Evaluating advertising strategies for fruits and vegetables and the implications for obesity in the United States

We investigate consumer response to various types of advertising for fruits and vegetables—a food category which health officials uniformly agree is significantly underconsumed in the United States. Using an adult, non-student subject pool of participants in the experiment, consumers’ response to different broad-based (not used currently in the United States) and commodity-specific (widely used in the United States) advertising campaigns for various fruits and vegetables is empirically measured. We show that broad-based advertising effects far exceed those of the commodity-specific advertising and discuss the implications of the effective fruit and vegetable advertising programs on caloric intake and obesity management policies.