“Eww, It Has a Face!” Anthropomorphizing Food Products Deteriorates Consumption Experience

Anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman objects – is a popular marketing strategy used for various products (Aggarwal and McGill 2007; Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2008). This research focuses on the anthropomorphization of food products – a fairly neglected area of research. To promote food products, companies frequently rely on anthropomorphized brand characters such as Mr. Peanut, Tony the Tiger, or the M&M mascots and endow products with humanlike characteristics. For example, Nestlé promotes its cinnamon toast crunch cereals by making the cereals appear alive and Dunkin’ Donuts recently introduced a smiley face donut. In addition, governmental institutions such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) anthropomorphize fruits and vegetables to promote healthy eating to children. What are the consequences of anthropomorphizing food products? While extant anthropomorphism research has focused predominantly on consumer responses before purchase (e.g., liking, purchase; e.g., Wen Wan et al. 2017), the current research takes a new perspective and investigates how anthropomorphizing food products impacts consumption-related outcomes. Drawing from mind perception theory, the central proposition of this research is that anthropomorphizing leads to the perception of Experience – that is, capacity to feel pain, pleasure and emotions (Gray, Gray, and Wegner 2007). Experience transforms an entity into a moral patient. A suffering moral patient triggers feelings of care and concern (Gray et al. 2007; Waytz et al. 2010b), which should negatively influence consumption-related responses.