Lifestyle characteristics and health promotion

Maike Bruhn, Kiel

There is strong and consistent evidence that the intake of fruit and vegetables reduces the risks of major chronic diseases. Many countries have issued recommendations for increasing the population’s intakes .

In many cases, however, people often do not follow these recommendations. Psychographic segmentation of the population is an important tool to increase the effectiveness of health promotion programmes. In order to identify different consumer segments a consumer survey was performed in Kiel, a town in northern Germany (n = 257).

The food-related lifestyle approach – developed by the Centre for research on customer relations in the food sector in Denmark (MAPP) – was applied to segment German food consumers according to their attitudes towards purchase, preparation and consumption of food products. A hierarchical cluster analysis according to Ward was employed for segmentation.

Six distinct food-related lifestyle segments were identified: non-involved food consumers (22 %), enthusiastic food consumers (20 %), adventurous food consumers (19%), interested food consumers (18 %), conservative food consumers (12 %) and extremely non-involved food consumers (9 %). The food-related lifestyle approach is the method of choice for analyzing different consumption patterns. Our results have shown that fruit and vegetable consumption differs among these segments. Enthusiastic food consumers have the highest, and extremely non-involved food consumers the lowest consumption frequency. In order to increase the intake of fruit and vegetables the different types of consumers have to be addressed in different ways.

For enthusiastic food consumers an informative type of communication seems to be appropriate, because this segment is interested in getting information. Extremely non-involved consumers usually are quite opposite; they are not interested in food at all. Accordingly, chances of direct communication are low. However, these consumers could, for reason of entertainment, pay attention to secondary aspects of health promotion such as a picture in a print ad or actors in a TV commercial.

Keywords: Food-related lifestyle, segmentation, fruit and vegetable consumption, health promotion.

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