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Building upon humans’ trichromatic vision systems, dual-process theory and halo effects, this paper aims to examine the effects of red and green color brightness of food pictures on customers’ evaluations and purchase intention of restaurant food.

The proposed hypotheses were tested across three experimental designed studies on a total of 575 participants. Multilevel analysis, analysis of variance and multivariate analysis of variance were applied for data analysis.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the effects of red brightness and green brightness on customers’ affective and cognitive evaluation of food and purchase intention in Study 1. Study 2 validates the effects of red and green brightness on food evaluation with the presence of nutrition information. Study 3 further elaborates on the halo effects of color brightness on customers’ favorable intentions to patronize a restaurant and willingness to pay for a meal in a controlled lab experiment.

One main limitation is that this paper focuses on unveiling the role of color brightness and does not consider other picture properties, which opens an avenue for future research.

This paper includes implications for food promotion and management of customers’ experience via food pictures.

This paper is one of the first attempts to reveal the effects of red and green brightness of food pictures on customers’ food evaluation and food consumption behavioral intentions.

The study's purpose was to examine the role of two main factors in the design of online food delivery systems (OFDS) user interfaces: the display of pictures and calories – on consumers' attitudes toward online food delivery systems, intentions to use such systems, spending on a food item and tipping behavior.

The study is grounded in the elaboration likelihood model. A 2 × 2 randomized post-test only between-subjects experimental design manipulated the types of pictures (food item only vs consumers eating a food item) and calorie information display style (numbers vs activity symbols) to determine whether they influence consumers' attitudes, intentions to purchase, spending and tipping behaviors.

The results show that the calorie display style influences consumers' intentions to use such systems and consumers' tipping behaviors toward the delivery driver. It was also found that the type of picture shown to consumers influences their intentions to purchase through ODFS, such that pictures of consumers enjoying a product is more effective in stimulating intentions to purchase than pictures containing only the food items.

This study advances the current knowledge on web design for restaurants wishing to distribute via online food delivery systems. Moreover, this study extends the literature on persuasion in online environments by focusing on foodservice – an area that only recently has undergone substantial distribution online. Finally, this study advances the literature on tipping behavior.

This study provides several contributions for both restaurants and online food delivery system designers. Specifically, it illustrates exactly how specific elements in the design of the web interface and the message targeted at consumers influence consumers' behavior. Most importantly, this study provides insight into tipping behaviors for the delivery driver. This is important because the delivery driver is an important participant in the new value chain of restaurant delivery.

As the first study to develop an experiment that tests these important design conditions, this study offers several critical theoretical and practical implications. This study is the first attempt to examine various ways to present persuasive information in an OFDS in order to stimulate consumers' behaviors. Moreover, this study illustrates that the use of website design that enhance social presence is critical to website effectiveness in OFDS.

Food packaging pictures are one of the most important extrinsic cues for consumers to evaluate food products before purchasing. Over the past decades, marketers have used exaggerated pictures to attract consumers' attention, enhance their attitude toward a product and increase their purchase intention. This study examined the interplay of “puff-up” product picture, food type and picture type in influencing consumers' responses via persuasion knowledge.

The research comprises two 2 × 2 factorial experiments. Study 1 tested the interaction effect of puffery (high vs low) and food type (utilitarian vs. hedonic) on consumers' responses using two fictitious brands of prepared food, whereas Study 2 tested the interaction effect of puffery (high vs. low) and picture type (ingredients vs. cooked food) using a fictitious brand of Chinese delicacy.

Results demonstrated that the degree of picture puffery did not influence consumers' responses to utilitarian food and ingredient image. Conversely, consumers were sensitive to puffery when they see hedonic food and cooked-food image. Our findings also suggested that consumers' persuasion knowledge mediates the relationship between puffery and their responses.

The presented findings facilitate marketers to know consumers' attitude about food puffery pictures.

This research is one of the first efforts to empirically explore the influences of persuasion knowledge on food puffery pictures. The importance of this work is underscored by the fact that a growing number of visual exaggerations are adopted on food packaging.

This paper aims to examine the effect of proximal (versus distant) depiction of food products within an advertising or online context on consumer responses across food types (indulgent versus non-indulgent) and display formats that lead to a single exposure (e.g. billboard) versus multiple exposures (e.g. online menu).

Five experimental studies, using both implicit and explicit elicitation techniques, demonstrate the effect of proximal food depictions. The paper rules out alternative explanations (portion-size perception and participants’ bodily distance) and controls for several other factors (e.g. visual crowding, body-mass index, dietary restrictions, etc.)

The studies find that proximal food pictures are implicitly associated with tastiness more for indulgent (vs non-indulgent) foods; lead to higher purchase intention for indulgent food upon a single exposure driven by enhanced perceived tastiness; and evoke satiation upon multiple exposures.

This research identifies the effect of spatial proximity of food depiction on consumer responses using different stimuli. Future work could explore the effects in alternate consummatory contexts.

The findings provide clear instructions to marketers and policymakers on how to tailor consumer responses using spatial distance in depiction of food products, depending on the food type and display format. Understanding the effect of visual food cues will help policymakers devise strategies to counter over-consumption, which increases the risk of non-communicable diseases and reduces consumer well-being (SDG 3, United Nations).

Introducing a novel pictorial cue (i.e. the spatial distance of product depiction), this paper contributes insights to the literature on implicit associations, visual information processing, satiation, over-consumption and food marketing.

The purpose of this paper was to study responses to traditional food of a country, focusing on emotion-motivational responses by locals and foreigners.

Through an experimental design study, Portuguese and Foreign participants were exposed to both traditional and nontraditional food pictures of a country and asked to evaluate their emotional and motivational responses while physiological responses of electrodermal activity were being continuously recorded. Predisposition factors of body dissatisfaction, food neophobia and food involvement were also evaluated given their potential role in predicting the responses to the visualization of the food pictures.

This study found that local traditional food received a higher positive evaluation than nontraditional food with locals evaluating it even higher than foreigners. Higher feelings of arousal and desire as well as willingness to try in response to traditional food were also found as well as higher feelings of pleasure by locals. However, interestingly, and contrary to expectations derived from previous literature, emotion-motivational responses were not significantly different between locals and foreigners.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research addressed an identified research gap in the literature, being the first one evaluating the autonomic responses of consumers to traditional food by exploring how local and foreign consumers respond to traditional food versus nontraditional food using psychophysiological measures of emotion.

El objetivo principal de esta investigación fue estudiar las respuestas a la comida tradicional de un país, centrándose en las respuestas emoción-motivación de los locales y los extranjeros.

A través de un estudio de diseño experimental, los participantes portugueses y extranjeros fueron expuestos a imágenes de comida tradicional y no tradicional de un país y se les pidió que evaluaran sus respuestas emocionales y motivacionales mientras se registraban continuamente las respuestas fisiológicas de la actividad electrodérmica. También se evaluaron los factores de predisposición de la insatisfacción corporal, la neofobia a la comida y la implicación en la comida, dado su papel potencial en la predicción de las respuestas a la visualización de las imágenes de comida.

Encontramos que la comida tradicional local recibió una evaluación positiva más alta que la comida no tradicional, con los locales evaluándola incluso más alto que los extranjeros. También se encontraron mayores sentimientos de excitación y deseo, así como la voluntad de probar en respuesta a la comida tradicional, así como mayores sentimientos de placer por parte de los locales. Sin embargo, curiosamente, y en contra de las expectativas derivadas de la literatura anterior, las respuestas emocionales-motivacionales no fueron significativamente diferentes entre los locales y los extranjeros.

Esta investigación abordó una brecha de investigación identificada en la literatura, siendo la primera que evalúa las respuestas autonómicas de los consumidores a la comida tradicional al explorar cómo los consumidores locales y extranjeros responden a la comida tradicional frente a la no tradicional utilizando medidas psicofisiológicas de emoción.

本研究的主要目的是研究本地人和外国人对一个国家的传统食物的情感动机反应。

通过实验设计研究, 葡萄牙人和外国参与者会看到一个国家的传统和非传统食物图片, 并被要求评估他们的情绪和动机反应, 同时连续记录皮肤电活动的生理反应。考虑到其他变量在预测对食物图片可视化的反应方面的潜在作用, 还评估了身体不满、食物恐惧症和食物参与的易感因素的影响。

研究结果发现, 当地的传统食物比非传统食物得到了更高的积极评价, 且当地人对它的评价甚至比外国人更高。当地人对传统食物的表现出更高的唤醒, 欲望和尝试意愿, 以及更高的愉悦感。然而, 有趣的是, 与以往文献的预期相反, 当地人和外国人之间的情绪动机反应并没有呈现出明显差异。

这项研究填补了现有文献中的研究空白, 它是第一个通过使用心理生理学的情绪测量方法来探索本地和外国消费者对传统食物与非传统食物的反应, 从而评估消费者对传统食物自主反应的研究。

Unlike many other cross‐cultural advertising comparisons, this study compares two different cultures within the same country, and the topic of the content analysis is narrowed down to one particular type of product – restaurants. The content analysis is conducted on ads for Chinese restaurants and English restaurants in newspapers printed in New Zealand. The number of ads in different newspapers, themes of the ads and ads with and without relevant pictures are compared. The results of the study show that the number of ads for Chinese restaurants in English newspapers is significantly greater than the number of ads for English restaurants in Chinese newspapers; the number of ads for other restaurants in Chinese newspapers is significantly more than that in English newspapers; the number of ads for restaurants in holiday issues is significantly greater than that in non‐holiday issues; the themes of the ads for Chinese restaurants focus on basic functions, while the themes of the ads for English restaurants focus on dining atmosphere; and the non‐language speakers understand significantly better ads with relevant pictures than those without.

With influences on aspects of food choice originating from a number of sources and investigation requiring multidisciplinary considerations, more qualitative methods have proved effective in offering some insight into the changing role of food. These methods are particularly useful when considering food encounters and diet of both children and adolescents, as they can provide more personalised accounts of food use and social interactions than more quantitative alternatives. Pictures have previously been used to assist in food related studies, but with limitations. This paper considers the effectiveness of using pictorial prompts to initiate unstructured interviews with two sample groups of children and adolescents, highlighting an increased potential for their use in future research. Other considerations include the restrictions that are often imposed on the independent researcher in terms of time resources and limited access.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between mental simulation and affective misforecasting of hedonic consumption experiences.

The authors present a series of lab and field studies that manipulate mental simulation and experience type (ordinary versus extraordinary) and measure affective misforecasting and mindfulness. Data were analyzed using a combination of ANOVA and PROCESS.

Mental simulation before an experience causes negative affective misforecasting to occur for extraordinary experiences but not ordinary experiences. The authors further show that mindfulness mediates the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

The findings provide insight into how thinking about experiences before consumption affects consumers’ actual engagement with the experience. This paper suggests that, by encouraging consumers to mentally simulate their experiences before consumption, marketers may cause consumers to miss out on enjoying their experiences to the fullest. Instead, marketers may want to maintain some mystique by encouraging consumers to “come see for themselves”.

The authors demonstrate a novel cause of affective misforecasting: mental simulation before the experience and provide initial evidence in support of a novel psychological process explanation (i.e. mindfulness) for the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

This paper aims to explore the influence of four types of imagery stimuli (i.e. visual, olfactory, gustatory and auditory) on food craving intensity based on the Elaborated Intrusion theory and the central role of mental imagery in the food craving experience. The roles of overall perception of sensory imagery attributes and perceived availability in moderating this process were also tested. The aim is to extract the positive aspects of food cravings by increasing them and shifting them toward healthy foods.

In an online experiment, 314 participants were randomly primed with each imagery condition. After being exposed to either healthy or unhealthy food pictures, participants completed a questionnaire measuring their craving state, trait food craving, imaging ability, BMI, dietary restraint, hunger and mood. At the end, the impact of food craving intensity on marketing outcomes (i.e. willingness to pay, price sensitivity and food intake) were tested.

As predicted, visual imagery was found to be the strongest stimulus inducing food craving followed by olfactory, gustatory and auditory stimuli. Furthermore, the results indicate that perceived availability of food is the only important variable moderating this process. Additionally, the results show that hunger makes consumers more susceptible to food cravings than mood. Moreover, food craving intensity showed significant impact on the two marketing outcomes: willingness to pay and food intake.

First, the authors used a cheeseburger as unhealthy food and salad as healthy food, future studies can increase the generalizability of the findings by using other types of food. Second, physiological and psychological disorders should be considered and studied as influential factors on food cravings in future studies. Third, future studies should include some behavioral measures besides the analysis of state and trait craving. Fourth, although the main objective of this study was to compare the effect of different imagery stimuli on consumers’ food craving, there was no control (no-stimulus) condition.

Marketing strategists may benefit from the fact that encouraging consumers to visualize some specific type of food product along with informing them about its availability will elevate their craving for that food product. Hence, using this strategy in shopping environments could be beneficial. In the context of improving people’s diet, our results showed that encouraging people to visualize healthy foods (e.g. fruits and vegetables) might be more helpful than priming them with the benefits of eating healthy.

There has been a recent enthusiastic interest in identifying the role of food related mental imagery and stimuli in consumers’ decision making and their final consumption (Christian et al., 2016). Nevertheless, very few studies in marketing have paid attention to these underpinning stimuli driving food craving and the significant influence of this food craving phenomenon on marketing outcomes.

Food guides are graphic representations of food-based dietary guidelines that support national health policies and programming. They are visual aids simplifying complex nutritional messaging for the public. While pyramid and circle formats are the most common shapes in use worldwide, the dinner plate format is increasing in use due to its perceived effectiveness. However, research examining visual attributes of food guide graphics, and the dinner plate model specifically, is limited. The purpose of this paper is to systematically compare and analyse key visual attributes of plate food guide graphics (across multiple examples) to assess their potential for effective visual communication of nutrition messaging.

This study engages in a qualitative analysis of compositional elements of food guide graphics. Data collection and analysis are grounded in the methods of compositional interpretation, which includes a qualitative, descriptive approach to establishing a thematic survey of the data.

Unique visual attributes of the plate food guide (including image content, spatial organisation and expressive content) present challenges in the communication of key nutritional messaging regarding proportionality, moderation and overall usability.

A better understanding of the visual attributes of the plate food guide model will contribute to improved design and development of this key public health tool by researchers, educators and health practitioners. Additionally, the examination of visual attributes has implications for the study of food guide understanding and use.

This study highlights the need for critical visual skills in qualitative health research, and to address gaps in health education more broadly.