Attitudes Towards Television Commercials with an Underlying Health Claim

Sammanfattning: Health and eating healthy has become increasingly popular during the recent decades. On television, countless numbers of food commercials claim their products to be healthy, and fit good looking people propagate for the benefits of the products. At the same time, there are many studies showing these marketing messages to be highly misleading. Consequently, a great extent of existing research within this field treats the subject of consumers, children in particular, and television in relation to eating habits. However, in this study, we are not interested in confirming these facts; instead we focus on the attitudes that consumers have towards these marketing messages with underlying health claims shown in TV commercials. Today, many new types of communication channels exist, nevertheless, watching TV is an increasing activity, especially among young consumers. It was found that research including young adult consumers was scarce, why the segment of university students belonging to the generation Y was chosen for this study. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the attitudes that Swedish generation Y university students have towards TV commercials with underlying health claims. The aim is also to investigate why these consumers react to the commercials the way they do. In this thesis both a quantitative and a qualitative method was used, where the qualitative method was the most dominating. Thus, it can be considered a mixed methods approach. However, the quantitative part is dominating. For the empirical study we conducted tests where a number of persons in focus groups were exposed to different TV commercials, all with an underlying health claim. The respondents answered an in-group questionnaire and thereafter during the group discussion they were asked to describe their reactions to the TV commercials. Finally, the respondents were also asked what factors they believed important to them when they consider buying a product. The Swedish generation Y university students presented a number of attitudes towards the chosen television commercials. The students did recognize the underlying health claims and furthermore indicated other factors noticed within the commercials. Also, we could see that factors such as memory, unconscious influence as well as positioning of thecommercials had an influence on the attitudes. The results also specified that factors influencing these consumers in their purchasing decision, except the TV commercial itself, were; whether they had bought the product before, what family and friends used and recommended, as well as price and quality. The above features also had an influence on how these consumers reacted to the marketing messages. The study shows that the model of the emotional process by Holbrook and O‟Shaughnessy (1984) could be followed. We furthermore built on Bagozzi et al.‟s (1999) classification of advertisements by introducing the multi message ad. To conclude, it can be stated that factors influencing these consumers‟ attitudes of TV commercials with underlying health claims had different aspects and explanations, although common patterns could be seen.