Evolutions in food marketing, quantifying the impact, and policy implications

Area of Science:

• Digital Marketing
• Consumer Behavior
• Policy Analysis

Background:

• Interactive digital marketing rapidly expands promotional strategies, influencing consumer behavior and brand engagement.
• Current policy frameworks, particularly for youth-oriented food marketing, are insufficient to address the interactive nature of digital marketing.
• Existing evidence bases often conceptualize marketing as transactional, failing to capture the complexities of digital interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the adequacy of existing policy controls and paradigms in constraining the effects of interactive digital marketing.
• To assess the challenges in measuring the impact of digital marketing due to rich consumer data and rapid technological advancements.
• To propose evidence-based approaches for policy development concerning commercial food and beverage marketing.

Main Methods:

• Case study analysis of interactive digital marketing practices.
• Review of extant policy controls and their underlying paradigms.
• Exploration of the evidence base for marketing effects and policy interventions.

Main Results:

• Interactive digital marketing enhances relational marketing, data collection, marketing mix integration, and consumer co-creation.
• Current policies lack the paradigmatic logic to constrain interactive digital marketing, especially for youth.
• Digital technologies generate complex consumer data, increasing the difficulty in quantifying marketing impacts.

Conclusions:

• Existing policies are ill-equipped to manage the evolving landscape of interactive digital marketing.
• There is an urgent need for new metrics and approaches to measure the effects of digital marketing.
• Independent analysis of anonymized commercial consumer data can inform policy on marketing impacts and controls.