Kolar, Boris (2026) Exploring the impact of point of purchase marketing promotions on healthy food ordering in a restaurant environment: An Australian case study. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

The Food Service Sector (FSS), a core component of the Tourism and Hospitality Industry, plays a pivotal yet under-examined role in shaping population dietary behaviours and public health outcomes. While the sector has been widely implicated in the proliferation of obesogenic food environments, prevailing literature has largely advanced a null hypothesis suggesting that restaurant-based marketing and advertising functions exert minimal influence on consumers’ healthier food choices. This assumption has constrained both scholarly inquiry and policy development, leaving a critical gap in understanding whether hospitality practices can be repurposed as scalable public-health interventions. Addressing this gap, the present study provides robust real-world evidence that integrated marketing communication (IMC) strategies can meaningfully and measurably shift consumer behaviour toward healthier choices in full-service restaurant settings. Drawing on Fogg’s Behaviour Model as the primary theoretical lens, this longitudinal field experiment employed a post-test-only control group design within an operational restaurant in Melbourne, Australia. A sequential mixed-methods approach was used, comprising a dominant quantitative phase analysing weekly point-of-sale transaction data across multiple intervention stages, followed by a dominant qualitative phase involving in-depth consumer interviews. The quantitative phase tested four progressively layered marketing and advertising interventions—semiotic menu design, evocative menu language, nutritional labelling and information disclosure, and point-of-sale poster advertising—using t-tests and chi-square analyses. Results demonstrate a statistically significant and cumulative increase in healthy meal selection across intervention stages, with healthy orders rising from 96% in the initial intervention to 629% when all IMC elements were implemented concurrently. These findings decisively reject the prevailing null hypothesis and confirm that even low-cost, non-intrusive environmental cues can trigger immediate behavioural change without reliance on staff persuasion or consumer deliberation. The qualitative findings further illuminate the behavioural mechanisms underlying these effects, revealing how motivation, ability, and situational triggers interact at the point of choice. Consumers reported reduced cognitive effort, increased confidence, and heightened salience of healthier options when IMC elements were aligned, reinforcing the explanatory power of real-time behavioural models over attitudinal or intention-based frameworks. This research makes three original contributions. First, it delivers rare longitudinal, transaction-level evidence from a live restaurant environment, enhancing ecological validity and generalisability beyond laboratory and survey-based studies. Second, it reconceptualises restaurant marketing, which was previously a contributor to public-health harm, as a practical lever for prevention. Third, it offers actionable insights for policymakers and industry stakeholders, demonstrating that voluntary, design-based interventions can complement regulatory approaches to obesity prevention. This study makes an original theoretical contribution to marketing by empirically demonstrating, using longitudinal, real-world transaction data, that integrated marketing communication functions operate as generalisable behavioural mechanisms that can trigger immediate and scalable consumer choice change at the point of decision. In doing so, it extends marketing theory beyond attitudinal persuasion toward situationally embedded, behaviour-first models of influence. Overall, the study establishes the Food Service Sector as a critical intervention site for public health and positions IMC-driven environmental nudges as a scalable, generalisable, and commercially viable strategy for promoting healthier eating in restaurant contexts.

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