The Neglect of Positive Aspects in Novel Food Products

• Main Authors: Florack, Arnd, Koch, Teresa, Haasova, Simona, Alves, Hans
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brand preferences; Consumer behavior; Food; Nutrition; Product choice
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Today's marketing trend is lo design products that are very similar lo the already existing ones, but made healthier with a special ingredients composition. The current research investigates how consumers compare innovative food alternatives with existing ones and form their purchase intentions and tastiness expectations. A basic principle that can be used to form hypotheses about the formation of expectations towards novel alternatives is the cue overlap principle of differentiation, which has recently been studied in social psychology to explain the formation of attitudes towards individuals and groups. In line with the cue overlap principle of differentiation, we show that consumers do not rely on positive aspects that apply to both an existing and a novel food product when they form their evaluations of the novel product. Instead, they evaluate a novel food product primarily based on those attributes that differentiate it from existing ones. This phenomenon represents an undesired barrier for the introduction of novel foods because they are likely to share positive attributes with existing products, and are highly likely to be differentiated with negative attributes.