Effects of Product Unit Image on Consumption of Snack Foods

Across a series of three studies, the authors demonstrate that the number of product units displayed on a package biases consumers’ perceptions of package size, serving size and actual consumption. Specifically, consumers use an anchoring heuristic to infer that packages with a greater number of units displayed on them (e.g., 7 cookies vs. 4 cookies) have a larger size. The authors also show that consumers anchor on this arbitrary image, and use it to estimate how large an individual serving size is. Importantly, the authors demonstrate that actual consumption of the food product follows this anchor judgment.

Citation:

Adriana Madzharov and Lauren Block (2011) ,"Effects of Product Unit Image on Consumption of Snack Foods", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Alan Bradshaw, Chris Hackley, and Pauline Maclaran, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 481.