The effect of the images depicted on food packaging on consumer perception and response

Resumen

Food shopping is a low-involvement process in which consumers spend little time and cognitive resources evaluating products and deciding which to choose. Literature shows that people unconsciously rely on heuristics to make judgements and use the different packaging cues as diagnostic tools by which they infer product attributes and information; thus, each packaging cue should be designed considering what its role will be in this process. Although a great deal of research studies how the different packaging cues convey meaning and thereby affect perception, the role of packaging imagery has barely been studied, despite being a prominent visual sign that draws attention at the point of sale and requires a type of unconscious and unintentional processing. Specifically, the influence of some image’s features such as its subject (i.e. what is depicted on it) on consumer perception and response is still almost unexplored. Moreover, images tend to be intrinsically ambiguous stimuli since they can elicit different interpretations (e.g. depicting fire on a bag of nuts can convey either roast flavour or spiciness). Thus, for designers, it is not easy to foresee how an image will be interpreted, since the underlying mechanisms of this process have only attracted modest scientific attention to date. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it seeks to study how manipulating the subject shown on packaging imagery influences consumer expectations, perception, and response towards the product. Second, it aims to investigate how consumers infer meaning from ambiguous images. These objectives are addressed across six research studies by using an array of methods and techniques such as questionnaires, self-report scales, projective techniques, and speeded classification tasks. The results show that both manipulating what is depicted on the image and the way it is depicted influence consumer expectations and response, since the attributes of the products displayed on the packaging tend to influence the evaluation of the product contained within (although the effect is stronger for expectations than for perception during tasting). In addition, the work compiled here demonstrates that the congruence between the image’s possible meanings and the product’s potential attributes plays a key role in how the image is interpreted, since the more congruent meaning tends to be favoured. Moreover, the results also show that the interpretation given to an image can be modulated by manipulating the image’s shape. Overall, these findings contribute to research on design, semiotics, sensory science, and consumer psychology, and thus are discussed under an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis has been carried out following the official procedure for the completion of an International PhD, for which the candidate did a three-month research stay at the Wageningen University Marketing and Consumer Behaviour group (in The Netherlands). The main body of this dissertation consists of a compilation of six manuscripts, of which five have been published in international JCR scientific journals of the Food Science and Technology category, and one has been submitted for publication.