I love canned sardines. Whenever I visit different cities, I buy a dozen of canned fish on the way back home. I was excited to find Annam Gourmet at Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam because it has a wide variety of canned fish, along with fresh fish.
Canned fish are fish which have been processed, sealed in an airtight container such as a sealed tin can, and subjected to heat. Canning is a method of preserving food, and provides a typical shelf life ranging from one to five years.
Some say I am obsessed with canned fish. Others suggest me to avoid them. I have long wondered whether canned fish are bad for my health and whether over-consuming canned fish harm my health. Recently, I met an article released from Consumer Reports that canned fish are as healthy for us as fresh fish, particularly for sardines and salmon. For canned tuna, however, we should be cautious about mercury.
Thankfully, my love for canned sardines survives. However, it is difficult to correct a belief that canned fish are dangerous. Updating belief is unbearably challenging.
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Reference
Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2007). Decisions by rules: The case of unwillingness to pay for beneficial delays. Journal of Marketing Research, 44(1), 142–152.
Since the emergence of neoclassical economics, individual decision making has been viewed largely from an outcome-maximizing perspective. Building on previous work, the authors suggest that when people make payment decisions, they consider not only their preferences for different alternatives but also guiding principles and behavioral rules. The authors describe and test two characteristics pertaining to one specific rule that dictates that consumers should not pay for delays, even if they are beneficial: rule invocation and rule override. The results show that money can function as the invoking cue for this rule, that the reliance on this rule can undermine utility maximization, and that this rule may be used as a first response to the decision problem but can be overridden. The article concludes with a discussion of more general applications of such rules, which may explain some of the seemingly systematic inconsistencies in the ways consumers behave.
On average, people assume that raw fish is healthier than canned fish. Whether or not raw fish is actually more hygienic than canned fish, it’s true that when you see at first, the raw fish in front of you looks fresher and healthier than the long-shelf-life fish in the can. However, according to Consumer Reports, canned sardines and salmon are not much different from raw fish, although you do need to watch out for the risk of exposure to small amounts of mercury in canned tuna. Additional data suggests that tuna has higher levels of mercury than other fishes which is both raw and canned. In conclusion, there is no health difference between canned and raw fish. Despite this fact, raw fish is still healthier in people’s perception.
No difference in a health could have a positive impact on the perception of canned fish. At the beginning of the semester, when I presented this post, it was purely out of curiosity: “Is canned fish healthy? I asked around (my parents, 5 friends) and found that they all still strongly believed that raw fish was healthier, so I deduced that the biggest issue holding back canning companies’ marketing is this perception. Canning companies need to communicate that canned fish is healthy and trustworthy enough. First of all, canned fish companies need to be specific about who they market to. Self-employed people and people living alone probably eat canned food because it is convenient and tastes good. Therefore, they are not the target of marketing. The target audience for canned food is more likely to be health-conscious 40s and 50s housewives. Once you’ve categorized your consumer base, you need to position yourself. It is said that consumers are closer to a purchase decision when they compare products. For canned food, the comparison is likely to be with raw fish. In order to show that canned fish is as healthy as raw fish, you need to show that raw fish is not as healthy as consumers think, and that canned fish is manufactured in a more hygienic environment and is more efficient in the distribution process. For example, if you show raw fish being transported to the store and suffering from traffic fumes, sunlight, etc. and then show the fish in canned being happily transported in the coolness of a can, you can create the idea that canned fish is more hygienic. Another positive fact about canned fish is that canned salmon is nutritionally superior to raw salmon: canned salmon is said to have higher levels of omega-3s and calcium than raw salmon, which could be used as a marketing material for canned salmon. A similar example is spinach. Spinach is commonly promoted as a high-calcium plant, meaning it contains more calcium than other plants, but science shows that the amount of calcium in spinach is similar to that found in regular vegetables. Using this precedent, canned salmon could be promoted as a health food, pivoting away from its existing competitor, raw salmon, and repositioning it as a health food.
The flip side of this is that most canned fish can’t escape the comparison to raw fish, even though there is no significant health difference. Existing canned fish consumers choose canned fish because of its ease of preparation and low price, but in order to attract new customers, it is important to be able to bring the benefits of raw fish. This post only tells us that canned fish, which is traditionally considered inferior in terms of texture and nutrition, is just as nutritious as raw fish, but it doesn’t tell us what makes canned fish superior to raw fish. Therefore, it may retain existing customers, but it doesn’t have the power to attract new customers.
To summarize, this post can help retaining the existing canned fish customer base by teaching them that canned fish is nutritionally same as raw fish, and to a limited extent, it can help with marketing and repositioning of canned fish. However, it doesn’t change the fact that it still has to compete with raw fish.