Shaping up: How package shape and consumer body conspire to affect food healthiness evaluation

Abstract

Integrating research on human body shapes with studies of health cues in food package design, this research explores how food packages resembling humanoid shapes impact consumers’ evaluation of food healthiness. Adopting a self-referencing perspective, two studies show that packages resembling slim humanoid shapes lead to foods being evaluated as healthier, especially with female consumers whose bodily characteristics mark them as being not thin. Study 1 uses packages designed to mimic humanoid body shapes and shows that slimness effects depend on consumer gender and body mass index (BMI): The heuristic that slim packages contain more healthy foods is more pronounced with women and increasing BMI. Study 2 replicates these findings and offers process evidence for self-referencing as a mediator of the package slimness – healthiness evaluation. Together the findings highlight package shape as an important cue to food healthiness evaluation and aid marketers and designers in better matching packages to target audiences and products.