Going Undercounter: How product placement and branding influences our health

Claire Everett

With the news that by 2015 cigarettes and other tobacco products will be forced 'undercounter' in all shops, and branding potentially removed from packaging, it’s interesting to consider how much visual marketing impacts on our health choices.

One in five deaths in England are caused by smoking (Department of Health 2011), whilst one in eleven are attributable to obesity (Banegas 2003). A ban on tobacco advertising on television has been enforced over the past few decades, and in 2007 nutrition began to follow suit with restrictions on the advertising of ‘unhealthy’ food to children. Whilst it’s difficult to envisage junk food ever being relegated to undercounter shelves, exactly how much does its shelf positioning and branding influence us?

If we took away the bright familiar packaging from crisps, biscuits and chocolate, we’d be left with a pretty dull picture. And when these various shades of brown are lined up next to colourful fruit and vegetables, the healthier choice suddenly looks the more appealing – perhaps especially so to children. The debate has raged for years over whether supermarkets should be allowed to position confectionary displays by the checkouts (Derbyshire 2005) and whilst some supermarkets have removed them, it seems they’ve not replaced them with healthy snacks but instead used the space to display magazines and leaflets. It’s probably a bit far-fetched to suggest we should see carrot sticks and hummous in the behind-counter displays once cigarettes disappear from them for good, but it would be interesting to observe the impact on their sales if this happened.

It’s not only the colours and logos, but of course the straplines and health claims, that create the familiarity and appeal of branded snacks. But even when claims of “sugar-free”, “light” and low calorific values appear on branded processed foods, their healthiness is questionable. A food that claims to be “90% fat-free” is thought of as low-fat, but look on a bottle of full fat milk, that we generally consider a high-fat product, and you’ll realise it’s actually 96% fat-free. Many healthier foods like fruit don’t have packaging to make these claims on, and interestingly the advertising on healthier packaged foods like nuts and dried fruit tends to focus things like anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals which don’t contribute to weightloss, and thus for many don’t hold the same association with health.

The big issue from a retail and commercial perspective, is that fresh fruit only generates 3-6% profit, whereas a highly processed biscuit can generate more than 15% profit (Lang et al 2006) - so it makes no sense for food companies to spend vast sums of money advertising these lower profit products. Some will argue that a packaged snack is more convenient, but is it really that tricky to transport and eat an apple? Added value has been introduced to fresh fruit with pots of ready-prepared fresh pineapple etc commonly found. But what is seen as ‘added value’ to the manufacturer, is ‘added cost’ to the consumer - suddenly making fresh fruit seem an expensive option.

Personally, I don’t believe ‘hiding’ food is the answer. Certainly hiding a bar of chocolate from myself in my desk drawer never works, and I’ll have munched my way through it by 11am. But one thing that does work is having an alternative available. If I have a pot of cranberries and macadamias on my desk, I’ll happily snack on these and not even think about chocolate. So perhaps putting healthy snacks by the checkout and in the space left vacant by cigarettes, and giving them a colourful health promoting slogan or two is the way forward after all.