Whereas everyone recognizes that increasing obesity rates worldwide are driven by a complex set of interrelated factors, the marketing actions of the food industry are often singled out as one of the main culprits. But how exactly is food marketing making us fat? To answer this question, we...

Understanding consumer response to product supersizing and downsizing is an important issue for policy makers, consumer researchers and marketers. In three laboratory experiments the authors found that changes in size appear smaller when products change in all three dimensions (height, width,...

In today's cluttered retail environments, creating consumer pull through memory-based brand equity is not enough; marketers must also create "visual equity" for their brands (i.e., incremental sales triggered by in-store visual attention). In this paper, we show that commercial eye-tracking...

Food marketing is often singled out as the leading cause of the obesity epidemic. In this review, we examine the current food marketing, determine how exactly it may be influencing food intake, and how food marketers could meet their business objectives while helping people eat healthier. We pay...

Why sexual assaults and car accidents are associated with the consumption of alcohol mixed with energy drinks (AMED) is still unclear. In a single study, we show that the label used to describe AMED cocktails can have causal non-pharmacological effects on consumers’ perceived intoxication,...

Health claims on food packaging can focus on the presence of good (vs. the absence of bad) and the preservation of nature (vs. nutritional improvements). We study the frequency of use of four resulting types of claims (“clean,” “whole,” “diet,” and “enriched”) in three categories...

Food consumption and its physiological, psychological, and social antecedents and outcomes have received considerable attention in research across many disciplines, including consumer research. Although researchers use various methods to examine food decision-making, many insights generated stem...

To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1,266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA...

Food products claim to be healthy in many ways, but prior research has either investigated these claims at the macro level (using broad descriptions such as “healthy” or “tasty”) or at the micro level (using single claims like “low fat”). Our meso-level framework examines 1) whether...