Cereal offenders

Supermarkets are a distinctive human experience. Where else can you get to serve yourself without assistance and then get to stand in line while you wait to pay for your goods? There are surely no other opportunities either to listen to muzak while strolling along linoleum in a delicate minuet of Grocery hockey with your fellow shoppers. All the while of course you are being bombarded with marketing messages from posters and labels. Even your children are the objects of the marketers catch-cries and they don’t even need to be able to read to be affected as new research has shown.

The new study involved researchers analysing cereal boxes. The study was done in New York and Connecticut in the US and involved more than 10 stores where 65 types of cereal and the boxes they come in were analysed.

The results showed that cereals marketed to children involved characters on the box with their gaze directed downward at an angle of 9.67 degrees on average. This was calculated when viewing the box from 120cm distance, the average distance people are from the goods in a supermarket. By contrast, the cereals marketed to adults featured characters that were looking straight ahead, or actually at an average 0.43 degree upward angle. Children’s cereals also tended to be placed on the bottom two shelves at a height of 50cm while adult cereals were on the top two shelves at a height of 137cm.

Such uniformity in gaze suggests that marketers believe eye contact has an affect on cereal purchases. Given the nutritional waste land that exists inside many cereal boxes, if you want to take your children shopping in future, perhaps it might be wise to invest in some eye patches.