Cartoon Conditioning: Kids Think Food Tastes Better From Illustrated Containers

Researchers have demonstrated that graphics and good design influence purchase decisions, but new research suggests an even more powerful drive may be possible. While this is good news for designers and graphic artists - though not unappreciated, they are, arguably, underappreciated - it presents mixed news for marketers. The positive is that design elements should be used more thoughtfully and aggressively in developing marketing strategies. The potentially negative news is that government health agencies will likely pay much more attention to such features now that their impact is better understood.

Nanci Helmich reports in USAToday:

"Kids think foods taste better if they have cartoon characters on the packaging, a new study shows.

Using popular characters to market foods to children has been a subject of hot debate in recent years because the characters are often used to sell products of low nutritional quality.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania tested the influence such marketing has on children. They had 80 kids, ages 4 to 6, look at one of four boxes of a "new" cereal created for the experiment. The cereals were called Healthy Bits and Sugar Bits. One box of each type had a cartoon character on the front, and one of each type didn't. Cartoon penguins Mumble and Gloria from the movie Happy Feet were used on the packages.

The boxes were filled with a relatively healthy kids' cereal sold at natural-food stores. The kids were told the names of the cereals before the taste test. They all tasted the same cereal, but they saw and sampled from only one type of box. Then they were asked to rate the taste on a scale of 1 to 5.

Findings, reported in the March issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine:

•Kids who ate the cereal with the penguin characters on the box reported liking it better than kids who ate the cereal without the characters.

•The cereal's name had an influence on taste perception, too. When there was no character on the boxes, the children rated Healthy Bits cereal better-tasting than those who sampled Sugar Bits.

•Kids who ate Sugar Bits without the character on the box gave it the lowest rating.

"When there was a character on the box, they liked the cereal a lot, and it didn't matter what the name of the cereal was," says Sarah Vaala, one of the lead authors. "Once you put a character on the box, that overrides their judgment of the health merits of the food."

Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says: "There still are lots of kid-friendly characters on food packages, and unfortunately, they're mostly on unhealthy foods like fast-food kids' meals, sugary cereals and fruit gummies.

"This makes it much harder for parents to feed their children healthfully