Editorial: Psychological perspectives on consumer obesity

The prevalence of obesity has increased at an exponential rate over the past decades (Petersen et al., 2019; Thaiss, 2018). Currently, more than 39% of the global population are considered overweight, and 13% are obese (Yao et al., 2022; Connors et al., 2021). Thus, obesity rates at a global scale have escalated to the point of becoming a global epidemic (Pachali et al., 2022; Moore et al., 2017). From a marketing perspective, obesity research has tended to focus on issues such as how advertising and promotions influence a consumer’s food consumption (Garg et al., 2007) and the impacts of social marketing interventions to change food consumption practices and exercise behaviour (Manika et al., 2017a, 2017b). Furthermore, researchers focusing on consumer health have examined the effects of various factors on food consumption, such as various physiological hunger cues, as well as several external cues, pricing and packaging issues, choice variety, colour lights, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, among others (Tangari et al., 2019; Haws et al., 2017).

However, despite the increasing interest of the scholar community on the intersection between marketing and obesity, there are several research areas that remain unexplored. In particular, there is a need for marketing scholars to develop multi-disciplinary and integrative knowledge and transformative theories to enhance the understanding of concepts, behaviours, problems and issues related to obesity, as well as to improve the insights on successful marketing practices in this area that can help battle obesity.

This special issue on “Psychological Perspectives on Consumer Obesity” presents cutting-edge scholarly research that provide novel ideas, theories, findings and directions in addressing the obesity problem. The articles in the special issue will be of interest to a wide range of social science disciplines (psychology, marketing, policy, organisation studies, sociology-culture), including medical science, as well as practitioners and policymakers concerned with obesity and the problems that arise from this pandemic.