| Eating food allows us to meet our biological imperatives of surviving and passing along our genes, and thus encountering food in our environments automatically encourages us to eat, especially when the food is appetizing to our senses (i.e. looks, smells, tastes good). However, other factors about how food is presented have power to alter our attitudes and behaviors as well. The ways in which we encounter food, especially how it is presented, packaged and available to our senses, serve as cues that directly affect how we feel and act from moment to moment. Most food marketing means to take advantage of this instinctual response by presenting food products in advertisements, displays and packaging looking appetizing and ready to be eaten. This study examined how depictions of food (i.e. whether directly available to the senses or in packages) interact with other parameters about the food (i.e. perceived health level) to influence the dynamic processing of and memory for details in food advertisements as well as appetitive reactions toward the food products themselves in various states of packaging. An experiment was conducted in which N=123 subjects viewed a series of advertisements that varied their portrayals of food. Before and after exposure to these ads, participants viewed, reacted to and categorized a series of food product images. The primary prediction throughout the study was that ads and products that portrayed food as representational, or sharing more perceptual characteristics of the food objects themselves, would elicit a greater biological imperative, elicit more appetitive activation which, as a result of motivated cognition, would result in both more positive feelings and more cognitive resources being allocated to taking in information about the food. As a result, these portrayals of food would result in better memory and more positive attitudes towards the messages and the products. The results provide tentative support for the proposed underlying mechanism (i.e. the activation of a biological imperative) during exposure to the advertisements but relatively strong support for the cognitive and affective predictions. However, the data very strongly support that the most representational food product images activate greater biological imperatives, more appetitive activation, and thus better cognitive and emotional evaluations. |
