Beauty and the Banana: it is a commercial promotion, not a public health campaign

Abstract

This commentary examines the recent Disney-Dole “There’s Beauty in Healthy Living” initiative and the implications of using character licensing to market produce to children. While the idea of promoting healthy foods to children is appealing, it is critical to consider the ethics of marketing to children—and whether, in fact, these commercial promotions deliver when it comes to improving public health.

Introduction

What do bananas, pineapples, and tossed salad have to do with Beauty and the Beast? Nothing. Yet a strategic partnership between The Walt Disney Company and Dole Food Company has united Belle with the banana—ostensibly to help parents encourage their children to make healthier food choices. Their recently launched “There’s Beauty in Healthy Living” initiative, timed to correspond with the March 2017 box office release of Beauty and the Beast, features (among other things) stickers portraying characters from the movie prominently placed on Dole pineapples, bananas, and bagged salads. While this initiative is certainly not the first to put character licensing on produce, it provides a timely opportunity to consider some of the broader implications of such marketing. In this commentary, I argue that such commercial promotions come with unintended consequences that work to commercialize childhood and may even undermine children’s health.

Promotional culture and public health

Without question, encouraging healthy eating is laudable, especially in light of the obesity epidemic and the health benefits of produce. Inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption has been deemed an important risk factor in Canada (Krueger et al., 2017; Azagba & Mesbah, 2011). But is a movie promotion the best route to nutritional awareness? According to Disney and Dole, their “nutrition alliance” will help parents motivate their children and families to make healthier food choices and “help inform and inspire families to live healthier” (Dole and The Walt Disney Company, 2017). Simply put, Disney character licensing is framed as part of the path to collective health.

In announcing their latest initiative, Dole director of communications Bil Goldfield explained Dole’s vision that “the best stories begin with healthy eating” (Dole and The Walt Disney Company, 2017) [emphasis added] and expressed his delight at “working with Disney to make fruits and vegetables more accessible – and fun – for families in North America and around the world” (Dole and The Walt Disney Company, 2017). Yet, it is challenging to take these claims seriously: one might reasonably argue that “the best stories” typically arise from creative genius, not from produce. More importantly, it is unclear how placing Belle on bananas or Lumiere on lettuce will make fruits and vegetables more accessible for families worldwide. And on the “fun” front, it is the sticker that is fun for children, not the salad. Certainly, children may want a Belle or Lumiere sticker, but this does not mean that they will actually consume the lettuce or produce in question. The produce is merely a delivery mechanism for the sticker.

While the “There’s Beauty in Healthy Living” initiative is framed as a strategy for parents to improve family nutrition, examining the actual Disney-Dole promotion reveals little about how it helps to “inform and inspire families to live healthier.” Consider Dole’s “There’s Beauty in Healthy Living” website (www.doleliving.com), which invites consumers to take a 6-question, multiple-choice quiz “inspired by Disney’s live-action adaptation of Disney’s animated classic ‘Beauty and the Beast’.” One question asks: From dancing in an enchanted ballroom to your favorite activities outdoors, which DOLE product is your favorite to snack on when you need a boost of energy?

Answering the six queries (and inputting some personal information) allows me to discover that Belle is my “spirit character” and to receive a personal recipe recommendation, Heart Salad, that requires Dole® Tropical Gold® Pineapple, Dole Spring Mix, and Dole Raspberries and/or Dole Blueberries. It is unclear how identifying my branded snack preference of choice—the one I use to fortify my enchanted ballroom dancing dates—works to improve my nutrition literacy or amplify my desire to feed my family well.

The problem of commercialization, the problem of confusion

The problem with this campaign is that it makes parents complicit in terms of commercializing childhood: it reframes a movie promotion as the path to public health, but does not do much else to make fruits and vegetables desirable in their own right. Placing stickers on produce is a distraction strategy, because the produce is ancillary to the licensed characters. While the Beauty and the Beast sticker booklet that comes with Dole salad provides a salad recipe, its primary function is to collect Dole banana stickers featuring Beauty and the Beast characters. Again, produce simply becomes a delivery mechanism for the sticker and teaches nothing about the food.

This campaign aligns with a current trend in public health-related research, which suggests that brand mascots and media characters can be used “responsibly” to promote healthy foods to children (Kraak & Story, 2016; Hanks et al., 2016; Baldassarre & Campo, 2015). The idea is to “steal a page out of the big brands playbook” (Crawford, 2015), using the same marketing strategies of Big Food to promote produce (Elliott & Carruthers Den Hoed, 2016), and some encouraging studies reveal that cartoon characters may make unprocessed foods more desirable to children (Baldassarre & Campo, 2015; Droog et al., 2011; Wansink et al., 2012). However, such marketing has limits. For example, a 2011 study reported that preschoolers (in an experimental condition) liked sliced bananas in a package featuring a cartoon character more than bananas with no character. However, these children still preferred banana candy—with or without cartoon character packaging—over the sliced banana (Droog et al., 2011). A 2012 study (recently retracted twice by the journal1) similarly reported that children were more likely to select an apple at the school lunchroom if it had an Elmo sticker. However, children still chose cookies far more often than apples (Wansink et al., 2012). As a recent critique of these studies observes:

healthy, unprocessed foods marketed using stickers, fun names, or junk food style appeals prompt children to choose more healthy foods compared to the same healthy foods without the marketing… But marketing does not make healthy foods more appealing than similarly marketed, processed ‘junk’ foods. And so a problem arises… [because] if children only had healthy foods to choose from, then a sticker or junk-food style marketing on these healthy foods would not be necessary in the first place (Elliott & Carruthers Den Hoed, 2016).

Given the problem of childhood obesity and the quantity of highly processed, poorly nutritious foods marketed to children, critiquing Beauty and the Banana might seem overzealous. But while public health advocates may be tempted to adopt the techniques perfected by marketers of highly processed foods, there are problems with this “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach.

The first problem is strategic. One of the key aims of the Healthy Eating Strategy for Canada (launched in October 2016 by Health Canada) is to make the “healthier food choice the easier choice” (Health Canada, 2017). Part of this initiative includes developing restrictions on marketing unhealthy foods and beverages to children. But at present, alongside the Disney-branded produce in the supermarket is a flurry of other Disney-branded products of far less nutritional quality—including (to name just a few) Finding Dory-themed chocolate chip brownies, “fruit flavored” snacks, and “fruity swirls” cereal; Star Wars-branded cookies, “vanilla cake flavor” cereal bars, and marshmallow-filled cereal; and Frozen fruit-flavored snacks. Lest this be dismissed as simply an American issue not relevant to Canada, let me be clear that such marketing campaigns transcend borders. As part of a recent study on the marketing of children’s foods in the Canadian supermarket, I purchased every single Disney-branded product listed above (and many more) in my local superstore, including Beauty and the Beast-branded bagged salad mix. Given the quantity of Disney-branded brownies, cookies, “fruit-flavored” snacks, etc. available, if children are taught to eat based on Disney characters’ recommendations, they will be eating a lot of HFSS (high-fat, -sugar, and/or -sodium) foods along with the occasional Belle banana. Perhaps even more concerning, they will learn that food is just another form of entertainment, not a core component of physical and emotional well-being.

The second issue is about the commercialization of childhood and whether pineapples really need to be the vehicle for movie advertisements. In the province of Quebec, all commercial advertising to children under age 13 has been banned since 1980 under the logic that young children cannot recognize advertising’s persuasive intent: as such, it is deemed manipulative to market to them. A true “public health” campaign would avoid such manipulation. It also would not encourage children’s participation in an endless cycle of consumption where media programs are ads for a range of licensed products, which are in turn ads for media programs.

Conclusion

The Disney-Dole partnership and others like it are commercial promotions, not public health campaigns. Although framed as a strategy to improve children’s health, the campaign is less about educating children (or parents) about the value of unprocessed foods than it is about providing another marketing vehicle for Disney. This matters to Canada because American-style marketing initiatives do not stop at the Canadian border, and popular public health strategies are worth examining. As Health Canada makes efforts toward prohibiting the marketing of unhealthy foods to children, public health advocates should also carefully consider the unintended consequences of using licensed characters and fun appeals to promote produce to children. This is a distraction strategy and a commercial manipulation that does not teach children to value and appreciate healthy food. A true public health campaign would be about the food, not its wrappings.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.