The Indulgent Taste of Health: Can label use and language choice help consumers to make healthier food choices?
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2020-07-09
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Within the large food industry, businesses need to find ways to persuade consumers to choose their product over other available options. Furthermore, finding an efficient way to persuade the consumers might help tackle the great public health threats of obesity. Food labels seem to influence the health and tastiness perception and in doing so potentially trigger purchase reactions. On top of deciding which kind of labelling to use (e.g. indulgent, healthy or neutral), the food industry also faces the challenge of using the countries native language (e.g. Dutch) or opting for a single language approach (e.g. English). A single language approach helps reduce translation and production costs. The present study used five healthy foods with six different advertisements per stimuli based upon the two independent variables: label use and language choice. The present study, including 196 Dutch respondents, did not find evidence for a direct effect on (future) purchase intention through the use of language or labelling. This is contradicting to previous studies which have found a positive effect of the use of indulgent labelling and native language. This difference could have occurred due to the lack of spontaneous action required within the present study and the relatively high English proficiency of the respondents. The advertisement labels did influence the tastiness perception of the foods. In the indulgent condition, the role of tastiness perception on purchase intention was far greater than the role of tastiness perception on the neutral condition, but only slightly greater than the role on the healthy condition. The only significant result that was found amongst language use was that the respondents in the English condition evaluated the foods healthier than the respondents in the Dutch condition. This could have occurred due to the primed Anglophone cultural values and/or the ease of comprehension of the labels.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren