Can social media be a tool for reducing consumers’ food waste? A behaviour change experiment by a UK retailer

By W. Young, S. Russell, Cheryl A. Robinson, Ralph Barkemeyer. 2017

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports on a landmark study to field-test the influence of a large retailer to change the behaviour of its millions of customers. Previous studies have suggested that social media interaction can influence behaviour. This study implemented three interventions with messages to encourage reductions in food waste. The first was a social influence intervention that used the retailer’s Facebook pages to encourage its customers to interact. Two additional information interventions were used as a comparison through the retailer’s print/digital magazine and e-newsletter. Three national surveys tracked customers’ self-reported food waste one month before as well as two weeks after and five months after the interventions. The control group included those who said they had not seen any of the interventions. The results were surprising and significant in that the social media and e-newsletter interventions as well as the control group all showed significant reductions in self-reported food waste by customers over the study period. Hence in this field study, social media does not seem to replicate enough of the effect of ‘face-to-face’ interaction shown in previous studies to change behaviour above other factors in the shopping setting. This may indicate that results from laboratory-based studies may over-emphasise the effect of social media interventions.

Subfields: Food Science, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db49a94aceb187448065bc62ed4f60b6f1d23006

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Food Science

1. S. Russell
2. Cheryl A. Robinson
3. Karin Schanes
4. Burcu Gözet
5. David M. Evans
6. Karin Dobernig

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Kerrie L. Unsworth
2. C. Young
3. Cheryl A. Robinson
4. S. Russell

In Marketing

1. Karin Schanes
2. S. Russell
3. Cheryl A. Robinson
4. C. Young
5. Kerrie L. Unsworth

Citations in the corpus

• Food waste matters - A systematic review of household food waste practices and their policy implications (2018, background): “Various retailers have already started initiatives to trigger less wasteful consumer behaviour (Young et al., 2017).”
• Bringing habits and emotions into food waste behaviour (2017, methodology): “During the course of the research an intervention study was also being conducted (Young et al., 2017).”
• Review: Consumption-stage food waste reduction interventions – What works and how to design better interventions (2019, background): “Enewsletter use resulted in 19% reduction in self-reported food waste in the home (Young et al., 2017).”