McDonald’s May Be Their Kind of Place–With or Without Advertising Gail Heriot

The front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune carried an interesting AP story entitled “Kids in Taste Test Study Prefer Food in McDonald’s Wrapper: Research Shows Effect of Marketing on Youngsters.”  The story reports that a Stanford University researcher had youngsters sample identical McDonald’s food in name-brand and unmarked wrappers.  Most children (though not all) preferred the food in McDonald’s wrappers.

For some reason, the researcher attributes this to the power of advertising, and the reporter seems to go along with him on that.  The article repeatedly suggests that this study improves the case for the regulation of advertising aimed at children :

Study author Dr. Tom Robinson said the children’s perception of taste was physically altered by the branding. Robinson, a Stanford University researcher, said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising. …

The study likely will stir more debate over the movement to restrict ads to children. It comes less than a month after 11 major food and drink companies, including McDonald’s, announced new curbs on marketing to children younger than 12. …

Dr. Victor Strasburger, an author of an American Academy of Pediatrics policy urging limits on marketing to children, said the study shows that too little is being done.

It’s an amazing study, and it’s very sad, Strasburger said. Advertisers have tried to do exactly what this study is talking about to brand younger and younger children, to instill in them an almost obsessional desire for a particular brand-name product.

But the study shows that the effect was strongest for french fries (77% “preferred what they thought were the McDonald’s french fries and 13% preferred the plainly-wrapped ones).  It was very weak for hamburgers. Only 29% preferred the hamburger in the McDonald’s package, 22% preferred the unmarked one, and the rest (correctly) tasted no difference.  It sounds like advertising is not really what’s at play here.  As far as I know, McDonald’s doesn’t advertise its french fries more than it does its hamburgers.

But even if the hamburgers had come out the same way as the french fries, I’m not sure I would buy the premise–that the results would be different in the absense of advertising.  “Advertising” in the sense of radio, television and print ads (or even brightly-colored signs at the restaurant itself) may have nothing to do with it.  Maybe it’s simpler than that.  Children who have eaten McDonald’s food before (and almost all these children had) tend to like it.  They’d like it even if it were never advertised.  The only “advertising” that matters here may be the simple trademark, which helps them to identify the hamburger in the McDonald’s wrapper as being “like” the hamburger that they’ve had before.  They’ve always liked the food they get from McDonald’s and they’ve come to expect that food from McDonald’s will be good.  When presented with food in a McDonald’s wrapper, they make the rational prediction that they will like it.  Maybe their little brains even play a trick on them, by causing them to believe that the food in a McDonald’s wrapper actually tastes better than the food in the plain wrapper.  But it’s not the advertising that is causing all this; it their actual experience with the product.

Kids are notoriously picky eaters.  That means they’re real conservatives.  And that’s a blessing. If they were inclined to culinary experiments, they’d be feasting on roadkill and furnace oil.  Since they don’t have the knowledge to make good judgments about foods, parents should be happy (or at least not unhappy) that they turn up their noses so easily.  A mysterious plain wrapper may bring out the food fears of children.  It’s hardly surprsing to find that they think that familiarly-wrapped hamburger tastes better even when it can’t possibly.

What would happen, for example, if you asked 100 children who watch television, but who have never tasted McDonald’s food, the same question?  And what would happen if the unmarked wrapper were marked with a similar brand they have had experience with but which is not advertised?  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they prefer the more familiar brand.

What would happen if you asked children for the name of their favorite brands of candy and then picked their favorite unadvertised brand and performed the same trick?  My guess is that you’d get a similar result even in the absence of advertising.

Alternatively, what if you were to ask 100 children if they liked their mother’s cooking?  (Most will probably say yes, but if some don’t, leave them out of the study.)  Then give them two hamburgers, both prepared by their mother, and tell them one was made by their mother and the other was prepared by Mrs. Murphy, a fourth-grade teacher from Des Moines.  My guess is that the children would like “Mom’s” hamburger better–even if you guarantee them that Mom won’t find out whose hamburger they picked.