Research Seminar Marketing - "From Observation to Social Transmission: How Communication through Cues Shapes the Construction of Food Product Perceptions" - Simona Haásová, HEC Lausanne

This research advances a novel theoretical position, a semiotic serial reproduction approach, to investigate the relationship between healthiness and tastiness perceptions of food products in cue-based perception and communication. In two exploratory and one confirmatory study we show that all cues used to communicate healthiness or tastiness show overlap of some degree. This semiotic characteristic predicts systematic changes in healthiness and tastiness perception, amplified by repetition, and the choice of cues moderates the effect size. This results in an illusory correlation, a perceived positive relationship between healthiness and tastiness of food products even if they are stereotypically negatively related (the unhealthy-tasty intuition). Our research bears implications for health communication and marketing, and it highlights how the influence of semiotic characteristics (e.g., cue overlap) can override the influence of stereotypical expectancies, resulting in illusory correlations.