بازاریابی موبایل برای کودکان: تجزیه و تحلیل محتوا از برنامه های شرکت های مواد غذایی و نوشیدنی  Mobile marketing to children: a content analysis of food and beverage company apps

To date, scholars at the Rudd Center for Food Policy are the only researchers to have studied food-branded apps, providing brief descriptions of apps promoting fast foods and sugary beverages.1,2 In their most recent report on fast food marketing, they identified two child-directed apps, only one of which featured food.2 They also recently identified 13 childoriented sugary beverage apps: 9 games, 1 eBook, 1 app promoting a contest, 1 app linked to a real-world event, and 1 art app.1 However, they did not report on apps associated with other food categories, such as cereals or candy, some of the products most commonly marketed to children on other media platforms.3 They also did not quantify the saturation of engaging or interactive features (e.g. the prevalence of branded characters) within apps, features which may lead to marketing’s effectiveness,3 nor did they analyze the healthfulness of foods these apps promoted. This study aimed to expand understanding of food marketing to children by examining apps produced by America’s leading food manufacturers across product categories. In the general children’s app marketplace outside the context of food marketing, games and art-themed activities are popular.6 Such apps include dynamic, potentially appealing features such as branded characters and music.6 Food marketers may be emulating these existing apps. We thus sought to characterize the prevalence of food-branded apps, identify common types of content within them (e.g. games), tally frequently employed branding and interactivity features, and explore the healthfulness of promoted foods. To identify a sample of apps, we consulted food company sales reports and created a stratified sampling frame of food brands (~700) produced by 36 top-selling American manufacturers. In November 2013, we selected 153 brands from this sampling frame and searched the App Store for iOS apps promoting each. We focused on iOS offerings because preliminary searches identified only one Android food app not available for iOS, which did not appear to target children. This search only yielded 36 apps. To increase our sample, we also searched for apps promoting multiple brands or the company in general, locating an additional 19 apps (N ¼ 55).