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The purpose of this research is to investigate how biofortification claims impact consumer food taste inference and purchase intention. Based on the halo effect, the authors propose that food products with biofortification claims are inferred to taste better than regular foods. Due to this inference, biofortification claims subsequently improve purchase intention.

To examine these predictions, the authors conducted three between-subject design lab experiments featuring three staple foods: corn soup (β-carotene biofortification claim present or not), cooked rice (zinc biofortification claim present or not) and uncooked rice (zinc biofortification claim present or not). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two bioproduction claim conditions (present vs absent). Then, taste inference, purchase intention, consumer characteristics and confounding variables were measured.

In Experiment 1, the results showed that biofortification claims indeed appeared to evoke a heuristic halo effect, in which foods with biofortification claims were inferred to taste better than regular food. In Experiment 2, the results showed that participants had more intention to purchase foods with biofortification claims than regular food. The mediation effect of taste inference between biofortification claims and purchase intention was examined. In Experiment 3, the data further showed that this halo effect was more pronounced when consumers held a higher preference (vs lower preference) for the enriched nutritional element.

Biofortification claims have commonly been viewed solely as information about nutrition value for consumers. However, little is known about how biofortification claims impact hedonic consumer expectations. In this paper, the authors find that biofortification claims alone can impact consumer food taste inference, as nutritional information is not related to actual food taste. These findings extend the authors’ understanding of the psychological mechanism behind consumer attitudes towards biofortification.

This paper aims to address the following question: Do consumer inferences of respect (disrespect) contribute to satisfaction (dissatisfaction)? The research question is explored over two studies. The first aimed to test whether respect spontaneously emerged as an important component of consumer satisfaction. The second aimed to examine whether perceptions of respect could explain consumers’ satisfaction response beyond traditional antecedents of satisfaction (i.e. product and service factors, expectations).

The first (pilot) study examined whether respect/disrespect spontaneously emerged in written descriptions of highly satisfactory/dissatisfactory experiences (n = 356). The second (main) study used a survey methodology to test whether perceptions of respect could explain customer satisfaction beyond traditional antecedents (n = 2,641 plus n = 398).

Drawing on theories from social psychology and organizational justice, the current study argues that perceived respect, as inferred by customers from elements of their interactions with organizations, may also be critically involved in the satisfaction response.

Conceptually, the findings place respect as a central antecedent among satisfaction determinants.

Practically, this research underscores the importance of enacting respect and avoiding actions that communicate disrespect because of their effect on satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction is critically important to organizations and so a great deal of research or work has sought to understand its causes – traditionally product performance, service quality and expectations. This current work, or This current research argues that inferred respect, as an indicator of the extent to which people perceive they are valued, should have an important, and general, influence on satisfaction that goes beyond what traditional determinants of satisfaction can explain.

There is research evidence that suggests that perceptions of price unfairness give rise to consumer resistance to prices and result in decreased profit to the firm. However, it is as yet unclear what factors influence perceptions of unfairness. Answers the question, “What is fair?” by proposing that consumers sometimes infer a firm’s motive for a price and that the inferred motive influences perceived price fairness. A study provides evidence that consumers use contextual information to infer a firm’s motive. When consumers infer a negative motive, the price is perceived to be unfair and when consumers do not infer a negative motive, the same price is perceived to be fair. Suggests that marketers should: provide reasons for prices; consider consumers’ likely inferences of motive and either avoid taking actions that are likely to give rise to inferences of negative motive or manage the motive inferred; and consider the inferences that consumers may make for other marketing actions in addition to price.

Consumers’ product evaluations are often influenced by information contained in their memories. Prior to product evaluations, consumers are often exposed to data that permits them to judge the covariation relationships among different product attributes. However, these attribute covariance perceptions may lead to biased product evaluations. Using an experimental design, this study examines the accuracy of consumers’ product attribute covariance beliefs as a function of their product experience and the relevancy of product information to which they are exposed prior to evaluating product performances. The results indicate that even limited product information affects consumers’ beliefs about product performances on attributes for which no information is available. In other words, specific product information may serve as a cue or indicator for other product characteristics via attribute covariance inferences. The accuracy of these inferences appears to be, at least partly, the function of the consumers’ product experience. Consumers with high levels of product experience are more effective at encoding and retrieving product attribute performance information. Implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.

Past research has demonstrated a health halo for food product labels (e.g. organic), resulting in inflated perceptions of a product’s healthfulness (e.g. low fat). While past studies have focused on labeling and related health claims, the health halo of brand names has scarcely been investigated. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the health halo of brand names featuring morality- and purity-signifiers.

The current research uses two experiments to examine the health halo of morality- and purity-signifying brand names on perceptions of nutritional and contaminant attributes. Mediation analysis is performed to investigate perceived naturalness as the mechanism for the brand name effects while moderated mediation analysis examines this mechanism across product types (healthy vs unhealthy).

The findings reveal that both the morality- and purity-signifying brand names produce a health halo on nutritional and contaminant attributes, regardless of product healthiness. Further, mediation and moderated mediation analysis provide evidence for perceived naturalness as the underlying mechanism driving these effects.

This research highlights unwarranted consumer inferences made based upon food brand names and, thus has implications for consumers, public policy and marketing managers.

While much health halo research has focused on labeling, this research examines the health halo of two brand name types which symbolically convey either morality or purity. This research provides additional contributions by investigating perceived naturalness as the underlying mechanism for the effects and is one of the few studies to investigate the health halo for both healthy and unhealthy products.

This paper aims to examine the effects of qualifying language, functional ingredient, ingredient familiarity and inferences of manipulative intent (IMI) on the likelihood that consumers make stimulus-based inferences about the level of scientific support for health claims on food.

An advertisement copy test for a fictitious product bearing a caries risk-reduction claim has been conducted. The test design comprises three claim conditions, each corresponding to one of the sufficient levels of support for nutrient-health relations within the World Health Organization (WHO)-framework.

The claim conditions have affected the likelihood of making stimulus-based inferences, which is lower for high-level-of-support claims as opposed to low-level-of-support and moderate-level-of-support claims. No effect of ingredient familiarity has been observed. The effect of the functional ingredient featured is significant at the 10 per cent-level. IMI has a negative effect on the likelihood of making a stimulus-based inference.

The survey relies on a demographically homogeneous sample.

Examining the likelihood of stimulus-based inferences about health claim substantiation is essential for assessing the effectiveness of claim formulations and for addressing resulting miscommunication.

The current paper addresses the research gap on consumer ability to identify the level of support for health claims within the European context.

To understand the effectiveness of electronic word of mouth, the purpose of this paper is to examine how high- vs low-knowledge consumers judge and attribute the credibility of positive and negative online reviews by drawing upon accessibility–diagnosticity theory and attribution theory.

This study conducts an observation-based study in an online forum and a 2 (review valence) × 2 (consumer knowledge) between-participants factorial experiment to examine the proposed hypotheses.

High-knowledge consumers elicit less perceived credibility and make more non-product-relevant attribution than low-knowledge consumers in negative online reviews. Consumer attribution is also found to mediate the effects of the review valence by consumer knowledge interaction on review credibility.

This study adds to extant research by examining how consumer knowledge plays a key role in determining consumer perception of online review credibility. This study also advances the understanding of different casual inferences about online reviews between high- and low-knowledge consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the direct and indirect effects of three credence labels (Australian, animal welfare and grass-fed) on US consumer attitudes toward buying beef steaks. Furthermore, it explores the impact of consumer attribute knowledge, usage frequency, education and opinion strength on the magnitude of direct and indirect effects.

Data are collected through an online experiment with 460 US consumers and analyzed with path modeling.

The Australian label generates a 86 percent negative direct effect vs a 14 percent negative indirect effect on consumer attitudes, which means that US consumers do not make strong inferences to form their attitudes toward buying Australian beef. The animal welfare label generates 50 percent direct and 50 percent indirect effects. The grass-fed label generates only indirect effects (100 percent). The higher consumer education, attribute knowledge, usage frequency, education and opinion strength, the weaker are the indirect effects of credence labels.

The study focusses on consumers in one country (USA), one product (beef steak) and one label across three attributes, therefore generalization of results is limited.

The study offers a tool to agribusiness managers as well as to policy makers, NGOs and consumer groups to design and assess the effectiveness of communication campaigns attempting to strengthen (or weaken) consumer inferences and attitudes relative to credence labels.

Despite the wide literature on consumer inferences based on credence labels, this is the first study that quantitatively disentangles the complex set of inferential effects generated by credence labels and explores common relationships across multiple credence attributes.

As an alternative to straight rhetorical questions, questions using analogies that invite the reader to think about the frame of reference to answer the target have been used in advertising to persuade. This paper aims to investigate consumer responses to the use of analogical questions in ads for incrementally new products and the important variables moderating those responses.

Four between-subjects experiments examined how product evaluations in response to analogical questions differ from non-analogical variants as a function of consumers’ persuasion awareness (Studies 1 and 2) and also tested if the effectiveness of an analogical question among potential consumers who are more aware of persuasion attempts might be enhanced only when it is proposed with a strong rather than a weak frame of reference (Study 3), and when the frame of reference and the target share underlying similarities (Study 4).

Analogical questions are more persuasive than non-analogical variants for participants who are more aware of persuasion attempts. Inferential fluency mediates the results. Furthermore, the positive impact of analogical questions for participants high in persuasion awareness is diminished when the frame of reference is weak or from a dissimilar domain. The same patterns are not evident for participants who are less aware of persuasion attempts.

Drawing on the concepts of inferential fluency, this study offers an empirically-based view of how the analogical questions in advertising may bias the responses exhibited by individuals who demonstrate either a high or low level of persuasion awareness.

The inclusion of an analogy can lower consumers’ tendency to behave in a defensive manner by facilitating inferences about intended claims that are implicitly stated in a rhetorical question and achieve higher levels of persuasion.

This study contributes to prior study on rhetorical questions within a persuasion communication by adopting inferential fluency as an underlying mechanism for analyzing the impact of analogical questions and individual’s awareness of persuasion.

This paper aims to investigate inferences consumers make about organic and all-natural labeled products in both food and non-food contexts using the health halo effect as a theoretical foundation.

This paper uses three experiments to test the effects of organic and all-natural labeling across three product types, food, personal hygiene and household cleaning, while controlling for environmental attitudes.

The results of the experiments in the context of food, personal hygiene and household cleaning products suggest that both organic and all-natural labeling produce halo effects. Distinct findings are presented across the three product types.

Findings indicate that consumers may make unwarranted inferences about both organic and all-natural labeled products and demonstrates that the health halo effect is a potentially robust phenomenon, pervasive across a diverse array of products. This research used a crowdsourcing platform for sample recruitment. Future research should validate the results of these experiments with other sample types.

This research suggests that consumers may make similar unwarranted inferences for diverse products bearing organic and all-natural labels. These inferences are particularly intriguing given the differing regulatory requirements for the labels

Organic and all-natural labels are ubiquitous in both food and non-food products. However, research on either label primarily exists in a food context and has not directly compared the labels. Understanding the inferences consumers make based on the labels across product types is imperative for both marketing and public policy.