Browsing by Author "Manita, Catarina Carvalho"
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- Communicating product healthiness through packaging : the impact of explicit informational cues and implicit visual cuesPublication . Manita, Catarina Carvalho; Fernandes, Daniel Von Der Heyde; Romeiro, PauloConsumers are more attentive than ever to the healthiness of the products they choose. Packaging is a key communicator of health benefits. Specifically, packaging communicates product healthiness in two distinct ways: displaying explicit information and/or relying on implicit cues that bring healthiness associations to the consumer’s minds. This work explores how these two ways of communicating product healthiness interact with each other, that is, which one is stronger and what is the consumer response when both are employed simultaneously. Consequently, this work aims to determine whether both cues are integrated into the healthiness judgment when both are present in the package, and, if so, whether one of the effects is diminished. In particular, we study front-of-package nutrition labels as an explicit informational cue and package color lightness as an implicit visual cue. Based on an experimental factorial design, results show that both cues have a significant impact on perceived healthiness, but front-of-package nutrition labels have a stronger impact than the package color lightness. However, we find that the two cues do not interact with each other, having an independent influence on the perceived healthiness judgment. That is, they exert the same effect regardless of whether the other cue is present or not. Nutrition knowledge is shown to moderate the effect of front-of-package nutrition labels on perceived healthiness by amplifying it. The same does not apply to package color lightness. Therefore, managers should consider both cue types when creating packaging strategies.