Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 31, 2024
Date Accepted: Aug 16, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Food and Beverage Marketing in Virtual Environments: Viewpoint on the Potential Implications for Young People of Color, Knowledge Gaps, and Future Research Directions
ABSTRACT
Exposure to unhealthy food and beverage marketing is a major contributor to excessive weight gain in young people and may disproportionately affect Black and Latinx communities. Appropriate and comprehensive regulations on food and beverage companies is essential, particularly as companies expand their reach and leverage the latest technologies to marketing experiences using virtual reality (VR). Although VR technology is in its infancy, the potential effects of immersive food and beverage marketing on consumption, food and beverage corporations’ history of racially-targeted marketing to Black and Latinx communities, and heightened burden of diet-related illnesses in Black/Latinx communities underscores a critical need to investigate immersive marketing to young people and young people of color. This viewpoint will provide a brief description of VR food and beverage marketing as the newest food and beverage marketing frontier, highlight key concerns and knowledge gaps, and underscore future directions in research.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.