Association for Behavior Analysis International

The obesity epidemic has been discussed at different levels—from research to health professional policies to general media interest. Arranging the environmental conditions so that people make better decisions, therefore, has the utmost potential for successful obesity prevention. In order to develop successful interventions, it is of vital importance to understand how environmental conditions influence consumers' food choices, and how they are constantly being altered through new marketing settings and stimuli. The ongoing digitalization transforms retail grocery to omni-channel retailing where "the distinctions between physical and online will vanish, turning the world into a showroom without walls" In this symposium, we will discuss recent advancements and possibilities within consumer behavior analysis in order to address challenges related to health. The symposium starts with a theoretical paper that discusses a range of topics relevant to the application of operant behavioral economics to health. In the second paper, the authors will focus on consumer behaviour related to smart carts and key environmental touch points throughout the consumer journey in a real-life grocery store. The third paper explores the opportunities for behavior analysts to examine the interrelationships of multiple variables and socially important choice settings, and to promote desired behaviors. The final paper examines the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) based stimuli, and how it can influence consumers in the grocery choice situation.

For consumer behavior analysis the store is the main laboratory and the future analysis lies in smart shelves, pricing and carts. The talk provides an introduction to a research program aimed at improving research practices in this laboratory, particularly emphasizing the importance of new behavioural data and experimental opportunities stemming from video surveillance, retail analytics, and the Internet of things. This talk presents a research strategy studying consumer behavior related to smart carts and key environmental touch points throughout the customer journey in a real-life grocery store in Norway. We show how shopping carts are not only used as an aid for the shopper's behaviour, as a device that increases sales, but how their selection and use can be further developed and tested as triggers and reinforcement in relations to healthy food choices.

The impact of complex environmental factors on consumer choices and preferences can be analyzed through the prism of consumer behavior analysis, whereas variations of marketing attributes and their impact on choice can be measured using conjoint analysis. Considering the case of the constantly growing online food selections, we discuss choice-based conjoint analysis and explore the opportunities for behavior analysts to examine the interrelationships of multiple variables and socially important choice settings, and to promote desired behaviors. We show a few examples of using trade-off analyses in online food retail to understand consumer behavior with respect to healthy food items. As demonstrated in these examples based on our own pilot research, conjoint analysis can be used for complex behavior—that which is not amenable directly to an experimental analysis—or as an efficient initial step before moving into further experiments or analyses using biometrics (e.g., eye-tracking) or web analytics conducted in different settings such as e-commerce, e-mail, social media, or on mobile platforms. This paper summarizes the personalized, data driven economic analysis that is possible with a choice-based conjoint analysis.

Internet of Things (IoT) presents an opportunity for retailers to develop an environment that makes physical things such as mobile phone, shopping basket, store shelves, digital display, and, even the product itself smart, allowing real-time interaction with customers in the physical store. The aim of this study is to expand understanding of how IoT can influence consumers in the grocery choice situation. To investigate the impact of IoT-related stimuli, we arranged a conjoint experiment in which participants purchased healthy food in a grocery store using a smart phone app. The results show that, relative to static information, IoT based information related to price, expiry date, quality indicator, and offer was the most salient stimulus related to tendency to interact with the smart phone app, and, the most salient stimulus related to likelihood to buy based on information from the smartphone app. These findings contribute both to researchers and managers within grocery retailing who want to understand how IoT technology influence consumers' in the grocery choice situation.