Junk Food Marketing – A Study among Youth

Abstract

The developmental vulnerabilities of children and adolescents have been capitalized by marketers especially those of junk food companies. The adverse    effect of unhealthy or junk food marketing on children including advertising on television, digital media content, sports sponsorship, product packaging and collectible toys have addressed by researchers. Kelly et al. (2015), assessed the evidence for a conceptual "hierarchy of effects" of marketing, to provide an understanding of the relationship between consumer’s exposure to unhealthy food marketing and poor diets and overweight. Similar to this, marketers may use the leverage of social media    influencers to spread their messages (Coates et al., 2019). In India, the rate of obesity and other non-communicable diseases are on the rise among adolescents and it is closely related with the consumption of junk food (Ismail et al., 2016). This causes a big threat to the subsistence of a healthy future generation.