There were several interesting articles in the paper over the weekend, but one ad in particular caught my attention. It’s a new campaign from a huge paper company I had never heard of before called Domtar. The ad was really effective because it caught my attention and I followed up to read on about what the campaign is about and who Domtar is and it was more interesting than I expected. My friend Tracy, who is a marketing and branding person told me that that word because is one of the three most effective words at getting us to stop in our tracks when it comes to a message, and this one did the trick. And that’s why I put the word in the title of this post about incentives.
The article “Let Them Eat Brocolli” by Anemona Hartocollis focuses on an increasingly heated debate about whether people who are on food stamps, the federally funded program for people who don’t have enough of their own money for food, should be able to buy luxury goods like fancy shrimp, or less healthy foods like sodas with their food stamps.
As with most rethinking topics, my overall conclusion was that people aren’t taking a step back and thinking about incentives and what will cause people to change their behaviors which is a topic that touches every organization in every industry.
The debate gets a little bit more complex when you understand that the really big food companies make some products that are less healthy than others, and getting a big push to get people to eat healthier hurts those big powerful food companies, and the realities of business are that at least in the short term they are going to resist.
But as incentives go, the discussion about whether someone has a dollar in food stamps, to tell them they can spend the dollar on broccoli but not a Coke not only seems a little condescending and demeaning, it just doesn’t sound like it would work to me. Overall people know the difference between healthy food and unhealthy food, though as I have said before I do think there’s a huge education gap in how fatal obesity can be (usually through diabetes and subsequent other downstream diseases). So if people know the Coke is less healthy than the broccoli, why do we do it? We don’t have enough will power for one, but it seems a lot of people (myself included) need more of a carrot, or rather an incentive to make the smarter choice.
So what’s my recommendation?
Instead of the big brother banning of use of food stamps for less healthy food, come up with an incredibly simple model where food stamps are twice as valuable for healthier foods, so the one dollar in food stamps still buys me a dollar’s worth of coke, but now it’s worth two dollars if I buy the broccoli with it. If you could make ads and billboards showing the pile of healthy food you can get for $50 (it would be $100 worth in this model) next to a much smaller pile of the unhealthy foods you get with that same $50. For the people who are truly concerned about putting food on the table, this message should be very clear and simple.
The bottom line is that you need to know what will really cause your target to behave in they way you want them to, and being heavy handed, in my experience, often results on the opposite reaction (unless of course you are actually the parent and the child has no say whatsoever).
While this isn’t a magic wand solution, there will be debates about which foods are healthy and which are not. There are lots of ways to do that, ranging from the percentage of trans fats, or even the ratio of trans fats and corn syrup to some other factors, seems like an interesting one, but I expect there are others. There are also some implementation issues in this at the cash register, but taller mountains have been climbed and I think that for the overall impact to the health and wellness of the population, in addition to the reduction in obesity, which would translate directly into lower health care costs, this is all worth figuring out.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this.
-Ric
Leave a Reply