How do you make scientific findings about sustainable food actually land with consumers? From Period 2, students in the course Marketing II (Digital Marketing) will take on that question for TealHelix, a European research project in which Michail Kokkoris, Associate Professor of Marketing at VU Amsterdam, leads the work on behavioural interventions.
TealHelix is a Horizon Europe project, now halfway through its four years. It studies how consumers make sustainable food choices, and how information such as food labels can support those choices. VU Amsterdam leads the part of the project that looks at how to encourage more sustainable consumption.
The first two years produced new insights into how people understand sustainability information, and how personal motivations and social context shape what ends up in their shopping basket. The project also published its first scientific article, introducing a scale that measures how important consumers consider food sustainability to be. In September, Kokkoris presented preliminary findings from the VU Amsterdam research at Northeastern University in Boston.
Students do their own audience research
Student teams will investigate how digital marketing can widen the reach and impact of the project’s findings. They start with the audience: what do people find relevant or confusing, which sources do they trust, and what makes them want to share something?
The teams then work on participatory dissemination. Instead of communicating research results to an audience, they develop the communication together with that audience. They build digital strategies and creative concepts, take those back to the people they are meant for, and use the feedback to sharpen their recommendations.
“Encouraging more sustainable food consumption is a major challenge, and marketing can play an important role in addressing it,” says Kokkoris. “Students will learn to understand different audiences and tailor scientific messages to their needs, while working on a real European research project.”
The most promising ideas will feed into TealHelix’s own communication in the second half of the project.
Read more about the project’s first two years in the full TealHelix press release, or visit tealhelix.eu.
TealHelix receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.