The efficacy of health warnings and package branding on perceptions of cannabis products among youth and young adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Little empirical evidence exists about the efficacy of labelling and marketing restrictions in a regulated cannabis market. This study examined perceptions of cannabis product packaging designs, health warning labels (HWL) and perceptions of packs displaying brand imagery and leading descriptors on measures of appeal, and perceived consumer attributes. METHODS: An online experimental survey of Canadian cannabis users and non-users (n = 870) aged 16-30 years containing eight between-group experiments was conducted in October 2017. Primary outcomes were appeal and perceived consumer attributes of cannabis product packaging, including the likelihood of being younger, female, fashionable, health conscious and likely to go out and party. RESULTS: When cannabis product branding was present, respondents were more likely (P = 0.027) to report greater appeal than when branding was absent. When an HWL was present, respondents were less likely (P = 0.010) to report greater appeal than when absent. The presence of a celebrity sponsor (P < 0.001), music references (P < 0.001) or party references (P < 0.001) increased the likelihood that respondents perceived the product as targeted at someone younger, and a party lifestyle. Differences by cannabis use status were observed across experiments; those who had used were more likely to find branding elements appealing. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: The findings demonstrate that brand imagery on cannabis packaging can promote lifestyle associations and increase the appeal of cannabis products among young people. Plain/standardised packs displaying HWLs were perceived as less appealing than packs with branding or without HWLs. Lifestyle associations can be communicated through brand imagery on cannabis packaging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".