Boring vegetables need better marketing. That’s the gist of a new study from Stanford university psychologists who gave cafeteria vegetables more “indulgent” names to see if students would buy them more often. Healthy labels (“wholesome,” etc) didn’t do well but indulgent labels (“sizzlin'”, “dynamite,” etc.) boosted vegetable sales by 25%. From the BBC:
The experiment took place over the whole of the autumn academic term. Each day, a vegetable dish was labelled up in one of four ways:
• basic – where the description was simply “carrots”, for example
• healthy restrictive – “carrots with sugar-free citrus dressing”
• health positive – “smart-choice vitamin C citrus carrots”
• indulgent – “twisted citrus-glazed carrots”
…The indulgent labels came out top and included “twisted garlic-ginger butternut squash wedges” and “dynamite chilli and tangy lime-seasoned beets”.
Seductive names resulted in 25% more people selecting the vegetable compared with basic labelling, 41% more people than the healthy restrictive labelling and 35% more people than the healthy positive labelling.