Color and Confusion

Most consumers spend less than 10 seconds to make an online shopping decision (Anesbury et al., 2016) and research in cognitive engineering showed that consumers can make accurate food decisions in less than one second (Milosavljevic et al., 2011). In a fast paced world, consumers lack the necessary time to comprehensively process detailed product information and thus marketers are increasing their efforts in making natural and healthy claims more salient on their products (Berry et al., 2017). There are different strategies that companies adopt to make health claims. For food products, visuals in general play a very important role as food selection is often guided solely by visual cues (van der Laan et al., 2011). To judge the healthiness of a product, consumers tend to rely on color as an explicit signal (Steiner & Florack, 2023). Marozzo et al. (2020) introduced the concept of "au naturel" colors referring to the natural, simple state of packaging colors and showed that consumers perceive healthy food packed in beige packaging to be more genuine and they are willing to pay more for it. The psychological meaning attributed to the colors (Regan et al., 2001), and in the specific case of au naturel colors the perception of authenticity (Marozzo et al., 2020) can overrule the reality of the product quality. Therefore, this project calls for attention to possible misleading messages that au naturel colors could transfer. As the findings of the studies will show au naturel colors can lead to healthiness perception even for snacking products rich in calories. These findings call for extensive policy implications and ethical managerial decisions to genuinely transmit healthiness cues by using au naturel colors only when the product has real healthy benefits.