Do you have a flair for creative production, love visual language and easy vocabulary to express difficult ideas, do you relish a past-faced and exciting environments of campaigns and promotions? Read on.
GAIN’s Demand team focus on influencing what people want as opposed to what’s on offer (supply). We want consumers to experience foods in a brand-new way. We want to innovate in TV and radio, in photography treatments and visual identity systems, and more effectively use visual and oral language to change the way consumers feel about nutritious foods.
Most of the work that’s been done to-date has been focused on giving individuals, like you or I, information to make ‘better choices’, limiting the marketing of certain foods to children via some channels, a little bit on differentiating healthy from less healthy foods through prices or labels, and some promotion of the ‘better choices’. It’s been very rational using the narrative ‘eat this because it’s good for you’. When was the last time you did something because someone told you to (excepting your Mum and your boss), or preferred ‘it’s good for me’ over the myriad of other ‘it’s…?
Food choices are rarely rational. Only a tiny fraction of people thinks about how many calories are in a meal, how much fruit and veg they’ve eaten today, or make a concerted effort to reduce the quantity of meat they eat. Most of the time it’s emotional cues: rushed, sad, lonely, hungry, tired, with my friends, end of the week, and financial fears that determines our day-to-day food choices. These immediate choices fit within our overall food preferences, which in turn are set by our food culture. These preferences and culture are influenced by what we see on TV, in films, our religious beliefs about food and health, how family life is organized around food/eating, what our friends and families say and think about food and health.
The Demand Generation Programme, in conjunction with GAIN’s country offices, designs and implements projects to increase the desirability of sustainable and nutritious diets. Our Demand Generation work is active in Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda. The programmes address motivation, opportunity, and capacity of consumers to purchase and consume nutritious, sustainable, and safe food. The programme has 4 key objectives: drive an emotional connection with consumers vis-à-vis a brand or core idea, ensure the core idea is personalized through participation in the brand, reinforce those core ideas by those around us, and that ensure it is easy to succeed (i.e., buy or consume). The channels used in this approach include radio, TV, print, out-of-home, and retail and community engagement.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to co-design media and promotional strategies that will addresses the desirability, and improve purchasing and consumption of nutritious food.
Now for the organizational bit. GAIN stands for The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. We are a Swiss-based foundation launched at the UN in 2002 to tackle the human suffering caused by malnutrition. Working with both governments and businesses, we aim to transform food systems so that they deliver more nutritious food for all people. In particular, we aim to make healthier food choices more desirable, more available, and more affordable. GAIN’s mission is to advance nutrition outcomes by improving consumption of nutritious and safe food for all people, especially the most vulnerable to malnutrition.
How to apply
To apply, please click on the following link:
