Demand Generation Alliance

In summer of 2020, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development FReSH Project (WBCSD), and the Global Business School Network (GBSN) developed the Demand Generation Alliance (DGA), a cross-sectoral initiative to shift societal preferences towards more sustainable and nutritious foods.  The DGA was formed after the organizations noticed that they could emphasize the importance of consumer demand for food system change.

Efforts to change consumer choices are critically important but are unlikely to be enough to shift consumer demand. The DGA believes that changing consumers’ underlying preferences is a critical lever to shift demand to nutritious and sustainable foods. This initiative will support multi-stakeholder, cross-sector collaborations to influence consumer preferences for nutritious and sustainable foods by deploying social and cultural changes.  Stakeholders will not only include consumers, but academics, private companies, public organizations, and event governments.

Purpose

The Demand Generation Alliance(DGA) has been established with a single vision: Nutritious and sustainable food, the preferred consumer choice.

Our mission is to drive societal preferences towards nutritious and sustainable food by leveraging social and cultural strategies.

Why social and cultural strategies?

Society and culture underpin and greatly shape consumer food choices: they set up lifelong preferences and habits, which are often hard to break, and they influence what is acceptable and appropriate.Social strategies can address the impact of social factors on food preferences, such as dinning experiences, social norms, peer networks, social status and social identities. Cultural strategies address moral aspects, values, symbols, narratives, and technologies and their impact on our food habits, cooking practices, and cuisine. Social and cultural strategies are deployed at society level.

Global Priority Actions to drive consumer demand	How Social and Cultural strategies can support
To support consumer education, awareness and inform choice: – Labelling – Food based dietary guidelines(FBDG)	Today the ‘informed choice’ paradigm dominates the consumer education sector. Food-based dietary guidelines(FBDG) are a tool for consumer education. To influence purchases, labelling initiatives are used to sign-post to the consumer what is in their food or how it has been produced. To support consumer choice efforts, one must tap into a broader collective organized around values. Food cultures(also known as food movements), such as the Slow food or Organic food movements, are ways to organize that collective, because they are characterized by values for how one grows, buys, prepares and consumes food. Food cultures can give labels or FBDG new meanings, a symbol of a way of life and something one stands for.
To improve purchasing power or provide income support: – Cash transfer programmes – Food banks, food vouchers	Foods can express social status. In many countries, some nutritious and sustainable foods (legumes, some types of vegetables, nuts, and insects) are not usually aspirational and are ‘left behind’ as incomes rise. A cultural strategy might use media to create new symbols and narratives in film, tv, and award shows. A social strategy might drive new social expectations (norms)from those with social status (celebrities, upper class). Together, these strategies would aim to change the desirability and the buying and eating of ‘low-status’ foods.
To address the food environment: – Nudges – Product marketing	Marketing at point of sale is influenced largely by consumer perceptions and consumer attention. Current perception challenges include ‘nutritious/healthy is not tasty ’or ‘eating vegan/vegetarian is boring’. Several cultural and social strategies could address these misperceptions, such as: – Celebrating traditional cuisines or developing new ones (e.g., Nordic Diet). These are often led by Chefs in use of traditional or new cuisine and the restaurant (eating-out) experience – Consumption vocabularies to evoke taste/pleasure – Media strategy showing the eating experience is as enjoyable in film, tv shows, adverts-Social norm interventions to change youths’ perceptions and social expectations about what enjoyable eating experiences ought to be(e.g., the coolness of eating vegetables). Youth make memories and associations with these foods, and as such are likely to be more attentive to nudges and product marketing in the food environment.