SAGE ADVICE: Newspapers Can Win in Heavyweight Food Fight

By: Leo J. Shapiro, Erik Shapiro and Steve Yahn Nestle?s $600 million purchase of Jenny Craig ratchets up the competition for market share of foods designed to help people lose and not gain weight and creates opportunities for the sale of newspaper advertising. The market for weight-control products is broad. In July 2006, our Leo J. Shapiro and Associates national survey of 450 U.S. consumers found more than four in 10 (43%) say it is likely they will slash the number of calories they eat.

Upon learning that Nestle?s owns Jenny Craig, a greater number of respondents say they are less (25%) than say they more (8%) interested in buying from Jenny Craig.

This negative reaction to Nestle?s ownership moderates but is not totally eliminated when consumers learn that Nestle?s has engineered proprietary food ingredients that alter absorption of sugar, reduce fatty acids in the blood, and step up burning of carbohydrates.

But even after they hear about these new ingredients, more consumers say they are less (24%) than say they are more (20%) interested in buying Jenny Craig products.

Jenny Craig?s marketing challenge is tremendous. It needs to promote its food ingredients without triggering the negative effect that comes when consumers hear they are owned by Nestle?s. Jenny Craig then needs to find media to carry those messages that consumers regard as trustworthy sources of news about healthful food.

It is cold comfort to newspapers that consumers give television a lower rating for trustworthiness (4.63) as a source of information about food than they give to newspapers (4.90). Friends, rated at 5.08, are not seen as being much more trustworthy than television or newspapers.

So, where do consumers turn for reliable information about the healthfulness of food? The Internet -- a logical and convenient alternatives -- is rated 5.71 for being trustworthy. Doctors in general rated 6.53. And a ?big name? clinic like Mayo -- with a trustworthy rating of 7.41 -- wins over doctors in general.

On the horizon, ready to serve consumers? hunger for information, are the mini-clinics being newly located in food stores. Here food companies may be able to bypass the mass media and reach consumers with authoritative statements about the healthfulness of their products in the stores where consumers shop for food.

The Bottom Line

Newspapers and Nestle?s are both confronted by a major marketing challenge. Consumers, faced with the choice of buying weight-control foods compounded by scientists, will be searching for sources of information that provide trustworthy information about food healthfulness. Advertisers will be seeking media that consumers trust.

In contending for a share of weight-control food product advertising, newspapers need to face up to and do something to correct their relatively low ratings by consumers as a source of information about healthfulness in foods.

One step in the right direction for newspapers is to establish better and more frequent ties with medical authorities?not unlike the manner in which most major television networks have an array of medical experts on duty. Many newspapers have created credible connections to the medical community beyond the regular sources their reporters and columnists have built up.

But in both advertorials and standard editorial coverage more has to be done to bolster newspapers? standing as unbiased authorities in the weight-loss area. Especially, perhaps, because of what readers perceive as an over-abundance of advertisements and even editorial coverage featured by newspapers that have to do with foods seen as tasty or delicious though not necessarily healthful.