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When ugly is healthy : packaging effects on perception of food healthiness
in 37ème Congrès International de l'AFM, Association Française du Marketing, Angers, 19-21 mai 2021 AFM, Association Française du Marketing 2021
Research shows that if half of the world would convert to natural ways of farming, this could reduce the annual carbon emissions in the atmosphere by 55% (Organic Consumers Association, 2017) and it may help reach the Paris Agreement target and reduce the global warming by 1.5°±2°C (Clark et al., 2020). Consumers could play a key role in this transformation. By increasing the demand of natural and organic food, industries will have to respond
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and change their producing strategies, and therefore pass to more sustainable ways of producing food.Therefore, in order to stimulate healthy consumption, it is crucial for the marketers to employ the tools that have higher chances of success. There are different strategies that companies adopt in order to make naturalness claims. This research argues that without making any stated claims, without explicitly making naturalness claims, consumers can infer them based only on package design.Building on research on aesthetics and on visual attributes of packaging the main hypothesize of this research states that highly simplified package can lead to more natural and healthier perceptions of the food. The hypothesis is tested in three experimental studies. The first study compares in a between subjects design a less attractive/ plain package design of crackers and an original, colorful package of the same product. The results present preliminary evidence that the less attractive/ plain package design leads to healthier, more natural and more authentic food perceptions. In the second study participants saw a typical online purchase screen (portraying a well-known supermarket online platform) with four snack choices : chocolate biscuits, potato chips, madeleines and apple chips. The package of the apple chips was either the original package or a plain package, depending on the experimental condition and was manipulated between subjects. Participants were told to imagine that they were purchasing online a healthy snack. Eye tracking measures showed that when searching for a healthy option, the plain package attracted the attention faster than the original package. The third study used a similar design as the second study. The results showed that Participants who were exposed tothe plain package took less time to make a choice decision for the healthy snack. Further, the snack in the plain package was perceived to be healthier and more sustainable than the snack in the original package. Moreover, this study showed evidence of the mechanism explaining the perception of healthiness of plain package through perceptions of authenticity.These results have important implications for research on product packaging. The three studies show that less effort in package design can actually have positive effects on healthiness perceptions. The analyses also show that the effects of plain food package on healthiness perception is mediated by authenticity perceptions. These findings can have important implications on package design, because they show that a plain package can actually be perceived as more authentic and as a consequence healthier. Therefore, the current research makes the link between authenticity and healthiness and can be interesting for managers as well as for researchers to further explore its implications.
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