Communicating health messages to young consumers

The purpose of this paper is to establish the effectiveness of a new system for communicating energy balance on food labels. A quantitative approach was taken to enquire into the ability of children and adolescents to understand the marketing communications contained on an existing food label in order to design a new system to rapidly communicate the concept of energy balance to a diverse market in terms that are appropriate and understandable. There is a gap between the perceived ability of children and adolescents to understand food label information relating to the ingestion of a healthy diet and their demonstrable ability to so do. Through a novel combination of existing theoretical approaches, children and adolescents were able to understand energy balance more clearly than before. The qualitative and quantitative samples were small and not representative of the larger sample. Future research needs to be undertaken to improve the reliability of the outcomes. Designing information systems based on the interests of target audiences can enhance their inclusiveness and usefulness. The programme of work undertaken to deliver this paper is highly original. The value of the paper is that it initiates a whole new area of research. It is of value to anyone working in marketing communications, and social marketing in particular. © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited