like "healthy" and
"low-calorie" caused people who were overweight or dieting to subconsciously buy
fewer snacks. They took a whopping 75% fewer snack items to the checkouts than
those who received the control flier, which did not have the health-related
terms on it. Seeing those words – being primed by them – activated people's
existing goals and reminded them what they could do now to meet them, without
the shoppers really taking notice, says Papies.
Other tricks have been proposed by Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer
behaviour at Cornell who's well known for his research into the psychology of
eating. Some of his latest work takes an earlier finding – that people increase
their fruit and vegetable intake by 24% if they are told that half of their
dinner plate should be reserved for these foods – and applies it to supermarket
shopping. Wansink found that dividing a grocery cart in two, with half to be
used only for fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat, causes people to spend more
than twice as much on fruits and vegetables than people without a partition –
$3.65 versus $1.82 on fruits and $5.19 versus $2.17 on vegetables. The idea is
that the partition implies the existence of a social norm that consumers try to
meet.
Anne Escaron, a public health researcher at the University of California,
Los Angeles, has co-authored a review of studies into supermarket interventions
for promoting healthy shopping that stretch back over 40 years. She says that,
in general, the more angles covered by the interventions, the more successful
they have been overall in shifting consumers' habits. For instance, while using
signs on store shelves that promote healthy shopping might help, if this is
combined with some subtle price manipulation, the intervention is more likely to
be effective. "Any way that you can catch more than one impulse that someone may
have in the grocery store, the more you're going to be able to influence
consumer choices," she says.
Interventions that shops could incorporate in the long term are a bit more
of a puzzle, though. Knocking down the price of a healthy product far enough
will make it fly off the shelves, says Karen Glanz, a professor of epidemiology
at University of Pennsylvania. "But the downside is somebody's got to pay for
[the price cuts]," she points out. She has also learned that we're not all open
to manipulation in the same way. For instance, she has found from interviews
with shoppers in low-income areas that highlighting how healthy a product is can
send the message that it will taste bad, rather than convincing them to buy
it.
Milk on the left
But while emphasising healthiness may not work everywhere, other nudging
techniques might. For a study published this year, Glanz and her collaborators
re-shuffled the beverages sections of grocery stores so that low- or no-calorie
drinks such as water took up more display space in the sweet spot at eye level,
and the dairy sections so that skimmed milk, rather than whole milk, sat on the
left side of the case, where consumers usually look first. They also marked them
with coloured signs, though these had no health information on them. These
interventions did not require priming or giving consumers a deal, but they
boosted sales of skimmed milk and water all the same. Glanz recently secured
funding from the US National Institutes of Health for a large, two-year study
that directly addresses how stores could cause significant changes in shoppers'
habits with such subtle changes.
It could be that the most sustainable interventions, like the ones that
currently route you past the snacks or put objects at the ends of aisles where
they are emphasised for the purposes of selling more, aren't ones you
necessarily notice. Produce sections are already placed just inside the front
doors of stores, to give an impression of freshness and healthiness that then
permeates the rest of your trip. High-end stores like Whole Foods Market, which
has stores across North America and in London, have led a charge in primping up
produce sections even further, including offering samples and emphasising
information about food's origins.
These stores might not yet have found a design that makes kale irresistible
to kids, but greater focus on produce and swapping around items so that
healthier options take up more of the shelf real estate than they do now might
have a larger effect that you'd imagine. How will the health-conscious grocery
store of the future look? It might be surprisingly similar to today's, with most
of the changes that alter shoppers' behaviour going barely noticed by the
customer.
It might feel strange to think that are so easily swayed without you
realising. But embrace the fact that you are not all your conscious mind
desires.
|
|
发表于 2016-7-10 18:11:55