Impact of Advertising Campaigns on Food Waste

Alice Boucher   

Would successful advertising and advertising campaigns see a decrease in food waste?    

Abstract

This dissertation proposal plans to investigate and explore the successful-ness of advertising within social and economical issues as well as environmental. Posing the question ” Would successful advertising see a decrease in food waste?”

Aims

In one year alone, 50% of food thrown away comes from households in the UK, this accumulates to approximately 7 million tonnes whilst half of this is perfectly edible, this is becoming a vast social, cultural and ethical issues worldwide resulting in families wasting money as well as food, people being unable to afford to eat and also food bank crisis’, therefore the main focus and aims of this dissertation will be the investigation, exploration and measurement of successful advertising and what impact advertising campaigns have on social, economic and environtmental problems, with food waste as the subject.

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To measure successful advertising the investigation in this dissertation will be in the form of creating an advertising campaign to raise public awareness and also create change. This will be produced in a form of photography and posters to create reactions and statistics – doing so will also practice the fundamentals of successful advertising and if it works, how it does so.

The proposed research topic of this dissertation is something considered of vast importance and discussed frequently within governing bodies, the reason for this is because not only is it a problem effecting the UK put the rest of the world to, as mentioned above it creates issues in social practice, economics and the environment, this is only going to get worse therefore this dissertation propose to inform people of how this could be changed.

Literature Review

For this proposed dissertation there are many different readings to be considered, below these are to split up into three different sections, Each of these concludes different aspects of this proposal outlining topics such as, Advertising Campaign technique and strategies, the dissertation subject, including facts and figures of food waste.

Advertising, Marketing and campaign strategy and Techniques

• The Advertising Concept Book (Barry, 2008)

This book includes different advertising techniques and design concepts enabling users to not only understand design concepts behind advertising, but also how to produce designs and advertisements themselves.

Written by Pete Barry and Published by Thames & Hudson, the key chapters to focus on and read into to move forwards with this dissertation are chapters 02 The Strategy – outlining the thinking before the production of a design or advertisement, 04 The Campaign – How and Why to produce a campaign and 09 Interactive – This Negotiates how to incorporate an audience and response. This book will come in useful when producing a campaign in the final dissertation.

• The Fundamentals Of Creative Advertising (Burtenshaw, Mahon, & Barfoot, 2006)

Here Another book to be aware of again focus’ on practical steps into advertising with considerations of the fundamentals of advertising,  written by a combination of academics, Ken Burtenshaw, Nik Mahon and Caroline Barfoot. Chapters 1: The Media Options pg.12-64, gives an insight into different outlets for advertising and where to publish, this is especially helpful for production purposes on where and how to advertise and run a campaign and

Chapter 2: publishes the debate on campaign planning and strategy pg.68-78, this will be useful when considering, clients, agency work and commissions, market research and campaign planning, for example a topic in the campaign cycle is ‘where do we want to be’ this may be subject to discussion because depending on business, commission and client needs the outcome will differ, in comparison to this The Advertising Concept Book (Barry, 2008) pg.92 states that the two key compartments to understand is the origin of ideas and the function of the tagline with no mention of the target market.

• Ogilvy on Advertising (Ogilvy, 1995)

The final literature recommendation for the advertising section on this dissertation is Ogilvy on advertising, opposed to the other two reading recommendations above, this literature is an introduction into the industry from and already existing advertising practitioner. The many passages in this book debate how modern advertising is generally no different to historic advertising and that the only major change was the invention of the TV “One change that can be called major: television has emerged as the most potent medium for selling most products” to follow this statement up Ogilvy added “Meanwhile, most of the advertising techniques which worked when I wrote confessions of an advertising man still work today, consumers still by products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from sufferent and social status etc. Again in comparison to the other literature included, Ogilvy Addresses and Boasts how simple advertising still works efficiently and also advertising which Un-Sells products, this is relevant because you gain an insight into the bigger picture of advertising and campaigns rather than just the positives and it also comes from someone who made it in the industry.

Reading on the topic of Food Waste

The literature below includes reading on the dissertation proposal subject

• Carbon Footprint of Supermarket Food Waste (Scholz, Eriksson, and Strid,

2015)

Written in 2015 by Eriksson Mattias, this article from an existing dissertation discusses alternate topics surrounding food waste, in this instance the subject is carbon footprint of supermarket food waste. The reason that this article is relevant to this dissertation proposal is because it is a very current article so any facts and figures surrounding the subject should be similar and also it gives a great insight into the subject such as defining food waste quoted here “Food waste is any food, and inedible parts of food, removed from the food supply chain to be recovered or disposed of (including composted, crops ploughed in/not harvested, anaerobic digestion, bio-energy production, co-generation, incineration, disposal to sewer, landfill or discarded to sea)”.

When producing research for this subject I also came across a significant amount of websites and other content to be used for reading, these all include information on,

• How social practices cause food waste generation (Leung, 2013)
• Consumer attitudes to food waste and food packaging (AlexWork, 2013)
• Identifying the barriers and opportunities for food waste prevention. (Lazell, 2014)

Research Methodology

When producing the official dissertation, the main research question will be whether an advertising would work successfully and if so, how? Producing this with the objective of a creating an advertising campaign addressing an environmental and economic issue of food waste.