To Serve the Customer: Leveraging Food Serving Contexts to Encourage Healthier Eating.

Abstract

The consequences of unhealthy eating are one of today’s most important societal issues. Accordingly, a growing area of research has started to examine how marketer-controlled variables impact food consumption. In this dissertation, I first highlight how food consumption research may benefit from more targeted research from a theoretical lens of motivated reasoning. Then, I empirically examine how two specific marketing actions—serving food to consumers versus letting them serve themselves, and serving portions that lead to larger versus smaller amounts of food leftovers—influence the extent to which consumers can downplay unhealthy eating, which in turn encourages unhealthier choices and behaviors. Focusing on processes that take place when consumers obtain their food, I find that whether oneself (versus a server) serves the food determines the opportunity for self-serving attribution of responsibility for one’s eating, such that being served enables, but serving oneself disables, rejection of responsibility. Through rejecting responsibility, and consequently feeling better about oneself, being served food encourages consumers to choose unhealthy options as well as larger portions. Examining the period after consumers have completed their meal, I find that larger (versus smaller) amounts of food leftovers reduce perceived consumption, which improves consumers’ self-evaluative feelings and dampens their motivation to compensate for their food consumption, as manifested in greater consumption and lesser exercise effort subsequently. Theoretical contributions and managerial and policy implications are discussed.