Food packaging cues influence taste perception and increase effort provision for a recommended snack product in children

Abstract

Food marketing research shows that child-directed marketing cues have pronounced effects on food preferences and consumption, but are most often placed on products with low nutritional quality. Effects of child-directed marketing strategies for healthy food products remain to be studied in more detail. Previous research suggests that effort provision explains additional variance in food choice. This study investigated the effects of packaging cues on explicit preferences and effort provision for healthy food items in elementary school children. Each of 179 children rated three, objectively identical, recommended yogurt-cereal-fruit snacks presented with different packaging cues. Packaging cues included a plain label, a label focusing on health aspects of the product, and a label that additionally included unknown cartoon characters. The children were asked to state the subjective taste-pleasantness of the respective food items. We also used a novel approach to measure effort provision for food items in children, namely handgrip strength. Results show that packaging cues significantly induce a taste-placebo effect in 88% of the children, i.e., differences in taste ratings for objectively identical products. Taste ratings were highest for the child-directed product that included cartoon characters. Also, applied effort to receive the child-directed product was significantly higher. Our results confirm the positive effect of child-directed marketing strategies also for healthy snack food products. Using handgrip strength as a measure to determine the amount of effort children are willing to provide for a product may explain additional variance in food choice and might prove to be a promising additional research tool for field studies and the assessment of public policy interventions.

Prevalence of Child-Directed Marketing on Breakfast Cereal Packages before and after Chile’s Food Marketing Law: A Pre- and Post-Quantitative Content Analysis

“…Food packages are of particular concern, as marketing strategies on packaging are an important component of integrated marketing campaigns [7,15] designed to influence consumers at both the point of purchase and during consumption [16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. Packages for sugary and energy-dense products in general [9,22,23], and for sugary breakfast cereals in particular [24,25], have been shown to employ child-directed strategies.…”

Neuromarketing in Haute Cuisine Gastronomic Experiences

“…Neuromarketing studies applied to the food sector aim to provide best practices in food marketing, as well as other aspects such as the perception of nutritional elements (Thomas et al, 2016) the health content of labels (Velasco et al, 2015) the presence of additives and the evaluation of the information transmitted by food packaging (Enax et al, 2015;Hahnel et al, 2015;Fenko et al, 2018;Stasi et al, 2018). The use of eye tracking in order to verify the efficacy of food styling (Tichy et al, 2017) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze brain activity against brand logos and their food products, in order to analyze their brain activation (Fehse et al, 2017) or neuromarketing techniques to improve a quantitative study on consumer preferences for organic products (Stoica et al, 2015) are lines of work in research for the food sector.…”

Improving Willingness to Try Fruits and Vegetables Among Low-Income Children Through Use of Characters

“…30 For example, two separate studies found that children significantly preferred food products that had a fun character displayed on the package versus food that did not, although the food products were identical. 31,32 In addition, characters from picture books and puppets have also been reported to influence children's food consumption and preferences. 33,34 Results from a study where children were shown a puppet DVD for 5 consecutive days before lunch to influence FV consumption reported a significant increase in FV consumed from the test group compared to the control groups.…”