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The wide literature about healthy behaviours posits that a high level of self-control is required in order to make healthy choices. This work intends to demonstrate that retailers, through the management of in-store marketing levers, can influence shopping behaviour, no matter which is the individual tendency to engage in cognitive behaviours. For this specific purpose, we have considered participants' “Need for Cognition” as a proxy of self-control.

With reference to a specific category (cookies), we created a new display based on benefits (healthy eating) rather than products' attributes. A pre-test was conducted before the main experiment in order to assess the potential ability of the new nutritional display to help customers selecting healthier products, by testing participants' awareness and comprehension of the stimuli proposed. Then, an online between-subjects experiment was conducted by simulating the shoppers' expedition in the cookies' aisle inside a store with the aim to demonstrate that healthy choices can be also made on impulse.

Our findings showed that when both communication and visual cues are provided, people low in need for cognition (NFC) are more willing to select healthy products from the shelf, compared with people high in NFC.

While there is a wide literature explaining the mechanisms supporting healthy choices, fewer are the contributions about the role of retailers in promoting healthy eating through in-store marketing levers. More important, there is no contribution about how to promote health among people with low level of self-control.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the importance of nutritional information in the selection of healthy food products and test the effects of different communication stimuli on people with different levels of self-control (NFC used as a proxy). Specifically, the authors posit that easy-to-process and intuitive nutritional information can lead to a substantial change in the shopping behaviour. Furthermore, this work wants to test the effect on behaviours, emotions and judgements of two different communication signs (stars and silhouettes) in the promotion of healthy food products inside grocery stores.

After the development of a new nutritional display, the authors identified two different communication stimuli (stars and silhouettes) in order to test their impact on emotions evoked, judgements and behaviours. First, a pre-test was conducted using neuro-marketing tools (Face Reader) to detect the emotions aroused by the communications and then a main online between-subjects experiment involving 222 participants was carried out to understand the impact on choices and attitudes. Data were analysed using SPSS.

Results showed that communication plays a key role in helping customers choosing healthier products. Concerning the different communication stimuli, the authors found a significant difference in the emotion evoked by the different signs used. This difference translates into a judgemental change but not necessarily into a behavioural one.

To the authors’ knowledge, previous researchers have focused their attention only on the nutritional values communicated at a product level through different product labels, while nobody has tried to implement and test a category/segment level communication strategy.

E' molto importante che in questo V° Congresso degli Esperti scientifici del turismo una sezione del lavoro sia dedicata all'insegnamento turistico perchè non v'è problema di carattere scientifico o sociale che possa ignorare la scuola, in quanto la scuola è l'unico organo che esprime ininterrottamente la forza vitale dei popoli: eterno organismo vivente, la scuola salva e afferma la continuità spirituale dei paesi, assorbendo ed equilibrando in essa lo spirito delle forme ideologiche e delle tecniche nuove imposte dai rivolgimenti e mutamenti perenni della società.