Fear appeal in health campaigns - smoking

Yesterday, I was on Belgian national television for the popular science show "Ook Getest op Mensen". Each episode, they try to tackle a few behavioral questions using quasi-scientific methodology. This week's episode, among others, focused on public health campaigns and sigarette packaging using visual and extreme fear appeals. As others have already claimed, those extreme fear appeals do not always result in adaptive consequences (see Witte & Allen, 2000). If not accompanied by easy to achieve goals or action plans or if they do not bolster self-efficacy, such fear appeals may result in maladaptive behaviors. The rationale is that fear appeals increase negative emotions and to reduce these negative emotions, we will do something maladaptive like avoiding the message or minimizing it. The real-life study we did produced some nice anecdotical insights.

Decrease in "showrooming" - An issue for FMCGs

Last week, @GinoVanOssel published an interesting post on the topic of showrooming. Brick-and-mortar retailers for high involvement goods face an interesting challenge from online retailers. Potential customers increasingly tend to visit showrooms to check out the products and then start searching online for the best bargain on their preferred product. So, the brick-and-mortar retailers invest in showrooms and staff, yet the online retailers get the the deal. This topic is often discussed, but less attention goes to a complementary issue in the low involvement category of FMCGs. With the steadily rising popularity of online grocery shopping and accompanying shopping apps, the producers of FMCGs are missing out on valuable marketing communications precisely because of the decrease of showrooming.

Food advertising and pledging not to target children

I wrote a commentary on the topic, following the Belgian Pledge of main food advertisers not to target children under 12 anymore. The commentary appeared on the blog of the KU Leuven Institute for Media Studies [in Dutch]: http://instituteformediastudies.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/kinderreclame-en-ongezonde-voeding-de-belgian-pledge/