Food retailing marketing management: social media communication for healthy food

Purpose: Healthy food sales have increased in recent decades. Retailers are widening their marketing management approach, including the use of social media to communicate with consumers and to promote healthy food. The purpose of this paper is to investigate European retailers’ social media communication content used to promote healthy food products, by analysing retailers’ Twitter messages and accounts characteristics, retailers’ Twitter messages content on healthy food and retailers’ Twitter accounts orientation on healthy food. Design/methodology/approach: Data include approximately 74,000 tweets sent in 2016 from 90 corporate and brand accounts. The tweets were sent by the top 36 European retailers. Data elaboration includes quantitative content analysis of Twitter messages, which is used to identify healthy food categories’ occurrences and co-occurrences. Then, multiple multivariate-linear regression analyses explore the relation between retailers’ characteristics and healthy food messaging and between the overall content of retailer accounts and a healthy food focus. Findings: The vast majority of retailers’ tweets on healthy food issues mainly address general health and sustainability issues. Tweets about food health and nutrition refer to food types, meals or consumer segments. Tweets about food sustainability refer to general issues. Analysis of retailer accounts shows that the larger the retailer is, the lower the relevance of healthy food. Retailers with high numbers of tweets and followers tend to decrease their attention to healthy food promotion. Compared to retailers with lower revenues, retailers with higher revenues tend to send a higher number of tweets that focus on healthy food but the incidence is lower compared to the overall accounts’ messaging. Research limitations/implications: As the study focuses on a single category of food products, further research into other categories of retail products may contribute to a wider perspective. Future research may include graphical content/emoticons and extend the analysis to other social media platforms. Finally, social media data allow studies to cover a wide geographical area. However, in order to also value non-English written messaging, this research introduces some approximations in language interpretation. Practical implications: The research provides insights into how retailers use social media and provides an overview of how retailers manage their social media communication in one of the most promising food product categories. Retailers manage social media communication content cautiously to minimise controversial issues. This study provides insights into the need to more effectively target the increasing number of social media users. Originality/value: The research approach and findings of this study extend prior research on retailers’ communication management by improving the understanding of retailers’ use of social media and marketing communication content for their key products, focusing on healthy food.