Cake or fruit? Influencing healthy food choice through the interaction of automatic and instructed mental simulation

Promoting healthy food choice is a central issue for public welfare and a continuous challenge for marketers and policy makers. This research examines how marketing communication elements, such as visuals and text, can be used to encourage healthy food choices. Extending previous research in automatic process mental simulation, this research examines whether visual presentations of food items can trigger a different type of automatic mental simulation that is outcome oriented. Results from four studies show that visual presentations of food items in an advertisement can trigger process and outcome automatic mental simulation (AMS) of food consumption, and AMS interacts with an advertisement’s instructed mental simulation (IMS) to influence consumer healthy food choice. Contributing to marketing research in using IMS in advertising to promote product offerings, this research demonstrates that the success of IMS cues varies depending not only on the amount, but more importantly, the type of AMS triggered from visual cues.