Are Junk food companies developing brand loyalty towards children? With childhood obesity being a complex issue, is regulation required?
With the recent approval of McDonalds at the Royal Children Hospital, is creating brand awareness from an early age a good thing.

I like to compare it to tobacco adverting in motor sport, if it had no effect on peoples decision top either change their cigarette brands or influence their decision to commence smoking why would they spend hundreds of millions of dollars placing there logo’s on the cars?

Well guess what, they ban any form of advertising in Australia yet junk food is ok to be promoted unregulated.

Today everyone from breakfast cereal companies such as Nutri-Grain which is a third sugar to McDonalds sponsoring Little athletics.
The next strategy are branded toys and even McDonalds now has a toy whereby the children can make hamburgers in a Barbie doll style plastic kitchen.

Now we are seeing websites created by the big multi nationals with web based games show casing planety of company logo’s and product images.

So why do junk food companies do it?
*Brand awareness
*Creates associations with a particular event or activity
*Creates a relationships with the parents
*Influencing children at an age where they lack the ability to make healthy food and beverage decisions.

Ultimately you can argue that the parents have the final say or control the money to purchase these products but the same can be said for cigarette advertising.
Ultimately it makes it harder for responsible parents to take control of there children’s health.

The latest Government Preventative Health Taskforce document targeting obesity and Diabetes make recommendations to phase out junk food advertising before pm and banning junk food toy competition promotions.
The only issue is the voluntary nature of this report, once again leaving it to the socially responsible corporations to follow the guidelines.
Unfortunately self regulation hasn’t worked as was experienced by Coke last year.

So will the junk food companies adopt a more responsible approach when developing their brand loyalty towards children

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 10:35 am by Andrew Talati and is filed under Public interest.

Tags: Childhood, Nutrition, Obesity, Politics

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