Designing food packaging for the Spanish market: Do motivations differ between involved and non-involved adolescents?

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationships among food choice motivations and the relevance of packaging elements (visual and informative elements) in the adolescent market. In addition, these relationships are re-tested in two different frameworks: high-involved consumers and low-involved consumers. 590 young consumers between 13 and 17 years were interviewed at the door of their public or private schools. Structural Modelling was used to test our hypotheses. The first analysis was done considering the global sample. The second one split off the sample into two groups: 351 high-involved adolescents and 239 low-involved adolescents. Our results showed, on one side, that weight control and familiarity motivations do significantly affect the relevance of visual packaging cues. On another side, price motivations and weight control motivations do affect the relevance of informative packaging cues. The rest of food choice motivations are not linked to packaging cues. Second, regarding involvement, our results could not demonstrate that high-involved adolescents will also be higher food choice motivated consumers with a greater concern with the packaging decisions.