As consumers continue to struggle with issues related to unhealthy consumption, the goal of front-of-package (FOP) nutrition labels is to provide nutrition information in more understandable formats. The marketplace is filled with different FOP labels, but their true effects remain unclear, as does which label works best to change perceptions and behaviors. We address these issues through an interdisciplinary meta-analysis, generalizing the findings of 114 articles on the impact of FOP labels on outcomes such as consumers' ability to identify healthier options, product perceptions, purchase behavior, and consumption. The results show that, although FOP labels help consumers to identify healthier products, their ability to nudge consumers toward healthier choices is more limited. Importantly, FOP labels may lead to halo effects, positively influencing not only virtue but also vice products, e.g., interpretive nutrient-specific labels improve health perceptions of both vice and virtue products, yet they influence only the purchase intention of virtues.

Managers and academics often think of price promotions merely as incentives that entice consumers to accept offers that they might not have considered otherwise. Yet the prospect of paying a lower price for a product of given quality can also discourage deliberation, in a sense "dumbing down" the purchase encounter by making it less consequential. The authors examine this possibility in a dual-system theory of consumer behavior. Specifically, they argue that price promotion lowers a consumer's motivation to exert mental effort, in which case purchase decisions are guided less by extensive information processing and more by a quicker, easier, strong conditioner of preference: affect. Field data from a large daily deal company and four controlled experiments support this idea and document its implications primarily for product choice, in turn providing insight into the form and cause of brand switching that manufacturers and retailers can leverage to improve the allocation of promotional budgets and category management.

Managers and academics often think of price promotions merely as incentives that entice consumers to accept offers that they might not have considered otherwise. Yet the prospect of paying a lower price for a product of given quality can also discourage deliberation, in a sense "dumbing down" the purchase encounter by making it less consequential. The authors examine this possibility in a dual-system theory of consumer behavior. Specifically, they argue that price promotion lowers a consumer's motivation to exert mental effort, in which case purchase decisions are guided less by extensive information processing and more by a quicker, easier, strong conditioner of preference: affect. Field data from a large daily deal company and four controlled experiments support this idea and document its implications primarily for product choice, in turn providing insight into the form and cause of brand switching that manufacturers and retailers can leverage to improve the allocation of promotional budgets and category management.

No abstract

Using data from a large-scale field study, we show that (perceptions of) crowding change(s) the composition of a consumer's shopping basket. Specifically, as shoppers experience more crowding, their shopping basket contains (a) relatively more affect-rich ("hedonic") products, and (b) relatively more national brands. We offer a plausible dualprocess explanation for this phenomenon: Crowding induced distraction limits cognitive capacity, increasing the relative impact of affective responses in purchase decisions. As we are the first to show that level of crowding relates to what shoppers buy (at both product and brand level), the implications of these effects for retailers are discussed.