As legislation affects more and more areas of business, the packaging industry is the latest to feel its effects. The Food Standards Agency's proposed traffic light labelling system has spurred ongoing debate amongst the grocery trade and manufacturers regarding alternative design formats, and consideration really should be give to how such changes will affect food packaging and its current use within brand promotion. Ultimately, we should be asking: What will such legislation do to brands?
With most brand owners currently leveraging the promotional properties of packaging and utilising it as a sales driver, such legislation could prove critical to brand success. While subtle or cleverly applied labelling of health advantages can prompt consumer selection and offer a point of differentiation, confused messaging and inconsistent signage could prove detrimental to some brands.
Mixed messages around what consumers should look out for on pack and varying symbols and colour codes could, if we're not careful, act as barriers to consumers rather than benefits, causing confusion and potentially restricting selection if purchasers don't understand what the labelling means.
As well as the effect such confused messaging my have on a brand and the way consumers perceive it, further threats lie in just how far such legislation is likely to develop. Should legislation around and content warnings escalate, following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry, brand owners could soon find they have lost a valuable marketing tool - namely their point of sale promotion.
As the tobacco industry has demonstrated, such labelling requirements have the potential to spiral considerably. If nutritional information becomes a required percentage of a pack's design, on-shelf differentiation will become increasingly difficult to establish. Brand owners will need to look at alternative and often more costly, promotional solutions to keep their brand at the forefront of the consumer's mind.
It is important that a single consumer-friendly standard is agreed upon amicable that also leaves room for brand messaging. The grocery sector and brand owners need to work with the Food Standards Agency, rather than generating resistance, to agree on something that works for everyone. Otherwise brand owners may find themselves at the mercy of government legislation - and suffering as a result.
The survey found that 80% of 17,000 parents backed the traffic lights food labelling system which offers a simple red, amber and green guide to nutrition. The findings come as the British Medical Association announced its backing for the traffic light idea and The National Heart Forum said that the GDA markings are complex and misleading.
GDA supporters say their system provides people with more detailed information and that the traffic lights are too crude and simplistic. Many in the food industry prefer giving the GDA for things like calories, sugars and fat.
Cathy Court, a director of Netmums, said the strength of the traffic lights scheme was its simplicity. She said some of the parents who responded to the survey stressed that the easy-to-use nature of the scheme made it ideal to use with their children. She said: "An important thing nowadays is to get your children to understand what healthy food is. People could actually use it to teach their children about healthy food, and work out healthy options together."
Dr Vivienne Nathanson, BMA head of science and ethics, said: "It is absolutely essential that it is simple, that you don't need to sit down and start trying to work out what that percentage means. And the traffic lights system is something you can even see from a distance, so you can start to hone in on the foods that are predominantly green or green and amber, and just cut down on the foods that are marked red."
The independent watchdog the Food Standards Agency has also called for the wider industry to adopt traffic light labelling. Rosemary Hignett, FSA head of nutrition, said the evidence so far pointed to that consumers not running scared of red markers, as feared by critics of the traffic light scheme. She said: "They are using the information to balance their shop. They are not interpreting the red as "don't buy". They are interpreting it as "high in fat, salt or sugar - therefore don't eat too much of this product. So they are using it in a very sensible way, in fact."
Tesco have insisted that they are not seeking any competitive advantage by sticking with GDAs and that it was convinced that its approach was better for working out a balanced diet through the day. It also said traffic light labelling might appear simpler at first, but that the GDA approach was more likely to change customer behaviour, and encourage a switch to healthy products.
However, supporters of both methods of Nutrition Information delivery think that their schemes encourage healthy eating.
Both Tony Kwenns & Chris Marshall are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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