24th March 2015
The CLYMBOL project: how health-related claims and symbols impact consumer behaviour
A
cutting-edge research project comprising research institutes and
communication experts across Europe has set out to study the role of
health-related claims and symbols in consumer behaviour. One of the
goals of CLYMBOL is
to understand how claims and symbols appear on food and drink products,
in their context, and how this information can help guide consumer
behaviour. In addition, a toolbox will be produced to support guidance
in measuring the impact of claims and symbols on understanding, purchase
and consumption behaviour. Findings will be used to design better
communication activities and draw implications for policy makers and the
European food industry.
There are 14 partners
working on the CLYMBOL project, which is more than half way through its
planned four years. It is split into six main work areas and receives
partial funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
for research, technological development and demonstration.
The
project’s first work area focusses on the history of health-related
claim and symbol use across EU member states; their current prevalence
on food packaging and in which context the claims and symbols appear.
Among other things, 53 European key representatives from national food
authorities, representatives of the food industry and consumer
organisations were interviewed. Results showed that there are vast
differences in Europe when it comes to how health claims and symbols
have been regulated before 2006, and how their use was monitored. The
stakeholder groups did express a strong interest in evaluating the
impact of health claims and symbols, in particular (1) the role of
health claims and symbols in consumer behaviour; (2) their impact on
public health; and (3) economic effects. Building on these findings,
researchers have sampled more than 2,000 food and drink products in five
EU member states and are currently analysing the packaging for product-
and health-related information. They are reviewing which claims and
symbols are found, how they are classified and the nutritional
composition of foods carrying those claims and symbols.
Consumer
needs and wants with regards to health claims and symbols are important
to identify in CLYMBOL. In a second work area of the project, the
researchers are looking at consumer models of health (e.g. their beliefs
and inferences related to specific health outcomes) and how they use
these models to interpret nutrition and health claims. Furthermore, an
online study of European consumers in 10 countries was undertaken to
assess how motivated and able food shoppers were in processing health
claims and symbols on food products, and whether there are
country-specific or segment-specific differences, such as social
demographics. In general, European consumers’ motivation and ability to
process health claims differed little between claims and symbols. How
motivated people were to process health-related claims depended strongly
on their ‘need for information’, while ‘subjective knowledge about the
healthiness of food’ correlated strongly with how able people were to
process claims.
A methodological toolbox will be
developed, as part of the third work area, to enable researchers and
other stakeholders such as public authorities, industry and consumer
organisations to measure the impact of health claims and symbols on
consumer understanding, purchase and consumption behaviour. The toolbox
will cover a range of tested and validated methods, explaining how to
apply each technique; which research questions are most suitable and how
to undertake the analysis and interpretation. The toolbox will be made
publicly available at the end of the project.
In
work area four, a wide range of European studies will be undertaken to
empirically investigate the effects of health claims and symbols on
consumer understanding, purchase and consumption behaviour. This will
take the form of in-store and experimental studies in selected
supermarkets. Methods that will be applied include eye-tracking of
consumers, household panel data, surveys and actual food and nutrient
intake during consumption. This work will be completed by early 2016.
The
implications of findings from work areas one to four for different
stakeholders (consumers, industry, retailers, non-governmental
organisations, policy makers and others), including actionable
recommendations for communication and education around health claims and
symbols, will be analysed in the fifth work package. Furthermore,
researchers will study the effect on consumer awareness, perception and
understanding of a social media-based health logo campaign, which ran in
the Netherlands in 2014.
The project also has a
separate work area which focusses on the dissemination and
communication of CLYMBOL. All project information can be accessed
through the project website at www.clymbol.eu.
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