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People frequently experience a conflict between immediate pleasure and long-term health when consuming healthy food. This study investigates how anthropomorphizing healthy food influences consumers’ sense of pleasure and their subsequent food preferences.

Using different samples and food items, the authors conducted five online or laboratory studies to provide empirical support for the research hypothesis, rule out potential alternative explanations, and demonstrate boundary conditions.

By conducting five empirical studies involving self-reported and actual eating preferences, this study found that anthropomorphism increases consumer preference for and actual intake of healthy food. Such an anthropomorphism effect is driven by the increased positive affect evoked by anthropomorphism. However, this positive effect is suppressed for consumers who experience low trust in their affective feelings. Additionally, the effect is weakened when consumers readily attribute their affective feelings to a target-irrelevant source.

This study contributes to the literature on healthy consumption, anthropomorphism, and mood, revealing whether and how food anthropomorphism affects consumers. For marketers in the field of healthy food and relevant policymakers, anthropomorphic means can be employed, such as giving products human names, to enhance consumer preference for them. Moreover, anthropomorphizing can help alleviate consumers’ concerns about the relative lack of pleasurable taste in healthy foods and compensate for the lack of hedonic value that consumers may feel, thereby enhancing consumer welfare.

1. Anthropomorphism increases consumer preference for healthy food and actual intake of it.

2. The anthropomorphism effect is driven by the increased positive affect evoked by anthropomorphism, through which affective feelings offer evaluative and decisional informativeness for judgments and decision-making.

3. The positive effect of anthropomorphism is suppressed for consumers who experience low trust in their affective feelings.

4. The anthropomorphism effect is weakened when consumers readily attribute their affective feelings to a target-irrelevant source.

Anthropomorphism increases consumer preference for healthy food and actual intake of it.

The anthropomorphism effect is driven by the increased positive affect evoked by anthropomorphism, through which affective feelings offer evaluative and decisional informativeness for judgments and decision-making.

The positive effect of anthropomorphism is suppressed for consumers who experience low trust in their affective feelings.

The anthropomorphism effect is weakened when consumers readily attribute their affective feelings to a target-irrelevant source.

Sharing project information is critical for the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns. However, few users share medical crowdfunding projects on their social networks, and the sharing behavior of medical crowdfunding projects on social networking sites has not been well studied. Therefore, this study explored the factors and potential mechanisms influencing users’ sharing behaviors on networking sites.

A research model was developed based on the attribution-affect model of helping and social capital theory. Data were collected using a longitudinal survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data. We conducted post hoc analyses to validate the results of the quantitative analysis.

The analysis results verified the effects of perceived external attribution, perceived uncontrollable attributions, and perceived unstable attributions on sympathy and identified the effect of sympathy and social characteristics of medical crowdfunding users on sharing behavior.

This research provides a comprehensive theoretical understanding of users’ sharing behavior characteristics and provides implications for enhancing the efficiency of medical crowdfunding activities.

This paper aims to examine the image realism effect, studying how changing the front-of-package visual affects the acceptance of an insect-based food by consumers. By comparing reactions to realistic and less realistic images of an insect as an ingredient, this research investigated how visual imagery can affect consumers’ responses, reducing perceived disgust or increasing expected taste.

Three experiments studied the impact of realistic (photo) versus less realistic (drawing) images for two types of insects (mealworm, cricket) on consumers’ psychological distance from the image, perceived disgust, expected taste, willingness to eat, purchase intention and food choice.

Study 1 demonstrates that using a less realistic insect image reduces perceived disgust, with psychological distance from this image and perceived disgust mediating realism effect on willingness to eat. Study 2 shows that a less realistic insect image, perceived as more remote, improves expected taste and willingness to eat. Study 3 confirms the results by measuring behavior: consumers were more likely to choose the product with the less realistic image.

The research focused on one kind of product and two ways of depicting this product, limiting the generalizability of the findings for other visual representations and product categories.

The findings suggest how brand managers can use the image realism effect on the packaging of novel, sustainable products to influence consumers, reducing their disgust and increasing their expected taste.

This research breaks new ground by explaining how visual cues on packaging affect the acceptance of insect-eating, drawing on construal level theory.

With the increasing competition and rise in the number of brands in almost every product category, consumers need help to figure out authentic brands. Thus, it becomes imperative for marketers to examine the factors that influence the perceptions of brand authenticity (PBA) and its favorable outcomes for the brand. This paper aims to explore the critical antecedents (i.e. “brand heritage” and “brand nostalgia”) and consequences [i.e. “consumer brand engagement” (CBE) and “perceived brand ownership” (PBO)] of PBA in this study.

In total, 368 responses were collected online through a self-administered survey method and were analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS v 25.

The findings reveal that both brand heritage and brand nostalgia can affect PBA. In addition, PBA engenders CBE and PBO among consumers toward the brand.

The study findings help the marketers to find ways to induce authenticity perceptions among consumers about their brands, which can further translate into PBO and CBE.

This study empirically verifies a model to enhance PBA through brand heritage and nostalgia. Further, it explores CBE and PBO as the potential outcomes of PBA.