Why people drink shampoo? Food imitating products are fooling brains and endangering consumers for marketing purposes

Basso, Frédéric ORCID: 0000-0003-3709-8331, Robert-Demontrond, Philippe, Hayek, Maryvonne, Anton, Jean-Luc, Nazarian, Bruno, Roth, Muriel and Oullier, Olivier (2014) Why people drink shampoo? Food imitating products are fooling brains and endangering consumers for marketing purposes. PLOS ONE, 9 (9). e100368. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

A Food Imitating Product (FIP) is a household cleaner or a personal care product that exhibits food attributes in order to enrich consumption experience. As revealed by many cases worldwide, such a marketing strategy led to unintentional self-poisonings and deaths. FIPs therefore constitute a very serious health and public policy issue. To understand why FIPs are a threat, we first conducted a qualitative analysis on real-life cases of household cleaners and personal care products-related phone calls at a poison control center followed by a behavioral experiment. Unintentional self-poisoning in the home following the accidental ingestion of a hygiene product by a healthy adult is very likely to result from these products being packaged like foodstuffs. Our hypothesis is that FIPs are non-verbal food metaphors that could fool the brain of consumers. We therefore conducted a subsequent functional neuroimaging (fMRI) experiment that revealed how visual processing of FIPs leads to cortical taste inferences. Considered in the grounded cognition perspective, the results of our studies reveal that healthy adults can unintentionally categorize a personal care product as something edible when a food-like package is employed to market nonedible and/or dangerous products. Our methodology combining field (qualitative) and laboratory (behavioral and functional neuroimaging) findings could be of particular relevance for policy makers, as it can help screening products prior to their market release – e.g. the way they are packaged and how they can potentially confuse the mind of consumers – and therefore save lives.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://www.plosone.org/
Additional Information:	© 2014 The Authors
Divisions:	Psychological and Behavioural Science
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Date Deposited:	27 Aug 2014 09:32
Last Modified:	14 Nov 2024 04:06
Funders:	French Ministry of Research (full fellowship), Aix-Marseille University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Center for Research in Economics and Management, UMR CNRS 6211 (PRD), French Ministry for Research, Graduate School of Management Grant
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/59224

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