Look the part, be the part

Pretty food = healthy food, at least in the minds of consumers.

New research in the Journal of Marketing by Linda Hagen, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behavior at USC, explores whether the way in which food is displayed affects perceptions of health.

So-called classical aesthetics are characterized by patterns that occur in nature, and one of those classic features is symmetry.  Nature gravitates toward symmetry – think about spiderwebs, honeycombs, and fish scales, for example.  When people see  food that is symmetrical, they tend to believe it is more natural – and when they think a food is more natural, they perceive it to be healthier.

In Hagen’s study, two groups of consumers were provided with an identical set of information about the ingredients and price associated with a slice of avocado toast. One group saw a “pretty” piece of toast (shown above on the right), while the other group saw an “ugly” one (shown above on the left). 

Despite the identical descriptions, consumers who saw the “pretty” toast rated it as healthier and more natural than those presented with the “ugly” toast. Experiments with other foods revealed a similar pattern.

This only seems to apply to “classically pretty” food.  In contrast, so-called “expressive aesthetics” are more creative (e.g. foods cut into shapes to simulate a scene).  Those expressively pretty foods did not affect perceptions of whether that food was natural or healthy. The pattern only held with the symmetrical or classically pretty arrangements.

Hagen argues that her findings have implications for marketers who want their healthy foods to be perceived as such. It also has shadow implications -- when marketers may pedal a relatively unhealthy food as healthy, simply by depicting it in a classically pretty way.