Wathelet als strateeg van BIVV: choqueren of blokkeren?

[Dutch blogpost in reaction to a newspaper article in which the new Belgian road safety campaign's strategy was discussed]

Vrijdag 13 september. De dag kon niet beter gekozen worden om het over verkeersongevallen te hebben, al ging het in de nieuwsberichten niet om ongevallen door brute pech. De manier waarop Wathelet samen met het Belgisch Instituut voor VerkeersVeiligheid hardleerse bestuurders willen overtuigen, staat in De Standaard te lezen. In het artikel "Nieuwe campagnes moeten choqueren" kan je enkele merkwaardige zaken lezen. Ten eerste lijkt het daar alsof Staatssecretaris Melchior Wathelet zelf de nieuwe strategie bepaalt. Ten tweede staat er geen nuance in over hoe men gaat choqueren, terwijl dat toch belangrijk is.

Reden genoeg voor collega Karolien Poels van Universiteit Antwerpen en mezelf om onderstaande reactie te schrijven. We stuurden ze ook in naar De Standaard, maar daar kregen we geen reactie.

Portion cues in food packaging: Implicit seduction

Ever wondered about the adequate portion size of a glass of soda or juice? A bowl of cereals? Or spreads for your sandwich? Maybe you do think about this from time to time, maybe you don't. Chances are, however, that cues around you have implicitly seduced you (they "nudged" you) to have a certain portion size because they set anchors on which you rely to make your own choices. One such cue could be provided by social comparison: you tend to derive information from what others do. For instance, you'll take a bit more than a smaller person or somebody you know to be dieting. These are quite valid cues. But we are also surrounded by biased cues on food packaging. Next time you open the fridge or you're sitting at the breakfast table, you better take a good look and then think about this post.

brief aan de rectorskandidaten van de KU Leuven omtrent wetenschappelijke integriteit

English Summary: This is an open letter to the four electable chancellors of Leuven University in the 2013 elections. It deals with specific questions about the candidates position regarding scientific integrity issues. It is written by a group of academics employed by Leuven University and signed by an even larger group of Leuven University researchers. 

Endorsement strategies: don't select the obvious

I wrote a guest blog for the Dutch organisation SWOCC, that bridges fundamental research and practitioners on the topic of brands and communication. They regularly publish posts that discuss academic research from an applied angle. What is the practical significance of the reported findings?
In this series, I summarized the findings of the paper by Fredrik Thörn on celebrity endorsement. In this paper, Thörn discusses a study demonstrating the persuasive superiority of a slight mismatch between the celebrity and the brand. Contrary to common logic, many practices, and some much cited theories, others already demonstrated that perfect congruity between celebrity and brand is outperformed by ads where there is still a good but more moderate congruity. Prior studies demonstrated this with regard to tier I brands, boiling down to a guideline where market leaders should use mildly congruent endorsers and new or unknown brands should use congruent endorsers. But what about all brands in between? Thörn demonstrated that also for such brands the expected persuasive impact is higher for moderately congruent endorsements.

The SWOCC blogpost can be found here [In Dutch]