Digital Food Marketing
Summary
October 2020
,Digital food marketing
Marketing: All activities that occur in between the completion of a product through the
purchasing process of consumers. Herein, advertising consists of the 4 P’s (price, place,
product and promotion) and provides the essential link between the products of a
competitive food supply chain and the creation of demand for the resulting products.
Contemporary marketing campaigns typically apply an integrated communications approach,
using a range of marketing platforms and techniques in parallel to achieve maximum impact.
Consequently, campaign effectiveness is a consequence of exposure to the message and the
persuasive power of the message.
Two purposes of advertising:
1. Provide information to potential purchasers about a product
2. Induce positive feelings about a product to that potential purchasers view the
product as desirable and attractive.
TV advertising is the most popular promotional channel, but it is slowly switching to
internet-mediated marketing.
Digital marketing: promotional activity, delivered through a digital medium, that seeks to
maximize impact through creative and/or analytical methods. The new commercial media
environment encounters blurring boundaries between advertising, entertainment and
information. The level of integration between the persuasive message and its context is
arguably one of the defining characteristics of the current commercialized media
environment. We can no longer speak of marketing messages as isolated, measurable units;
rather, we need to consider the synergistic nature of marketing interactions across a variety
of platforms. 6 concepts that constitute unique features of digital media and marketing:
1. Ubiquitous connectivity: if you compare the way people are connected to other
people now than it was before, the connectivity has much increased. Children and
teens now move seamlessly, and often simultaneously, across a spectrum of
platforms. Marketers design their campaigns to take advantage of young people’s
constant connectivity to technology, their geographic locations and the fluidity of
their media experiences.
2. Engagement: in contrast to the passive experience of watching television, the
increasingly participatory environment of interactive media facilitates active
engagement. Rather than simply exposing consumers to a particular message,
product or service, engagement means creating an environment in which young
people are actually interacting with the brand, befriending the product, and
integrating it into their personal and social relationships. Exposure to marketing may
be less important than the nature and degree of engagement with marketing and
brands.
1. User-generated content: digital technologies make it possible for marketers to enlist
youth in creating and distributing brand-related content, including advertisements,
products, and packaging for their favourite products.
2. Personalization: through ongoing data collection and tracking, digital marketers can
create personalized marketing and sales appeals based on a customer’s unique
preferences, behaviours and psychological profile. However, personalization creates
an entirely new set of issues that were not part of the traditional advertising and
marketing paradigm, requiring researchers to take into account the individualized
, nature of commercial transactions in the digital environment, which often involves
techniques that are not transparent to the user. Personalization means that each
individual has his or her own unique interactions and relationships with brands and
the companies that produce and promote them. The increasingly immersive nature
of all digital media means that young people are not just viewing content, but
inhabiting media environments where entertainment, communication, and
marketing are combined in a seamless stream of compelling sounds and images.
3. Social graph: the complex web of relationships among individuals facilitated and
tracked online, enabling marketers to access and influence both individuals and their
communities in ways that were never possible before.
4. Immersive environments: surround and engross a person with powerful, realistic
images and sounds, creating an experience of being inside the action, a mental state
that is frequently accompanied by ‘intense focus, loss of self-distorted time sense
and effortless action”. Examples are state-of-art animation, high definition video,
interactive games and three-dimensional virtual worlds.
Emotional marketing: one explanation for how marketing influences attitudes and
behaviours despite expressed scepticism about advertising is that marketing effects often
occur on an emotional level, effectively bypassing a rational information-processing
response. Marketers distinguish between ‘informational’ and ‘emotional’ marketing
messages. In food marketing nearly all messages are emotional. Marketing researchers have
adopted cognitive psychology to describe brand attitudes, including emotional connections
to brands, as networks of associations.
Food marketing: ensures brand-product awareness, brand-product knowledge, brand-
product memory, brand-product preference, brand-product choice, cognitive responses (e.g.
attitude), affective responses (e.g. positive or negative emotions, physiological responses
(e.g. sweat and brain responses) and brand-product consumption. The impact of HFSS food
marketing is a function of both the level of exposure (the reach and the frequency of
promotions) and the power (design, execution and persuasive techniques). Entertainment
techniques such as the use of animated and fictional characters are more likely to be used in
food advertisements than in non-food advertisements aimed at children. TV advertisements,
free gifts and packaging routinely attract children’s attention, and simulate acceptance, liking
of and demand for products.
Three types of integration between a persuasive message and its context can be
distinguished:
1. Format integration: the level of integration between the message format and the
editorial context. Examples include advertorials in magazines or websites that are
designed to resemble editorial articles or website content.
2. Thematic integration: the conceptual fit or congruence between the persuasive
message and its context. This may include, for example, placement of ads around
thematically congruent content, such as placement of the Nike brand logo in a
football or soccer game, or an advertisement of Bratz action figures in the Bratz
magazine.
3. Narrative integration: the semantic or conceptual relevance of the persuasive
message within the narrative of the surrounding media context. Television programs
