Manufacturers increasingly adopt health symbols, which translate overall product healthiness into a single symbol, to communicate about the overall healthiness of their grocery products. This study examines how the performance implications of adding a front-of-pack health symbol to a product vary across products. We study the sales impact of a government-supported health symbol program in 29 packaged categories, using over four years of scanner data. The results indicate that health symbols are most impactful when they positively disconfirm pre-existing beliefs that a product is not among the healthiest products within the category. More specifically, we find that health symbols are more effective for (i) products with a front-of-pack taste claim, (ii) lower priced products, and (iii) private label products. Furthermore, these results are more pronounced in healthier categories than in unhealthier categories. Our findings imply that health symbols can help overcome lay beliefs among consumers regarding a product’s overall healthiness. As such, adding a health symbol provides easy-to-process information about product healthiness for the consumer and can increase product sales for the manufacturer.

Premium organic retailers are specialist retailers that exclusively offer organic products. Past literature has not studied their entry, focusing instead on the impact of generalist store entry, such as Wal-Mart. This study examines the impact of premium organic specialist store entry on category performance at incumbent generalist stores for 47 packaged food and beverages categories. The results indicate that incumbent stores lose sales after a local organic store entry, and that the impact of price on sales at generalist stores becomes stronger. The authors postulate that incumbent stores can reduce sales losses by reducing the relative distinctiveness of the entrant along three dimensions: variety, price-quality, and authenticity. Empirical results show that more variety in organic products as well as more organic feature and display advertising protect generalist stores from premium organic specialist store entry. Assortments composed of premium organic products are harmed less, whereas assortments where organic products are subject to more frequent and deeper price promotions are harmed more. Furthermore, including products from an organic specialist brand in generalist’s organic assortments, offers additional protection.

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This generalization study determines if open advertisements for brands differing in familiarity can be successfully used as a cross cultural advertising tool. Open ads do not guide consumers towards a ready-made interpretation and require more effort to decipher than closed ads. The study was performed in five European nationalities and the United States. A randomized 4-group design was used with ten advertisements, each in four different versions, with attitude towards the ad as the dependent variable. The results, which are robust across different nationalities, show that the attitude towards closed ads with familiar brands is more positive than towards open advertisements with unfamiliar brands. However, the negative effect of openness and the positive effect of brand familiarity can be explained by ease of comprehension. Controlled for ease of comprehension the open ads outperform the closed ads. When advertisers aim their campaigns at different nationalities, they might consider using open advertisements in combination with unfamiliar brands, but only if these ads are easy to understand.