It’s Saturday night and you’re watching your favorite show. As the show reaches a thrilling climax, it cuts to a commercial break, and that is when your eyes catch something extraordinary. You come across a mouthwatering food ad that stands out from the rest. The perfectly plated dish looks incredibly delicious. However as a health-conscious individual, you are curious about the nutritional information of this tempting meal.

Emojis have taken over how the world communicates online. From social media platforms to text messages, emojis have become an integral part of our daily communication. These little expressive icons have taken over our digital conversations. They add a splash of color, humor and personality to our messages making them more engaging and relatable. It’s amazing how a simple string of symbols can convey emotions and ideas, with just a touch of playfulness. 

Do you know any of the people in these picture? 

Neither do I. Actually, I ‘created’ them using this AI-powered website: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

These people do not exist. Yet the powerful realism of these faces has the ability to create the belief that they do relate to actual people. This may be a problem in consumers’ perceptions of a brand, especially for the charity sector. And we’ll see why.

More and more consumers are interested in ethically produced meat. This includes the place and ways animals are raised and cared for. Previous research has found that telling about the better living conditions or organic production of beef products made them more preferable and increased willingness to buy these products (Risius & Hamm, 2017). Could providing this information also influence how beef products taste? Let’s find out!

Shoppers increasingly consider the naturalness of products. Typically, natural products are preferred in categories in which naturalness is considered important. But what does naturalness have to do with the package of the product? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Let’s look at the images below. Which of the products do you consider to be most natural?

Supermarkets display packaged and unpackaged versions of products across a number of categories in-store and online. Restaurants also display products with and without packaging. Starbucks, for example, instructs its employees to remove bakery items from their individual packages before placing them unpackaged in a display case, only to re-package them for the customer upon purchase. The question is: what effect does this have on consumer preference, and purchase likelihood?

In this blog, we will discuss how packaging food has an effect on perceived naturalness  (i.e., originating from plants, animals, or humans) and thereby on purchase intentions. Let’s dive in…