Of course, companies know what DiSanti explained—what people see is what they buy—which is why commercial industries use the architecture of the shelves to frame up the products they hope to move, even if those products pose complications to the good health of their customers. This is why, in 2011, the U.S. tobacco industry paid retailers $7 billion, representing over 80 percent of the advertising budget, to display their products in highly trafficked areas in stores: near the cash registers and in eye-level displays. This product-placement strategy also worked for carbonated-drink companies. In a one-year analysis of sales in a major supermarket in northern England, researchers found that getting soda into aisle-end displays increased annual sales by over 50 percent. This kind of increase was matched only by “buy three, get one free” promotions.
Of course, regulators know all this too. And some governments have taken counteraction. For instance, by 2009, most states in Australia had banned tobacco displays near checkout counters. This legal shift preceded a downward trend in youth smoking rates. Among Australian youths ages twelve to twenty-four who had never smoked before, the odds that any one of them would become a smoker dropped by 27 percent after the government banned advertising near the registers in stores.
Coming Eye-to-Eye with Good Health
Frames and their impact on choices are not all bad. Our visual environment—what appears both within and outside our frame—also nudges us toward decisions that improve our health and well-being.
In 2010, Anne Thorndike and her research colleagues turned the cafeteria at Massachusetts General Hospital into a testing ground. They examined how visual frames affect the choices we make at mealtime. The first phase of the study was covertly deployed. Three months before anyone knew it, cafeteria cash registers began to identify and record the types of foods purchased by people visiting the cafeteria. Then the researchers started tagging foods with different-color labels. Green-tagged items, like fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins, were the healthiest. Yellow tags were placed on less healthy items, and red tags on foods with little or no nutritional value. A few months later, the researchers rearranged the shelves in the cafeteria. Green-tagged foods were moved to shelves at eye level. Yellow- and red-tagged foods went higher or lower, out of an easy line of sight.
When the team analyzed the purchase patterns twenty-four months after these changes, they found something astonishing. Overall, purchases of the green-tagged items—the healthiest options—had increased by 12 percent compared to the first covert testing period. Beyond that, purchases of red-tagged unhealthy items had dropped by 20 percent. The most frequently avoided item became the sugar-sweetened beverages. Purchases of these non-nutritional drinks dropped by 39 percent. Placing the yellow- and red-tagged foods on harder-to-see shelves gave a visual warning to consumers and helped to keep those products on the shelves.
Google discovered this same phenomenon through slightly different means. Not long ago, it had a big problem. Just as its employee roster was growing, so too were employees’ waistlines. Employees at Google have access to many amenities; perhaps the most talked about is the free food. The company has its own fleet of food trucks, creating sinfully delicious dishes like burrata salad with stone fruit, or naan with smoked salmon and dill cream. Inside the office walls, cafeterias offer seared diver scallops with Parmesan, squid-ink rice, and maitake mushrooms followed by banana cheesecake. And the snacks in between the usual three meals are abundant enough to count as a fourth. The New York office, for instance, had beverage stations all over each floor, and these stations were all stocked with treats like M&M’s, chocolates, nuts, cookies, granola bars, chips, pretzels, and beer. Getting a bottle of water, at the time of this study, generally wasn’t a calorie-free experience, because employees inevitably took a handful of something sweet or salty when popping in for a drink.
The problem was that these offerings were too tempting, in part because they were always in view. So Google tried to change the allure of the unhealthy options by altering what fell into employees’ visual frame. At the snack stations in New York, the pantry crew stocked the eye-level shelves with bottled water, and put sugary sodas at the bottom of the refrigerators or behind frosted glass. By comparing what needed restocking now to what needed restocking before, the pantry attendants reported that employees were 50 percent more likely to snag a bottle of water than before. And to choose a sugary drink slightly less often.
The pantry attendants also made the unhealthy snacks harder to see, obscuring the line of sight employees had on them. They stored the chocolates in opaque containers while putting healthier options, like dried figs and pistachios, in transparent glass jars. Google’s New York employees alone consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&M’s over the next seven weeks. By placing the temptations outside the visual frame, Google had, in effect, decoupled the link between focused attention and action.
Knowledge that a visual frame can inspire healthier choices is not unique to Google, and the impact on diets is not special to the tech community. In Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, for instance, researchers, nonprofit health advocates, and supermarket managers have banded together to try to nudge healthier choices among shoppers in low-income neighborhoods who aren’t working in companies that prepare their meals. These influencers brainstormed the creation of a visual environment that would frame up healthier choices and, in particular, inspire sales of water. To craft their visual landscapes, they used two marketing techniques: cross-promotion and prime placement. In the dead space within the soda aisles, store employees stacked up bottled water. In the coolers at the ends of the checkout lanes, water now appeared on the top shelf, easy to see and access, while sodas were moved lower down and out of sight from most adults.
To know whether the placement of water made a difference, the research team needed a group of stores to compare sales against. They selected stores that were in the same neighborhoods and attracted the same clientele. Within these stores, managers were not given any special instructions on how to display their bottled water. They just used the techniques that they always had and that their customers were accustomed to.
Then managers took note of how many cases of water they sold. During the time they were tracking them, water sales decreased by 17 percent in the stores that stocked their aisles and their coolers as they wished. But the stores that put water in shoppers’ visual frame saw sales of water increase by 10 percent. Another study of supermarket produce sales found something similar. When managers put fruit closer to the cash registers, fruit purchases increased by 70 percent. When the fruit appeared within the visual frame, consumers went for it; when it remained outside the frame, they didn’t.
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Michael Bloomberg is the eleventh-richest person in the world, with a net worth of over $50 billion, half of which he has promised to give away as part of Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge that I mentioned earlier. He created a global financial services and mass media software company that bears his name. His profile in business is legendary, and so is the mark he’s made in politics. He was elected mayor of New York for three consecutive terms. While mayor, he focused on public health campaigns, reforming laws where possible to improve life expectancy for city residents. He enacted a new bill that applied to all restaurants operating in the city with fifteen or more outlets there or across the country. Think chains of all sizes. This bill required that calorie counts be posted as prominently for the eye to see as the price of each menu item. Venues like McDonald’s and Starbucks already provided calorie information on websites, posters in dining areas, and tray liners. But now the caloric cost of each item had to be as easily seen as the monetary cost. If people can see the calories, he explained, they’ll make different choices.