Halo effect of color brightness of food picture on consumers’ perceived value and intentions

1. Halo effect of color brightness of food picture on consumers’ perceived value and intentions Present for GWTTRA Ruiying (Raine) Cai & Christina Chi School of Hospitality Business Management Washington State University

2. Outlines • Background • Methods • Results • Conclusions & Implications

3. Food pictures in menu • Digital menu • 46% of smartphone users use their phones at least once a month to order restaurant food (National Restaurant Association, 2017) • Food pictures in menu • Presenting food pictures can increase consumers’ overall evaluations of the restaurant (Hou, Yang, & Sun, 2017; Pennings, Striano, & Oliverio, 2013). • Color is a critical component of the food pictures (Garber, Hyatt, & Starr, 2000). • Color may influence individuals’ food evaluations (Wei, Ou, Luo, & Hutchings, 2012) • Previous studies: verbal cues • Menu descriptions • Nutritional information • Scant attention has been paid on color of food picture.

4. Purpose of the study • The specific objectives of this study are (1) to examine the effects of color brightness of the menu items on consumers’ favorable attitudes and willingness to pay (2) to investigate the interactions between level of color brightness and perceived value on consumers’ favorable attitudes and willingness to pay

5. Color brightness • Color can be measured with three main properties (hue, saturation, brightness). • Color brightness (value/lightness) is defined as the degree of darkness or lightness of a certain color (Gorn et al., 1997). • Compared to the large attention on specific hues or hue category, brightness and saturation have been overlooked. • Color brightness has shown strong and independent effect on consumer behaviors than saturation (Valdez and Mehrabian, 1994). • Color brightness is especially relevant when talking about food-related behaviors.

6. Trichromatic vision system • Three color components can explain the color sensation for human beings, red, green, and blue (Wu & Sun, 2013). • Prior evidence in other non-human primates using trichromacy found that: • Red brightness signals higher energy or greater protein content (Foroni et al., 2016). • Green brightness indicates lower energy (Rushmore, Leonhardt, & Drea, 2012) . • Cooking (small ingredients) changes the color of the food and the calorie content.

7. Color brightness in food pictures • The evolutionary advantage may reside in human’s food-related behaviors (Rushmore, Leonhardt, & Drea, 2012). • Color brightness of the food picture may bias consumers’ food evaluations. • Little is known in the current literature about the effects of color brightness of food pictures in the context of restaurants. • Color brightness and consumers’ food evaluations: • Red brightness influences consumers’ affective food evaluations. • Green brightness influences consumers’ cognitive food evaluations. • Color brightness has significant effect on consumers’ affective food evaluations with presence of nutrition information.

8. Halo effect of color brightness • Prior research found that consumers generally overgeneralize the claims to an overall evaluations of the service providers (e.g., Wansink and Chandon, 2006). • The present study proposes a halo effect of the color brightness of the menu on consumers' favorable attitudes of the restaurant. • H1. Level of color brightness of a food picture affects consumers’ favorable intentions. • H2. Level of color brightness of a food picture affects consumers’ willingness to pay.

9. Perceived value • Consumer value is a customer’s desired end goals in a specific consumption situation (Ha and Jang, 2013). • Hedonic value refers to the desire for emotional pleasure (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982). It associates more with fun and playfulness than with task completion. • Utilitarian consumption is described as rational, task-oriented consumption (Batra & Ahtola, 1991). • Consumers’ perceived hedonic and utilitarian values are often influenced by external stimulus.

10. Perceived value con’t • A dining experience can create both utilitarian and hedonic values and consumers may focus on different values (utilitarian vs hedonic) depending upon their experience in the restaurants (Ha & Jang, 2013; Ryu, Han, & Jang, 2010). • H3. Consumers’ perceived utilitarian value has a positive effect on their favorable intentions to the restaurant. • H4. Consumers’ perceived hedonic value has a positive effect on their favorable intentions to the restaurant. • H5. When food picture is presented with more green brightness, consumers’ perceived hedonic value has a stronger effect on favorable intentions. • H6. When food picture is presented with more red brightness, consumers’ perceived utilitarian value has a stronger effect on favorable intentions.

11. Methods • Participants: 259 college students from a northwestern public research university in the United States. • Participants were recruited to earn extra credit in a class. • Participants were guided and instructed by trained research assistants to complete the experiment at the computer stations in the lab. • After removing the responses that failed the screening question and attention checks, 185 responses were retained with a retention rate of 71.43%.

12. Experiment procedures

14. Measurements • All measurements were adopted from previous literature with slight modifications to fit the design of this research: • Hedonic value was measured by five items. • Utilitarian value was measured by four items (Babin et al., 1994). • Favorable intention was measured by three items (Ajzen and Fishbein, 2002; Lu & Gursoy, 2017). • Willingness to pay for the combo was measured by a single item “How much are you willing to pay for the combo above” with a range of $15-$30.

15. Hypotheses testing H1 & H2 • Data were analyzed with MANOVA. • Before conducting the MANOVA, a univariance analysis of perceived food quality was applied. • The results suggest a nonsignificant difference of perceived food quality across three groups of color brightness (F=0.50, p=0.61) and framing of the restaurant image (f=0.87, P=0.35). • These results ruled out the effects of perceived quality. • The Box’s M value was 16.47 (F=2.70, p=0.013). • Considering the large cell size and the sample size of the study, the difference was not an issue of this study. • The Wilks’ Lamba value was 0.936 (F=3.05, p=0.017, observed power=0.804).

16. Hypotheses testing H1 & H2 con’t

17. Hypotheses testing H3 & H4 • Two-step regression was conducted to test hypothesis 3 and 4. • Before the hedonic value and utilitarian value was aggregated, factor analysis was conducted to confirm the two-factor structure. • The results revealed that items demonstrated high loading (all above 0.80) on the designed factor with substantial internal consistency (all above 0.85).

18. Hedonic value 0.422 Utilitarian value 0.215 Favorable intentions Levels of color brightness 0.849 0.654 Hedonic value × Level of color brightness Utilitarian value × Level of color brightness The interaction model explained 32.8% of the variance of consumers’ favorable intentions.

19. Conclusions • The results suggest that color brightness has a significant effect on consumers’ favorable intentions towards the restaurant and willingness to pay for the meal. • The findings were consistent with previous evidence that hedonic value has stronger effects in the dining experience.

20. Conclusions con’t • Consumers are generally willing to pay more when the food pictures on the menu were of more red brightness and holding more favorable intentions towards the restaurant. • Restaurant professionals may adjust a higher level of red brightness in order to promote the food items. • The results of the interaction between level of color brightness and hedonic value indicate that hedonic value can somewhat compensate the effect of green brightness on consumers’ favorable intentions.

21. Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Ruiying (Raine) Cai School of Hospitality Business Management Carson College of Business Washington State University ruiying.cai@wsu.edu