Why People Drink Shampoo? Food Imitating Products Are Fooling Brains and Endangering Consumers for Marketing Purposes

Abstract

A Food Imitating Product (FIP) is a household cleaner or a personal care product that exhibits food attributes in order to enrich consumption experience. As revealed by many cases worldwide, such a marketing strategy led to unintentional self-poisonings and deaths. FIPs therefore constitute a very serious health and public policy issue. To understand why FIPs are a threat, we first conducted a qualitative analysis on real-life cases of household cleaners and personal care products-related phone calls at a poison control center followed by a behavioral experiment. Unintentional self-poisoning in the home following the accidental ingestion of a hygiene product by a healthy adult is very likely to result from these products being packaged like foodstuffs. Our hypothesis is that FIPs are non-verbal food metaphors that could fool the brain of consumers. We therefore conducted a subsequent functional neuroimaging (fMRI) experiment that revealed how visual processing of FIPs leads to cortical taste inferences. Considered in the grounded cognition perspective, the results of our studies reveal that healthy adults can unintentionally categorize a personal care product as something edible when a food-like package is employed to market nonedible and/or dangerous products. Our methodology combining field (qualitative) and laboratory (behavioral and functional neuroimaging) findings could be of particular relevance for policy makers, as it can help screening products prior to their market release – e.g. the way they are packaged and how they can potentially confuse the mind of consumers – and therefore save lives.

“Chemophobia” Today: Consumers’ Knowledge and Perceptions of Chemicals

“…There is evidence concerning the importance of worldviews (e.g., technological enthusiasm, economic growth, egalitarianism) in determining individuals’ risk perceptions (Mertz et al., ; Slovic et al., ). Additionally, situational factors (e.g., labels, advertisements) (Basso et al., ) might also influence people's risk perceptions of chemicals and their chemophobia. Future studies should investigate the relationships between these factors and chemophobia to develop a better understanding of the factors that shape chemophobia and inhibit informed decisionmaking.…”

“…and situational cues (e.g., packaging of consumer products, distractions, etc.) are thought to comprise part of the reason why consumers do not always comply with the instructions and safety information found on potentially dangerous chemical‐containing products (Basso et al., ; Kovacs, Small, Davidson, & Fischhoff, ). Hence, to ensure the safe handling of consumer products, it is necessary to further understand laypeople's risk perceptions of chemicals as well as how such perceptions are formed.…”

Assessing the expectations associated with pharmaceutical pill colour and shape

“…Levitan, Zampini, Li, & Spence, 2008). It is especially important for children that food and medicine do not have sensory features that overlap (see Basso et al, 2014). Selling medicines in multiple colours might appeal more to children while at the same time present a very real risk of potential accidental poisoning.…”

Basic taste processing recruits bilateral anteroventral and middle dorsal insulae: An activation likelihood estimation meta‐analysis of fMRI studies

“…Upon stimulation of taste receptors, neural signals are generated and relayed to the primary taste cortex, which then mediates the more complex perception and behavior pertaining to taste sense integrations and associations. Examples of such associations include phantom tastes (Henkin, Levy, & Lin, 2000), taste memory (Levy, Henkin, Lin, Finley, & Schellinger, 1999), semantic grounding of taste words (Barrós-Loscertales et al, 2012), synesthesia involving tastes (Jones et al, 2011), taste enhancement by additives , taste inference related to viewing food-imitating products (Basso et al, 2014), and visual food cues (van der Laan, De Ridder, Viergever, & Smeets, 2011). Understanding the mechanisms behind these associations will be difficult without first mapping out the brain regions important to basic taste sensation.…”