What's inside matters: The impact of ingredient branding on consumers' purchasing behaviours in services

Ingredient branding has been widely used as a marketing strategy to create added value and enhance market competitiveness in a variety of durable and non-durable product categories. Despite its prevalence in practice, current research into ingredient branding offers little guidance for the services sector and is, in any event, limited to studies that analyse intentions rather than actual behaviours. This paper contributes to the literature by using scenario-based and field experiments to examine the impact of ingredient branding on consumers' purchasing behaviours in a service context. The scenario-based experiments highlight the mediating role of quality perception on willingness to pay, which increases by up to 9 % for a food item that is ingredient branded. The results of the field experiment show that the actual sales of an item increase by 40 % when it is ingredient branded. Consequently, this paper provides both theoretical and managerial insights into the favourable impact of ingredient branding on consumers’ purchasing behaviour. This paper concludes by proposing an agenda for future research.