- Title
- My feed is what I eat? A qualitative study on adolescents' awareness and appreciation of food marketing on social media
- Creator
- van der Bend, Daphne L. M.; Beunke, Tjamke A.; Shrewsbury, Vanessa A.; Bucher, Tamara; van Kleef, Ellen
- Relation
- Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics Vol. 37, Issue 5, p. 1320-1335
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jhn.13336
- Publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Background: Adolescents spend much of their time online and hence are exposed to a lot of non-core (energy-dense, nutrient-poor) social media food marketing (SMFM). This may influence their dietary choices and health. This present study aimed to investigate adolescents’ perceptions towards SMFM; that is, their recognition and appreciation of SMFM. Methods: Semi-structured one-on-one interviews were conducted with Dutch adolescents aged 13–16 years (n = 16), on Skype. Examples of food promotions on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were discussed with adolescents. Results: Adolescents’ reasons for recognising and appreciating or liking SMFM were often related to the level of product integration. Factors that determined participants’ recognition of SMFM included product focus (e.g., brand or product prominence), sponsorship disclosure, type of content (paid, influencer and peer-generated content) and promotional strategy (e.g., discounts, promotional texts, layout). Participants’ appreciation of SMFM was determined by the format of a post (image, video, text, pop-up), trustworthiness of the source (brand, celebrity, friend/peer), type of product promoted (core, non-core) and appearance or layout of a post (e.g., professionalism, appeal). Conclusions: The present study contributes to the ongoing debate on how to increase adolescents’ resilience to commercial messages that promote non-core foods. Adolescents mostly enjoy watching non-core video content from peers or influencers and do not perceive this as food marketing. It is recommended that future studies investigate the effects of earned social media marketing formats (i.e., unpaid peer and influencer endorsements) promoting non-core foods on adolescents’ dietary intake, and how they can be made more critical towards such types of SMFM.
- Subject
- social media; adolescednts; food marketing; awareness; appreciation; qualitative analysis
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1511816
- Identifier
- uon:56555
- Identifier
- ISSN:0952-3871
- Rights
- © 2024 The Author(s). Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Dietetic Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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