‘Goal-orientation’ is the fourth type in the typology and refers to customers using the information provided by the Nutrition Code as a way to accomplish something greater than ‘merely’ a more healthful diet. While ‘Learning’ was about using information as an instrument to achieve a more healthful diet, here information is used to achieve something more that goes beyond food healthfulness. Here the healthier diet in itself is used instrumentally to serve greater purposes for the customer.
I'm glad that I found this right now. I just found out at the doctor’s that my cholesterol levels are completely off. The Nutrition Code will help me in this new lifestyle I’m starting on. [anonymous customer feedback]
So this means that a healthful lifestyle is a part of me now. That there’s no dieting anymore but a whole new life. It’s a whole new lifestyle and the Nutrition Code service assists me in it.
- Matilda, 53
As reported by Matilda, the Nutrition Code is more than just a guide toward a more healthful diet; it rather supports her striving toward a whole new lifestyle. The role of the information goes beyond the types of ‘Playing’, ‘Check-pointing’, and ‘Learning’; customers perceive its role in more holistic terms, as a means to a better life. As a result, the way in which the information eventually supports customers’ value creation has more diverse characteristics. In more detail, the information as an additional resource contributes to higher-level needs that can take various forms respectively; the way in which the information was used in customers’ value creation was not limited to food retailing:
An excellent service. It makes you think about your eating habits. I’m a mother of two small children and well-being is very important to me. Now that I use the Nutrition Code I think more carefully about which products I add to my shopping cart. Thank you for a great service!
[anonymous customer feedback]
I feel like okay, I’m making the right choices or that it somehow. Sometimes I do come to think about like, oh how can one or the other of my friends have such an unhealthful diet. Or something like that. Maybe I feel like a better person when I know how it should go. - Sofia, 21
If I think about my 17 and 18-year-old daughters who have got such a health education at school that I have to strain every nerve here, to be honest, because they keep checking every single label and tag and content and there’s an immediate protest if I have bought the wrong types of products, if there’s too much salt or it’s not Finnish or some other content is not right or it was produced elsewhere, too many E numbers, so in that sense I do want to prove that this shopping cart is correct.
- Amanda, 48
For example, a mother recognizes the Nutrition Code’s role in helping her to become familiarized with the nutritive substances of the food her children are eating
and as a result, helps her to be a better mother. Moreover, as a result of using the service, Sofia has compared her diet with her friends’ diets and has felt gratification and pleasure for knowing that at least she is making the right decisions. Amanda, in turn, is able to convince her daughters of the nutritive quality of the food she buys. In none of these examples was food healthfulness a central characteristic as such, because the information was used as input to the customer’s value creation at a higher-end level. The information was used to provide a feeling of being a better mother or considering oneself as a better man. Detailed information about the healthfulness of the groceries was not used to achieve a more healthful diet per se, but the role of the Nutrition Code as a whole was seen as supporting customers’ value creation.
Altogether, ‘Goal-orientation’ is characterized by the information being used for higher purposes than achieving a more healthful diet alone. Instead of focusing on the information’s ability to help customers to eat more healthfully, customers perceive greater goals that go beyond food healthfulness; the role of food retailing in customers’ value creation is extended. These ‘goals’ are not about food healthfulness or food consumption per se, but providing customers with information about the healthfulness of their groceries help them achieve specific goals in their own value creation. These goals, since they are more abstract in nature than the ‘mere’ more healthful diet, interestingly uncover the wide variety of customers’ value-creating processes. These processes take place at a higher level of analysis and can eventually be tracked down to food consumption – and more importantly – can be supported through providing information resulting from reverse use of customer data.