Obesity: An albatross around the neck for Marketing?

I was reading an article on the internet on how large food and beverage companies that earlier sold high fat, unhealthy food and drinks are today jumping on to the health food bandwagon. The article criticized companies for creating the problem of obesity and profiting from it and now trying to introduce diet products and are profiting from it again.

Reading this article (and many more with similar content) made me wonder- can the entire blame for Obesity be placed squarely on the shoulders of the marketing companies in the corporate world? Have we as a population lost our capability to judge and decide the best course of action for ourselves? Are we so influenced by TV commercials, print ads and other media that we can’t look into the mirror and figure out where we are headed?

This is not to say that marketing does not influence us as a species. Being a marketer myself, I believe it influences us in ways that sometimes are not even apparent. However, while reading a slew of articles on the creation of demand for unhealthy snacks, aerated beverages and sweet delicacies, then creating diet versions of the very same products, I began to wonder.

Marketing’s very premise is need identification. Once the need is identified, a product suitable for that need is created. Then a demand for the product is created, so on and so forth. Every company that invests in this process identifies the need first. The first snack in the world was not created by a corporate giant. Murukkus, Jalabies, Paneer Soda, Samosas, Pastas and Pizzas existed way before they became commercially big. Neither were cakes, pastries, sodas and chips. What corporates did was to identify that people enjoyed snacking on these foods and began commercial production, hence making their availability easier and cutting down the effort involved in making any of these items.

The culpability for consumption can only be placed in the fact that marketers identified ways and means to convince us of their ‘benefits’ – tangible or otherwise. For aerated drinks it was about quenching a thirst with a supremely sweet liquid and for food items it was about satisfying a latent need to ‘munch’ or satisfy a sweet tooth.

However, at the end of the day the fact was that these items became easier to purchase, tasted great and satisfied some latent need in us all. We craved for a refreshing change and let ourselves slip in the process. Every bag of chips, can of soda and pack of desserts comes with a declaration of the calorie per serving. Though this may not have always been the case, it has been a mandatory requirement for at least the last 15 years and in some countries since 1990s. Yet obesity numbers continue to rise.

Yet another angle to this is that these very same companies offer ‘diet’ products. At some level, I find it hard to believe that these companies hatched a grand scheme 30 – 40 years ago to create obese people and now plan to solve it through ‘fat-free’ products. The ‘diet products’ bandwagon basically carries opportunists. When the tide is turning towards healthy eating, these companies are trying to ride the wave. Yet nothing stops us from avoiding these products and settling for homemade snacks or drinks.  

Is it really fair to blame the corporates and marketing companies completely? While the blame for many of the world’s challenges today such as environmental degradation, habitat destruction etc. can be pinned on the corporates, can we really blame the corporates entirely for obesity? Aren’t personal things like weight, looks and lifestyles really in our hands? There is no one pointing a gun at our heads forcing us to purchase products that we know harm us. So to me, blaming corporates completely seems like a shift of responsibility off from our shoulders on to theirs allowing for escapism. After all, we hold our own purse strings.