Lay Belief Matters: The Boomerang Effect of Taste-Focused Message on Healthy Food Marketing via Psychological Reactance

This study compared the main effect of taste- vs. health-focused messages on consumer responses and investigated whether individuals' construal level (i.e., the extent to which people think abstractly or concretely about decisions) and their lay belief of unhealthy-tasty intuition (UTI) moderated the effect of the message strategy. Study 1 (N = 128) employed a between-subject experimental design with four types of message strategies and found no significant differences in persuasion. Study 2 (N = 224) conducted a 2 (message type: taste-focus vs. health-focus) * 2 (state construal level: low vs. high) between-subject experiment. Results showed that among high-UTI consumers, taste-focused messages (vs. health-focused messages) triggered more psychological reactance, which caused negative responses to healthy food promotion, operationalized as negative attitudes toward the ad and brand and reduced purchase intentions. However, the congruency effect between message type and construal level was not found. These findings reveal that the effectiveness of healthy food marketing strategies depends on one's food-related pre-existing beliefs.