A Natural Choice

Dave Brown's research into consumer trends and food packaging has led him to develop a new way of helping people make quick and informed choices from the plethora of products and product information on retail shelves.

Brown, a communication studies lecturer and veteran of the advertising industry, wanted to use his postgraduate research and industry experience to come up with a simple solution for consumers to gain immediate information about the type of food they might wish to buy.

While working on an MPhil within the Multimodal Discourse Research Centre, he began by looking at the trend towards sustainable consumerism. Research has shown that consumers are bewildered by food labels proclaiming products to be low-fat, lite, sugar-free or reduced-salt.

Brown's research found shoppers are moving away from slick consumer promotion and marketing towards authenticity, transparency, word of mouth, participation, community and other co-operative developments.

He focused on the issue of authenticity and its relation to packaged food, analysing the packaging of two competing brands of a similar type of biscuit sitting next to each other on the supermarket shelf: a brand of Anzac biscuit and another of sugar-free oatmeal cookies.

The comparison between these brands - one with natural ingredients, the other with added artificial ingredients - provided a useful snapshot of the choices being made by a growing group of consumers.

Products live or die according to their ability to appeal to the consuming public. Product popularity depends on consumer perception and product performance (taste, texture, etc). Perception is largely dictated by the information cues communicated in the media, on packaging and on product placement.

Following on from his research, Brown created a label: a circle which features a list of the natural ingredients of the product that is enclosed in an outer circle with the words NOTHING ELSE.

Brown, with the help of a senior AUT graphic design student Afifa Chida, has developed the Nothing Else label into a Nothing Else brand of natural foods which has been launched in partnership with Brand Support Ltd. as a range of healthy snacks at AUT University cafes with profits placed returned to AUT for further development. All product ingredients are screened by Professor Elaine Rush of the Faculty of Health & Environmental Sciences.

Product design, advertising, public relations and marketing students have all played a part in the brand's creation. Plans are in process to distribute the brand internationally.

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