Executive Summary
Obesity is a significant problem in children. Approximately 16% of children (more than 9 million) in the United States ages 6–19 years are considered obese. Because energy intake is an important contributor to obesity, finding ways to help children make more healthful eating choices is critical. Often, simply placing healthful food in front of children is not sufficient to motivate them to choose the healthful foods. Therefore, this research focuses on three different interventions—incentives, competitions, and pledges—aimed at motivating more healthful eating choices among school children. The goal is to provide school administrators with inexpensive, effective, scalable, and easy-to-implement ideas that they can apply in schools to get children to eat more fruits and vegetables.
The results of a six-month field study across 55 elementary and middle schools show that all three interventions increased fruits-and-vegetables choice (the proportion choosing additional servings increased 3 to 24 percentage points) ten weeks after the interventions ended. Notably, the study found that younger children (defined as children in Grades 1 and 2) responded differently to the three interventions than older children (Grades 3–8). Incentives and competitions worked well with young children, but pledges had no effect on them. With older children, all three interventions worked, but not as effectively as with younger children. These results are explained by the differences in cognitive development between younger and older children. Younger children are already cognitively developed to understand competitions and incentives, but they are not yet cognitively developed to understand pledges. Therefore, younger children respond to competitions and incentives but not to pledges. Older children understand all the three interventions well; however, they are not as motivated to comply with them, and therefore, even though they respond to all the interventions, they do so less effectively than younger children. A second study identified that a visible reminder of the pledge made was a critical component required for the pledge intervention to be effective.
The implications of the findings are as follows: First, relatively simple interventions are sufficient to motivate school children to make more healthful food choices. Second, this research suggests three ways schools can be involved in promoting healthful eating choices to children on a mass scale. Third, the results suggest that it is important to target children as early as possible to maximize effectiveness of eating interventions. Fourth, the age of the child is an important factor to keep in mind when planning interventions. Not all interventions are likely to work equally well for younger and older children. Finally, if pledge interventions are used, reminding children of their pledge seems important.
Biography
Sekar Raju is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business at Iowa State University. He received his PhD in Business Administration from the Ohio State University. His research focuses on brand commitment/loyalty and its influence on consumer behavior. He has published articles in leading journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Journal of Advertising, among others. He is currently working on topics dealing with memory effects of actions and inactions, in addition to his ongoing work in the area of brand commitment.
Priyali Rajagopal is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. Her research interests include consumer categorization, memory, and information processing. Her work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Journal of Economic Psychology.
Timothy J. Gilbride is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. Tim’s research interests focus on the application of Bayesian statistical methods to investigate marketing problems. His work has appeared in Marketing Science, Marketing Letters, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Journal of Marketing Research. Tim has chaired and served on the planning committee for the American Marketing Association’s annual Advanced Research Techniques Forum, which brings together quantitative researchers in industry and academia. He was designated a Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute in 2006. Tim’s professional experience includes consulting and staff positions in a variety of industries including profit and not-for-profit firms.
Journal of Marketing, Volume 74, Number 3, May 2010
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