Project
The backfire effect of product assortment structure and size on consumers’ healthy grocery choices
Public policy makers and marketers put a lot of effort into stimulating healthy food choices. At the
same time stores are continuously changing by adapting the sequence of products and by offering
bigger assortment sizes. This project looks at whether these in-store interventions might affect
consumers' healthy and unhealthy food choices. We investigate whether the retail trend to position
more healthy food assortments at the store entrance and more unhealthy categories store inwards
makes consumers buy more or less healthy food. We argue that consumers will feel like they
deserve an unhealthy snack when they first encountered and bought healthy products. We also
expect that consumers have less self-control when they have been shopping for a while, leading to
unhealthy choices when they encounter these unhealthy products at the end of the store. To make
consumers buy more healthy instead of unhealthy products, providing a reward like a thumbs up
whenever they buy a healthy product could be a solution. Furthermore, we test whether the trend
of increasing assortment sizes affects healthy choices. We argue that consumers experience choice
overload when confronted with very large assortments and at the same time, they do not
experience a need to justify their choice. To counter this, we propose that making people think
about health makes them choose healthy products, even in very large assortments.