Public health efforts to promote fruit and vegetable intake (FVI) among young children
must compete with pervasive child-targeted food marketing for nutrient-poor products.
1
,
2
Such marketing often features cartoon brand characters (eg, General Mills Trix cereal
rabbit) or cross-promotional tie-ins that link food products with popular media characters
(eg, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Squarepants on packages of Cheez-It snack crackers).
2
,
3
,
4
Brand characters and cross-promotional tie-ins are commonly used advertising techniques
designed to appeal to children emotionally by creating positive associations between
the character and advertised product.
3
,
4
The Institute of Medicine recommends the use of successful advertising strategies
to promote healthy diets to children; this is referred to as countermarketing.
1
Several experimental studies have demonstrated that children’s preferences and consumption
patterns are influenced by and can be improved through branding healthy foods with entertainment
characters.
5
,
6
,
7
Compared with the frequency with which food companies market nutrient-poor foods
using entertainment characters to young children, relatively few interventions have
used these strategies to promote more healthful behaviors, such as increasing FVI,
among children.
8
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Conflict of Interest Disclosure: The authors’ conflict of interest disclosures can be found online with this article on www.jneb.org.
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© 2015 Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
