Details:
Summary:
The research aims to determine if consumers of different demographic groups respond to imagery, especially human imagery, on food packaging differently.
Background: During the summer of 2020, brands such as Quaker Oats’ (PepsiCo) Aunt Jemima, Con Agra’s Mrs. Butterworth’s, Mars’ Uncle Ben’s, and farmerowned cooperative Land O’ Lakes have rolled out branding changes; acknowledging the culturally offensive imagery on their packaging. (N. Nittle, 2021)
The authors of this paper are not researching the implications of offensive imagery produced from stereotypes. Rather, the pullback of imagery from these brands struck an interest to determine if subjects – in North America – respond to imagery in food packaging differently; if that imagery contained photographs of white, nonwhite, and mixed-race people.
Consumer packaging is a rapidly growing industry, given the growth in world population, access to groceries and markets, e-commerce, and a rising middle class (to name a few). There are many aspects of consumer packaging that draw the consumer in to create a relationship with the brand. Color, imagery, structure, typography – all of these are design elements aimed at attracting attention of the consumer at very quick time intervals.
At the point of sale (or, inferred, ecommerce as well), well designed packaging can “forge a truly unique and personal relationship with the consumer -’be my friend’ (Connolly, 1996).
Similarly, Simmonds and Spence state, “The sight of food has a profound effect on us, from making us feel hungry/increasing our appetite, through to encouraging us to imagine what it would be like to eat that which we see” (Simmonds and Spence 2019).
According to Simmonds and Spence, “Images of food constitute salient visual stimuli in the mind of the consumer. They are capable of promoting both feelings of hunger and the desire for food.” (Simmonds and Spence, 2016). Fan, et al states, “humans are known to have selective attention to visual stimuli. Selective attention is the process of focusing on a particular object in the environment for a certain period of time. Attention is a limited resource, so selective attention allows us to tune out unimportant details and focus on what really matters. Previous studies have explored the relation between human attention and visual sentiment and found that humans attend to emotional objects more than emotionally neutral objects” (Fan, S, et al 2020).
In 2015, Vogl’s work on imagery in food packaging saw a statistically significant difference in consumer preferences of (crackers) food packaging with imagery vs. illustration, but the imagery was of food, not human imagery (Vogl, H. E, 2015).
There is little study of how human imagery in food packaging can provide that connection with the brand’s product, despite many brands using human imagery in their packaging. As it is well-known that consumers acknowledge packaged products (especially on grocery shelves) within seconds, that imagery on the package must allow the consumer to “focus on what really matters”. Yet, can this research asses whether human imagery, which includes photos of non-white, mixed race, and white families impact a consumer response to the brand?