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My name's Brian Wansink. People call me a "pracademic" -- an academic who has a practical mission to help change behavior and improve people's lives. My mission was initially directed toward changing eating behavior, and it is now directly more broadly.
During each of my 30 years in academia I've worked with amazing scholars (like some of the post-docs, international visitors, grad students, and interns pictured above) to find practical ways to help make people healthier and happier. We then work with an awesome staff to translate these discoveries into scalable programs that change behavior (like the Smarter Lunchroom program). We initially did this on a super-small scale when I was a professor at Dartmouth and at Wharton, and then on a larger scale when I was a professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and at Cornell. |
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The ideas and tools we discovered have been published in lots of peer-reviewed journal articles, but many of them can also be found in much more readable "How-to" books:
• How to discover unmet customer needs (Asking Questions and Consumer Panels),
• How to market healthy foods (Marketing Nutrition),
• How we can eat better and lose weight (Mindless Eating), and
• How companies can profitably help us do so (Slim by Design).
The goal of these how-to books is to help provide solutions: To help a researcher ask a more penetrating and actionable question, to help a manager of a healthy packaged food more quickly gain market share, to help a dieter eat better and lose weight, or to help an organization create scalable programs to help make us healthier or happier. Some companies have used these ideas and tools to help their customers (such as McDonalds and Kelloggs), and others have used them to help their employees (such as Google and the Armed Forces).
These books are designed to give practical, out-of-the-box solutions, and this website is designed to help. I hope that between the two of them (along with 400 or so published articles available on the web), you'll find what you need to help improve either your life, your family's lives, or the lives of others.
• How to discover unmet customer needs (Asking Questions and Consumer Panels),
• How to market healthy foods (Marketing Nutrition),
• How we can eat better and lose weight (Mindless Eating), and
• How companies can profitably help us do so (Slim by Design).
The goal of these how-to books is to help provide solutions: To help a researcher ask a more penetrating and actionable question, to help a manager of a healthy packaged food more quickly gain market share, to help a dieter eat better and lose weight, or to help an organization create scalable programs to help make us healthier or happier. Some companies have used these ideas and tools to help their customers (such as McDonalds and Kelloggs), and others have used them to help their employees (such as Google and the Armed Forces).
These books are designed to give practical, out-of-the-box solutions, and this website is designed to help. I hope that between the two of them (along with 400 or so published articles available on the web), you'll find what you need to help improve either your life, your family's lives, or the lives of others.