A researcher from University of Southern California published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that explores whether attractive food might seem healthier to consumers. The study forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing is titled “Pretty Healthy Food: How and When Aesthetics Enhance Perceived Healthiness” and is authored by Linda Hagen.
Consumers see almost 7,000 food and restaurant advertisements per year, with the vast majority touting fast food. In marketing materials, food is extensively styled to look especially pretty. Imagine the beautiful pizza you might see on a billboard–a perfect circle of crust with flawlessly allocated pepperoni and melted cheese. Advertisers clearly aim to make the food more appetizing. But do pretty aesthetics have other, potentially problematic, effects on your impressions of food? On one hand, beautiful aesthetics are closely associated with pleasure and indulgence. Looking at beautiful art and people activates the brain’s reward center and observing beauty is inherently gratifying. This link with pleasure might make pretty food seem unhealthy, because people tend to view pleasure and usefulness as mutually exclusive. For instance, many people have the general intuition that food is either tasty or healthy, but not both.
On the other hand, a specific type of aesthetics called “classical” aesthetics is characterized by the ideal patterns found in nature. For instance, a key classical aesthetic feature is symmetry, which is also extremely common in nature. Another prominent classical aesthetic feature involves order and systematic patterns, which, again, are ubiquitous in nature. It seems possible that sporting more of these nature-like visual features might make food depictions feel more natural. Seeming more natural, in turn, may make the food seem healthier because people tend to consider natural things (e.g., organic food or natural remedies) to be healthier than unnatural things (e.g., highly processed food or synthetic chemicals). So, by virtue of reflecting nature, the same food may seem healthier when it is pretty (compared to when it is ugly).
Importantly, these healthiness judgments affect consumer behavior. In a field experiment, people were willing to pay significantly more money for a pretty bell pepper than an ugly one, and a substantial portion of this boost in reservation prices was attributable to an analogous boost in healthiness judgments. In another study, even when people had financial incentives to correctly identify which of two foods contained fewer calories, they were more likely to declare a target food to be the lower calorie option when it was pretty than when it was ugly–even though this choice lost them money.
Source: EurekAlert
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