Overweight and obesity rates showed a concerning upward movement in recent decades to a point that these rates are expected to reach pandemic proportions in the upcoming years. While this trend is sparked by many factors, one often cited contributor is the unhealthy food environment children often find themselves in. To counter this, some policy has been put in place with the aim of countering the negative effects of unhealthy food marketing on (over)consumption and liking of unhealthy foods. However, existing policy is lacking and therefore consistently fails to curb overweight and obesity rates among children. A prime example is child-appealing food packaging. Despite it’s well-known appeal to children and it’s prevalence within unhealthy food categories, protective marketing regulations are scarce. In Belgium, the recent trend is to regulate unhealthy food marketing via industry-ignited self-regulation (e.g. The Belgian and EU Pledge), despite concerns from health institutions about the inadequate measures this form of regulation offers.

Therefore, this project aims to examine how (unhealthy) child-targeted food packaging can be resisted from a consumer empowerment perspective. As target group, the focus lies on parents and their decision making. Parents, as decision makers for their children, are the eventual buyers of the child-appealing packages. Yet, little is known however on how parents resist such child-targeted food packages. This project fills a gap in research on how decisions are made for others by examining how goal structures affect caregiving decisions made by parents in supermarkets. In a first study, parents indicated that they not only switch between goals on different shopping occasions, but these goals also alter reactance to typical marketing cues. For example, cartoons are negatively perceived when parents want to buy a healthy snack (focusing on long-term health benefits), whereas the same cartoons are a very appealing packaging element when focusing on making a short-term snack choice based on rewarding or offering fun to the child.

This concept of goal pursuit and how goals shape product and packaging assessments will remain the common thread throughout the rest of the project. For example, one study will focus on how parents might misinterpret or overestimate certain cues when explicitly primed with a long-term health goal. Another study will further explore the concept of delay discounting (indicating the difficult trade-off between short-term gains vs. long-term benefits) and examine if making a health goal more salient (as opposed to a short-term fun goal) will help parents in resisting unhealthy child-appealing food packaging. Additionally, during these studies, tools will be integrated into the study designs to see if increasing consumer knowledge on misleading packaging further helps parents to counter marketing efforts. This project will gain important insights into how parents can be made more resistant towards misleading packaging and will therefore give rise to recommendations for public policy and advertising practice.