Marketing 4 Life

- Commercial social marketing or just plain commercial ads with a social message?

Traditionally, social marketing is portrayed as the adoption and adaptation of commercial marketing tools in order to obtain behavioral – in contrast to commercial – goals. Like this social marketing emerges from – and draws on – commercial marketing. The commercial big brother inspires the social little sister. However, in recent years the direction of inspiration seems to have swoped around: commercial marketing is currently pretty much inspired by social marketing.

Commercial marketing is increasingly social
According to Baroness Peta Buscombe, CEO of the Advertising Association, UK, there is a great social role to be played by commercial marketing. In a TV interview on BrandRepublic.com (www.brandrepublic.com), Buscombe characterizes the evolving interconnections between commercial and social marketing like this:

“(…) What we do do [at the Advertising Association], is encourage the industry to act responsibly, absolutely critical, because we have such a powerful role to play, which is positive … we are having a very positive role in terms of shifting behavior, encouraging behavioral change in a positive way (http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/844529/Advertising-Association-chief-industry-government-latest-BRTV/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH).”

Underscored by the fact that the Advertising Association spearheads the initiative Business4Life, the call on commercial social marketing is more than empty words (http://www.business4life.co.uk/home/). Business4Life is a broad coalition of major industry players (PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Unilever, Tesco just to mention a few), who join forces in the attempt to encourage healthy lifestyle through branded marketing communications. In the run up to the Olympic Games in London 2012 the coalition has pledged to make a 200 million (GBP) contribution to the integration of health messages in their commercial marketing communication.

But a crucial question remains: is commercial marketing merely flirting with social marketing or are we about to see a real marriage?

Social marketing benchmarks
One way of addressing this question is to check the current initiative against definitions of social marketing. In 1995 Andreasen launched one of the most influential definitions of social marketing. In his view, ‘social marketing is the application of commercial marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution and evaluation of programs designed to influence the voluntary behaviour of target audiences in order to improve their personal welfare and that of society (Andreasen, 1995, p. 7)’.

On such a broad generic definition of social marketing, Business4Life seems to be an instance of full-blown social marketing. It applies commercial marketing techniques to influence the behavior of their target audience in order to improve public health. However, unfolding the essence of social marketing, Andreasen points to the fact that social marketing is a strategy that ‘attempts to use all four Ps of the traditional marketing mix; for example, it is not just advertising or communications (2002, p. 6).’

Social marketing indeed do make use of advertising, branding and other kinds of marketing communications, but it is much more than that. A full-blown social marketing campaign or intervention combines the four Ps of the marketing mix:

PRODUCT: Social marketing conducts consumer research in order to inform the process of developing a product that is intended to solve a social problem.

PLACE: Social marketing interventions take place where the consumers are (in schools, streets, football pitches…)

PRICE: Social marketing accounts for the social and emotional costs of buying into the social product.

PROMOTION: Social marketing communicates through advertising, branding, PR, word of mouth, product placements, information campaigns…

The missing P
Well, it is too early to tell whether Business4Life evolves into genuine commercial social marketing campaigns or ends up as standard commercial campaigns with a social attitude. While there is little doubt that Business4Life, viewed as a commercial social marketing campaign, will fulfill the requirements of two of the Ps (place and promotion), it is also beyond doubt that a group of social marketers will be rather reluctant with regard to the initiative’s fulfillment of the remaining two Ps (product and price). My guess is that we first and foremost will see objections centered on the product P.

It is likely that Business4Life – viewed as a commercial social marketing campaign – will be under suspicion of not having a product. Or, rather, will be accused of having a commercial product, but not a social one. Thus, I think watchdogs will voice the view that what we have here are commercial products promoted through marketing communications with a social message. The watchdogs’ would love to have as their paradigm case a diet fizzy drink fortified with vitamins and minerals, which is promoted through marketing communications with a social message. (Don’t give them that case, please). They will argue that initiatives like Business4Life are not social marketing because the most fundamental of all the Ps is missing: there is no social product.

Re-branding a bad business
And so what if the watchdogs are right? I mean, is it intrinsically bad to promote decent commercial products through social advertising? While I share with the watchdogs the opinion that social marketing is certainly most effective when drawing on the full range of the marketing mix, I must admit that I cannot see why it should be wrong for a commercial marketer to be inspired from social marketing even though the inspiration does not lead to more than a flirt with the promotional P of social marketing.

However, we have to anticipate that commercial marketing may wish to be identified or associated with social marketing in order to provide a new justification for an enterprise that many consumers over the years have come to view as basically dishonest (see the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s 2009 Agenda Paper ‘Less Fire, More Smoke’ www.cim.co.uk). Thus, watchdogs might accuse the Advertising Association and its Business4Life for trying to establish a link between social marketing and commercial marketing in order to give the advertising industry an image make-over.

P for pragmatism
From a pragmatic point of view the motives of the advertising industry to seek identification with social marketing do not really bother me. I think that coalitions like Business4Life are hugely welcomed and so much needed, because the current health crisis with epidemically rising obesity really cannot be tackled unless all actors with strong powers to influence the way consumers think and act join forces. Of course I do hope that Business4Life will provide a showcase of brilliant commercial social marketing campaigns that draws on all of the four Ps (in the social marketing sense). But even if we are not about to see more than that kind of commercial marketing with a social message, which has been around since the 1970s, I am still quite pleased.

Why? Advertising and branding – commercial promotional marketing as such – do have a power of its own to influence social norms and peer values. Social norms and peer values seriously influence our health behavior and health beliefs. Accordingly, well-performed commercial social advertising is definitely preferable to plain commercial advertising without a social message. We’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to win.


References
Andreasen, A. (1995). Marketing Social Change: Changing Behavior to Promote Health, Social Development and the Environment. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Andreasen, A. (2002). ‘Marketing Social Change in the Social Change Marketplace’, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 21:1, pp. 3-13.

I Want What I Need, But Do I Need What I Want?

By chance I came across an old version of the European edition of the iconic Principles of Marketing by Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders and Wong (1999). I read the first chapter where they outline the core concepts of marketing and what caught my attention and kept me reading was their distinction between the basic notions of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ and, in particular, the way in which they interrelate these notions.

Natural needs, cultural wants
In short, their idea is that human needs are ‘a state of felt deprivation’. They distinguish between physical needs (food, shelter, safety, clothing), social needs (belonging and affection) and individual needs (knowledge, self-expression). Human wants are the individually and culturally shaped expressions of human needs. To take their own example: ‘A hungry person in Bahrain may want vegetable curry, mango chutney and lassi. A hungry person in Eindhoven may want a ham and cheese roll, salad and a beer.’

Their point is that the two persons are reflecting the same need (hunger) in two different ways (desires or wants for different kinds of meals). So, needs are a relatively narrow set of non-cultural states of felt deprivation; wants are virtually unlimited expressions of needs.

Products as fulfillment
The logical connection between needs and wants implies that what we want is in some deep sense a reflection of what we need. As Kotler & Co. put it: ‘People satisfy their needs and wants with products. A product is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a need or a want’.

What is really striking about this view on needs, wants and products is that products and, by inference, marketing are seen as properties and activities that are designed to fulfill wants and needs. They are thinking stunningly linear about the relation between needs, wants and marketing in that the point of departure, the very driver that necessitates the whole process of marketing, are human needs. The emotional expressions of what we cannot live without.

However appealing and beautifully simple this line of reasoning is, it is nonetheless a serious oversimplification. The causality of the whole process of giving people what they think they want (called marketing) could be completely reverse.

On the nature of need fulfillment
Marketing is not just about creating offerings that satisfy needs, but also about creating wants that we certainly do not need. Tobacco is a paramount case. Being a former smoker, I know the strong urge for a cigarette. And yes, buying a package of cigarettes satisfied my desire for smoking. But the very thing is that this particular desire for cigarettes did not correspond to a basic need. Or so I will argue.

I suggest that we think of need fulfillment in two different respects. On the one hand we can think of immediate need fulfillment, which occurs when a need is directly satisfied by a product without requiring any intermediate processes. As an example, bread can right away satisfy the need for food without relying on any intermediate processes.

On the other hand we have what I call intermediate need fulfillment, which occurs when a product satisfies a need but does so only by relying on an intermediating process of some sort. As an example, think of cigarettes. One can consistently give voice to the view that cigarettes satisfy individual needs for self-expression and social needs for recognition. But the point is that they do so only by relying on the intermediate process better known as marketing. Cigarettes do not in themselves satisfy a need for social recognition the same way as bread satisfies a need for food.

Cigarettes can reasonably be said to genuinely satisfy human needs only if we rely on marketing as a go-between that influences the consumer to believe that cigarettes actually can play this role. Without having marketing as a mediating go-between, cigarettes cannot fulfill the social need for recognition, because there is no natural causal relation between cigarette consumption and social recognition.

Empty wants
Desires for bread refer to the need for food, but desires for cigarettes do not refer to the need for social recognition (though this is the need we assume it satisfies). Rather, the want for cigarettes refers to a marketing process, because cigarettes cannot satisfy the need for recognition without going through marketing and the consumer would not think of cigarettes in terms social recognition if marketers had not designed that link.

It is marketing that makes cigarettes capable of satisfying the need for recognition, because cigarettes simply do not have that ability in their own right. In this sense we can consistently make the claim that marketing is not just about offering products that satisfy wants, which refer to deeper needs; it is also pretty much about creating wants that are artificially designed to refer to needs. Like this, we often want what we do not need.

Reference
Kotler, P., Armstrong, G., Saunders, J. & Wong, V. (1999). Principles of Marketing – Second European Edition, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Demolition or Remake? - Critical Marketing Between Hardliners and Engagers

What’s the aim of critical marketing? According to Tadajewski and Brownlie (2008) the aim of critical marketing isn’t just to scrutinize and criticize the techniques, traditions and consequences of commercial marketing, but also to attempt to improve the way marketing actually works in contemporary society. I’m more than delighted about the latter point. Academics all too often tend to conceive of themselves as societal watchdogs on a mission to reveal limitations, shortcomings and injustices. They view this negative approach as constructive and, thereby, fail to act on their responsibility to try to improve the current state of affairs. Being influential scholars in the field of critical marketing, Tadajewski and Brownlie’s constructive approach to critical marketing deserves recognition.

On means and ends
What I can’t share with Tadajewski and Brownlie is their vision of what it takes to act proactively as a critical marketer. For instance, they argue that social marketing – the branch of marketing that aims at improving human behavior through marketing techniques – in its current forms is uncritical, because it employs existing commercial marketing techniques. Even though the aim of social marketing is to improve such goals as healthy eating, smoking cessation, physical exercise, safe sex and to fight such things as bullying, social inequalities, binge drinking, informational deprivation and the like, Tadajewski and Brownlie won’t accept social marketing as part of the critical marketing movement.

The reason can’t be with the goals. It must be because of the means. They render social marketing uncritical, because it uses the same methods as commercial marketing, which, in their view, is responsible for a fair share of this world’s failings. Ruling out all prevalent commercial marketing methods on the grounds that they have been used in ways that have caused negative impact on individuals and society at large doesn’t seem very reasonable, if the very same methods can be used to obtain a significant amount of social goods.

Methodological pluralism is – or should be – a golden rule in critical marketing. Thus, discarding a whole bunch of powerful marketing methods that can be used to promote valuable non-commercial goals is a very uncritical approach to critical marketing. Critical marketers should only fight commercial marketing techniques if they have been demonstrated to suffer from an inherent tendency to create social problems or otherwise impair quality of life. It’s not commercial marketing methods per se, but bad application of the marketing methods that deserves criticism.

Should critical marketers advocate for a new social paradigm?
Tadajewski and Brownlie argue that we need a new social paradigm. That critical marketers should rethink the relations between marketing and society along a brand new social paradigm. In their view, we should leave the current belief structure that organizes western societies around an ideology of consumption, private ownership and liberal market-oriented democracy. I can think of two reasons to try to do this. First reason would be if we could point to another, and superior, social paradigm. But in the absence of any convincing alternative social paradigms, the only reason, at least the only one that comes to my mind, to leave the actual social paradigm would be a fundamental disbelief in the ability to improve the actual paradigm. However, improvements are possible. Even from the side of commercial marketing.

Divergent marketing
In a recent paper (under review) I’ve introduced the distinction between convergent and divergent marketing. Convergent marketing addresses the consumer as he or she is and tries to target the consumer’s actual set of beliefs, desires, hopes, dreams and so forth. Divergent marketing tries to change the personal identity of the consumer by transforming his or her web of beliefs, desires, hopes, dreams, actions and so forth.

Convergent marketing that, say, appeals to a consumer’s dream universe tries to link a product or organization to the consumer’s actual dream of something. By contrast, divergent marketing would try to transform the consumer’s actual dream universe and link a product to this new dream or set of dreams. To put it a bit differently: convergent marketing taps into the portrait of the consumer obtained through market research – divergent marketing tries to change it. Thus, instead of tapping into the consumer’s actual worldview, divergent marketing encourages reflection on stereotypes and promotes new social or political ideas.

Let us have a look at a two examples of commercial divergent marketing. Back in 1996 Nike launched a pre-Olympic campaign featuring the disabled athlete Peter Hull. Below the portrait of the athlete the text says: ‘Peter is not like ordinary people. He’s done the marathon.’ Here, as Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders and Wong (1999, 5)) notes, ‘Nike forces people to reconsider stereotyped ideas’. A contemporary example (my favorite one) is Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’. The campaign portrays wrinkled, chubby and gray-haired models – that under normal conditions wouldn’t have found their way to the billboards of the cityscape – as beautiful and attractive women.

Divergent marketing as a step towards a better world
Running the risk of being labeled a completely naïve village idiot in the pocket of the industry, I must admit that I actually do believe in the power of commercial divergent marketing to make the world a better place to live in. Nike isn’t just promoting trainers but also valuable lifestyles; Dove isn’t just promoting cosmetics but also valuable ideals. In both cases the promotion of non-commercial goals (lifestyles and ideals) is for the better.

Nike encourages people to put greater emphasis on the value of physical activity (extremely important in relation to lifestyle diseases that quite often are causally correlated to lack of physical activity). Dove encourages people to revise their narrow view of female beauty and instead focus on natural beauty in order to make beauty a more inclusive ideal that can be approached by most women. This is extremely important in so far as stereotyped ideals of beauty have a tendency to impact negatively on self-esteem.

I don’t try to sell commercial marketing as a silver bullet. My point is simply that in so far as divergent commercial marketing can support the efforts to improve the existing social paradigm, then – in the absence of attractive, alternate social paradigms – we should appreciate and encourage the constructive aspects instead of flushing the whole lot down the drain.

References

Kotler, P., Armstrong, G., Saunders, J. & Wong, V. (1999). Principles of Marketing – Second European Edition, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Tadajewski, M. & Brownlie, D. (2008). ‘Critical Marketing: A Limit Attitude’, Critical Marketing, M. Tadajewski & D. Brownlie (eds.), West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

Is There Room for Fruit Branding?

In the recent article 'Can the food industry play a constructive role in the obesity epidemic', Ludwig & Nestle (2008) argues that the logic of capitalism leaves the food industry with only two options to raise profits – both of which lead to unhealthy diets and obesity. They write:

“In a Western-style capitalistic economy, food corporations, like all corporations, must make the financial return to stockholders their first priority. ... To expand profits in this environment, food companies have only 2 options: convince customers to eat more (contributing directly to obesity) or increase profit margins, especially by marketing reformulated or repackaged products [i.e. processed foods] (an indirect contribution).”

Ludwig & Nestle argue that not just the first but also the second option contributes to an unhealthy diet – and to obesity – because processed foods are, by and large, high in fat. If sound, this argument impacts seriously on the expectation that health branding can promote healthy eating and healthy living: by implication the argument suggests that food health branding indirectly will lead to obesity either because it will encourage consumption of more foods (where the opposite is what health concerns demand) or because the branded products will be processed and therefore most likely to be unhealthy.

A carrot is a carrot. How strong is this argument? Even if it is true that processed foods are, on balance, as unhealthy as they assert, the argument does not tell the whole truth. It rests on the assumption that businesses cannot raise profits on commodities like milk, apples and carrots. But that assumption seems rather controversial to me. Why do they not consider branding of healthy products like fruit and vegetables as an alternative way – and, in terms of public health, quite a desirable one – to raise profits in the food industry?

One prevalent reason for skepticism concerning raising profits on fruit and vegetable branding goes like this: fruits and vegetables are not likely to be as heavily branded as processed foods, because they are commodities and commodities are all the same whether branded or not. The consumer does not experience any relevant difference between a brand and a non-brand commodity.

Everything can be a brand. In terms of current brand research, the claim that a brand experience is contingent on the product type is highly controversial. The standard assumption in branding literature is that anything from products and organizations over nations and ideas to public health can be branded, because the brand experience is an immaterial, symbolic dimension that exists and functions independently of any specific product type.

A visit to you local superstore will make the point down-to-earth. In Tesco, for example, you will find apples featuring Winnie the Pooh and other Disney characters, in Asda you will meet The Great Stuff Garden Gang on carrots, and going to Sainsbury may introduce you to the concept of Kids Apples. Moreover, marketers invent new concepts like ‘fun size apple’ and ‘easy peelers’ to establish fruit brands. Why? Simply because we are more than ready to pay a premium price to get the right fruit and vegetable brands.

Healthy profits. Holding this in mind it becomes clear that there exists at least one more option to raise profits in the current, mature food market; an option, which even Ludwig & Nestle have to admit is in the interest of the public good: to create strong fruit and vegetable brands. And the market is there - more than 80 percent of processed foods are branded, whereas only 19 percents of fruits and vegetables are branded (McGinnis, Gootman & Kraak, 2006, p. 44).

References

Ludwig, D.S. & Nestle, M. (2008). Can the Food Industry Play a Constructive Role in the Obesity Epidemic?, Journal of American Medical Association, 300:15, 1808-1811.

McGinnis, J.M., Gootman, J.A., & Kraak, V.I. (eds.) (2006). Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity?, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.

Is CSR Just a Big Corporate Illusion?

Encouraging as it sounds, the belief that commercial health branding will – or even has a considerable potential to – lead to health promotion is nevertheless fallacious. In terms of theory and experimental studies marketing may impact positively on social norms and values that bear on health behavior, but in the real world of global capitalism raising profits is always the main driver for corporate organizations. Whatever kind of social aims corporate organizations promise to promote, expanding profits is always the motivating reason.

Reluctance and skeptisism. This fact often leaves researchers either unconvinced about the true potential of commercial marketing to push health (e.g. Evans and Hastings, 2008) or directly pessimistic (e.g. Ludwig & Nestle, 2008). Is reluctance and sometimes even pessimism in relation to commercial health promotion reasonable? Specific cases of health brand deception (e.g. the Nutella-case (http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_44078.htm) shows that we have a strong reason to be extremely critical in particular cases, but is it fair to say that we, by and large, should meet corporate promises to promote public health with an attitude of disinclination because the corporate world as such does not have a true interest in taking corporate social responsibility? Reflections on brand equity discredits the pessimism and grounds a reason to expect true health benefits from commercial food health branding. Or so we will argue.

Brand equity. According to Aaker’s (1996) influential brand equity model, brand equity is a set of assets (e.g. brand awareness, brand loyalty, perceived quality, brand associations). These assets provide consumer value that, in turn, provides corporate value. Branding products as healthy without delivering on the promise and being exposed for this in the medias is likely to deteriorate consumers’ perceived quality and create negative brand associations. In other words: not delivering on a health brand promise backfires on brand equity, which causes consumer value and, thus, corporate brand value to drop.
According to Keller’s customer-based brand equity model, the power of a brand is a function of consumer’s perception of and reaction to a brand. He says:

“A brand has positive customer-based brand equity when consumers react more favorably to a product and the way it is marketed when the brand is identified than when it is not (say, when the product is attributed to a fictitious name or is unnamed). … a brand has negative customer-based brand equity if consumers react less favorably to marketing activity for the brand compared with an unnamed or fictitiously named version of the product (2008, 48).”

As was the case with Aaker’s model, Keller’s brand equity model implies that if a brand conveys a health promise without delivering thoroughly on that promise, then brand equity is decreasing due to negative consumer perceptions and reactions.

Genuine corporate social concern. Now, where does these comments on brand equity take us? They demonstrate that we have a serious reason to expect that corporate organizations – that are concerned about their brand equity – have a strong corporate reason to act with genuine social concern whenever they make health brand promises. Thus, we (consumers, watchdogs, researchers) have a reason not to be too skeptical about corporate promises to promote health. There is a strong corporate reason not to let the consumer down on social promises. Despite the existence of cynical examples of fake health branding, we have a reason to believe in the power of commercial health branding to push public health in the right direction.

References

Aaker, D. (1996). Building Strong Brands, New York: Simon and Schuster Inc.

Evans, W.D. & Hastings, G. (2008). Public Health Branding, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keller, K.L. (2008). Strategic Brand Management (3rd ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Ludwig, D.S. & Nestle, M. (2008). Can the Food Industry Play a Constructive Role in the Obesity Epidemic?, Journal of American Medical Association, 300:15, 1808-1811.

The Taste of Branding

Did you know that carrots don’t taste like carrots. I mean, of course carrots have a taste, but the precise nature of the taste - urghh or uhmmm - is not in the carrot. It’s in the bag, package, design, placement, wrapping… In the brand.

A recent article, 'Effects of Fast Food Branding on Young Children's Taste Preferences', demonstrates that children's experience of food taste is influenced by their perception of the wrapping and packaging the food come in. The children in the study reported burgers, chips and CARROTS to be more tasty when they came in McDonald wrapping compared to when they came in neutral white wrapping. The presence of McDonald wrapping simply intensified the preference for the food products.

What is the lesson of this observation?

Some have used the results as a vehicle to further ground the call for more regulation on food marketing. Clearly, the results can push that call, because they make clear that good branding of bad products has a measurable impact on childrens food preferences. They raise.

On second thoughts, however, the results do not unequivocally point to that interpretation. Since food branding impacts on food taste preference regardless of the specific product type in question, food branding is a powerful tool to raise preferences for healthy products as well.

We have to choose between two interpretations. One, that calls for more regulation. Another, that calls for encouragement.

If we choose to argue in favor of more regulation, we may stop branding of junk food. This is good to the extent that we protect children against some harm. But, on the other side, we have not done much to raise the preference for healthy living and healthy eating. And we have such a desperate need to do that. Banning all marketing for junk food will not stop the obesity epidemic. It will not stop until the social norms surrounding healthy living has changed significantly. And the food industry is one of the most important strategic partners in the efforts to reinforce the social and cultural norms governing our health behavior.

Thus, if we choose to use such results to encourage industry to brand carrots, skimmed-milk and apples, we might very well raise children's preferences for these products and thereby push public health in the right direction. If we choose to reinforce the call for more regulation, the corporate interest in turning healthy living into something attractive is not likely to be very strong.

Robinson, T.N., Borzekowski, D.L.G., Matheson, D.M. et al., 2007, 'Effects of Fast Food Branding on Young Children's Taste Preferences', Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med, 161:792-797.

The Power of Desire?

I believe in the power of desire. I think that human beings quite often are driven by a mixture of emotional and rational reasons. And it will take no one by surprise that I think that emotional decision making is particular high with food consumers. Research suggests that quite often consumers' cognitive processing ressources are constrained and that there is a positive correlation between 'constrained cognitive processing ressources' and 'tendency to act emotionally'.

Such observations have formed my believe in marketing as a powerful tool to influence people towards healthier food choices. However, even loaded with this kind of arguments I am sometimes met with rather forceful counterarguments.

One key objection is that marketing only has limited influence on consumers food behavior, whereas product availability is the structural silver bullet through which we can influence consumer behavior most effectively. In its most simple form the argument claims that by, on the one hand, making healthty food easily available and, on the other, constraining access to unhealthy food, we can effectively influence consumers towards healthier food habits. At the heart of this 'avialability approach' we find the belief that consumer behavior is determined by physical constraints: if it is hard to get hold of a banana, but easy to reach a chocolate bar, then we go for the chocolate. And vice versa.

In my view the 'availability approach' suffers from one fundamental shortcoming: We can only influence food behavior in a situation, where we are the managerial masters of that situation. By managerial control we can get totally rid of unhealthy food in the workplace or school, but beyond these managerial walls where each individuals behavior is determined - not by the boss or the head master - but by the will of that individual, availability is not exactly that magical tool, because of the simple fact that all kinds of products are equally available.

On a daily basis consumers encounter situations, where they have to choose between healthy and unhealthy foods (in the supermarket, cafe, canteen, restaurant). And in such situations the choice between healthy and unhealthy is not determined by availability, but desirability.