Don't Panic! It's Organic!

Introduction

Moving away from home to a university, students have an add-on responsibility for purchasing food and preparing meals whilst also managing their hectic schedule.  In such times frozen and conventional food is often preferred over organic food as they are perceived affordable, time-saving and have a longer shelf-life. Hence, implying the crucial impact of the transition from high school to a university on students dietary pattern. Here the use of food labels and knowledge about the benefits of organic food can be an effective method to promote healthy living.

Problem: Insufficient knowledge about organic food

Along with a lack of awareness of benefits, another issue identified is the struggle of distinguishing organic products from non-organic food products. Correct identification is vital as consumers often get duped into buying expensive organic food products which don't even meet the federal organic food standards. Consumer fraud is very common. Three farmers were recently pled guilty for selling conventionally grown corn and soybeans as organic. Moreover, famous celebrity Jessica Alba is sued for misleading the consumers into buying “deceptively labelled” organic food that contains toxic ingredients (did not meet the organic food standards) (Chew, 2016).

Nowadays, every food category out there has an organic alternative. 20% of all UK shoppers buy at least one organic product every week. The problem is, the majority of people have insufficient knowledge regarding organic food, leading to reluctance to buy these products with health benefits. In the past, consumers have often confused organic and free-range products because they believe that “organic” is equivalent to “free-range” food (Harper & Makatouni, 2002). Consumers are not consistent in their interpretation of what organic food is. Furthermore, uncertainty surrounding the true attributes of organic food and organic food labels may hold some consumers back from purchasing organic food (Yiridoe, Bonti-Ankomah & Martin, 2005). This emphasises how little people really know about organic foods, which may lead to a wide range of students not purchasing organic foods.

A positive correlation is identified between consumer behaviour of organic food and health awareness (Azzurra & Paola, 2009) suggesting students are willing to change the dietary pattern and incorporate organic food in their diet (Dahm et al., 2009). Moreover, Kolodinsky (2007) and Akhondan et al. (2015) believe there is a positive impact of dietary guidelines and health consciousness on healthier eating habits in university students. This suggests the issue of eating non-organic food is not rigid. Thus, behaviour change is possible if correct measures are taken.

Why is it important

This is an important problem due to the benefits that come with organic foods, in comparison to non-organic foods, which is something that consumers should be aware of.

We want students to live a healthier lifestyle, and eating more organic food is a step in the right direction. Organic food contains fewer pesticides residues than conventionally grown food. The Soil Association, a campaigner for organic food, highlights the chemicals used in traditional farming may have negative long-term effects on health. A vast amount of research has shown that organic foods generally contain higher levels of antioxidants, vitamin C, zinc and iron. (Brandt, Leifert, Sanderson & Seal, 2011; Hunter et. al., 2011; Asami, Hong, Barrett & Mitchell, 2003). Antioxidants help protect healthy cells from damage and their levels in organic foods can be up to 69% (Barański et. al., 2014). We believe that people should be educated on the scientific information, as well as personal accounts from those who regularly eat organic food. If students have access to this information, we expect them to purchase more, express the health benefits of and eventually spread their newfound love in organic foods, making for a healthier and more food conscious student population.

The problem at hand is not just important for health reasons, but also economically. Purchasing organic food, especially from the farmer’s market, supports your local community’s economy, creating jobs and keeping farmers thriving. Overall organic food may be more expensive than intensively farmed food, but a crucial reason for this is that agrochemicals are designed to make the food cheaper to produce. Agrochemicals were not developed with nutrition or taste in mind. So, although students are more likely to go for the cheaper, more familiar option, our goal with this project is to change students’ behaviour to opt for the marginally more expensive, superior product, as opposed to, the cheaper but inferior product.

Target audience

Our target population for this change are mainly university students. As a factor that influences a consumer’s likelihood to change behaviour is education, individuals with higher academic achievements are more willing to purchase organic food and change (Dettman & Dimitri, 2009).

Our Intervention

We made a poster which included the pros of eating organic food, cons of eating non-organic food, quotes from celebrities supporting organic eating, and logos and codes to identify organic products in the UK. All these elements were included to resolve the issue of the insufficient knowledge students have about organic food. The poster was hung outside the centrally located rootes grocery store on campus as it is the most frequently visited store.

Psychological and persuasion techniques used

Repetition

The borders of the poster made to promote organic living read “DON’T PANIC! IT’S ORGANIC!” the catchy slogan is repeated in bold throughout the entire border frame. According to Saegert and Young (1982) repetition affects the level of processing. The more the number of times repetition occurs the more effective is the persuasion as it promotes deeper cognitive processing as compared to when there's one repetition or no repetition. Therefore, the slogan “Don’t Panic! It’s Organic!” was repeated several times in the poster. Moreover, the repetition also seems to be effective because of the inverse relationship shared between the strength of learning and the rate of forgetting. Wherein the repetition positively influences the strength of learning thus slowing the rate of forgetting (Johnson & Watkins, 1971). According to Hewstone et al. (2015) repetition allows the cognitive elaboration of communication that enhances the attitude change for messages consisting of strong arguments. Hence, we also decided to include research findings that state the pros of organic eating and the cons of eating non-organic food. We expect the combination of the two to be more effective than using repetition alone.

MINDSPACE

We wanted to build our poster around a few aspects of the MINDSPACE framework, used to influence behaviour (Dolan et al., 2012).

Firstly, we focused on the messenger. In this case, there were two ‘messengers’ on our poster, celebrity accounts and expert researchers. Dolan et al., (2012) express that, our perceived authority of the source of information, greatly impacts the value we give to this information. Our intervention can be seen as a health intervention due to the emphasis on the health benefits of organic foods. Health interventions delivered by research assistants and health educators have been shown to be more effective in changing behaviour compared with interventions delivered by either trained facilitators or teachers (Webb & Sheeran, 2006). This research motivated our intervention to highlight what the researchers say about organic foods. We believe that students would be far more likely to change their behaviour if the information was given to them by researchers who they perceived to have more authority when speaking on organic foods. Similarly, students often show more belief in a topic if the author of an article was a credible scientist compared to a source which was not credible (Hovland & Weiss, 1951). In relation to our project, we believed that students, particularly those who deal with research on a daily basis, would be more likely to change their behaviour if the source was perceived to be credible (a health expert), as opposed to a source which was not credible.

Secondly, we wanted to focus on salience, which was one of the elements of the MINDSPACE framework we thought we would be able to implement with ease on a poster. People are subjected to different stimuli on a daily basis. As a result of this we cannot take on all the information that we see, there is simply too much. Dolan et al., (2012) references that, people are more likely to register stimuli that are novel, accessible and simple, all of which our poster achieves. Our intervention is simple, as it uses a short snappy slogan “Don’t Panic! It’s Organic!”. It is accessible, as we placed it outside of stores selling organic foods. Finally, it is novel in some way, due to its design of catching the attention of a passer-by. Simplicity is something we took advantage of, as we thought a busy students’ attention is much more likely to be drawn to something that they can understand. This was motivated by evidence suggesting that we are less likely to encode things presented in a more abstract way (Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995). In regards to information we have placed on the poster, including how to identify organic foods, we have implemented a more simple structure to encourage encoding of this information. In combination, there have been more demonstrations that information is taken into account only if it is salient. For example, it has been revealed that, when attentional or cognitive resources are restricted, individuals can only focus on the most salient behaviour cues. Furthermore, participants were more likely to respond to health-promoting messages when salient, and attention-grabbing cues were used (Mann & Ward, 2007). This research motivated the emphasis we placed on salience, and we believed that students would be more likely to purchase organic foods if the information was more salient and attention-grabbing.

Finally, an aspect we attempted to include in our intervention was priming. Our attention can be focused on unconsciously. In other words, we attend to things without consciously knowing about it (Morewedge & Kahneman, 2010). For example, we may ‘randomly’ feel the urge for a certain food, not recognising that our desire has been triggered by a display of that particular food (Kessler, 2010). This research acts as an underlying motivation for our intervention. Even though it is not as important to our intervention as the messenger and salience, priming is still a factor, as we believe students may be primed to purchase organic foods, if primed near to a food store.

Social Proof

Another technique we used in our intervention was social proof, specifically celebrity social proof. The idea of celebrity social proof is that, we all look to celebrities to influence, encourage and drive certain behaviours. Celebrities create attention and bring prestige to brands, potentially encouraging higher recall (Erdogan, 1999). Furthermore, existing literature highlights that a celebrity was better in enhancing brand name recall than a non-celebrity (Freidman and Friedman, 1979). Although our project does not focus on one brand of organic food, the idea is that the slogan “Don’t Panic! It’s Organic!” and the term ‘organic’, is the ‘brand’ in this situation. Therefore, this research motivated our use of celebrity social proof, to enhance organic foods. Hopefully, this will lead to students researching organic foods, and best case scenario, purchasing more organic foods. In addition to this, we gathered from the research and additional understanding of social proof that, when we think about ourselves, we view our possessions as an extension of ourselves. These possessions, which in this case are organic foods, may place us in a certain group or give us an identity, perhaps as a healthy, food conscious person. In purchasing the organic foods, which are endorsed by celebrities, we are aligning ourselves with that celebrity.

Implementation Intention

According to Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) willingness to achieve a goal is important as it furnishes goal intention with an if-then plan specifying when, where and how an individual will instigate responses that promote goal realisation. In our project, because we wanted to promote healthy living by motivating students to eat organic we used the if-then strategy in the poster where we explain and help students to correctly identify the organic product by presenting details like code and logo (shown in the picture above). According to us, mentioning identification details in the poster would really work as Sheeran et al. (2005) suggests the students do not need to be consciously aware of the goal intention for implementation intention effects to occur. So, even on an unconscious level students who have read the poster while buying the food product will identify the presence or absence of the logo. This can lead them to choose the organic product over a non-organic product.

The Future

It would be interesting to see if our intervention has had a significant impact on Warwick students behaviour. This may be measured by receiving information from local food stores to see if there has been a rise in the sales of organic foods. Or, by simply asking students if they happened to see our poster and if so, did this in any way change their behaviour. This project has great potential for expansion, for example, it would be fascinating to see if we could implement more of the MINDSPACE framework, with access to more resources. The popularity of organic foods is certainly growing and we believe projects like this, on a large scale, will increase popularity even more.

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