Manufacturers increasingly adopt health symbols, which translate overall product healthiness into a single symbol, to communicate about the overall healthiness of their grocery products. This study examines how the performance implications of adding a front-of-pack health symbol to a product vary across products. We study the sales impact of a government-supported health symbol program in 29 packaged categories, using over four years of scanner data. The results indicate that health symbols are most impactful when they positively disconfirm pre-existing beliefs that a product is not among the healthiest products within the category. More specifically, we find that health symbols are more effective for (i) products with a front-of-pack taste claim, (ii) lower priced products, and (iii) private label products. Furthermore, these results are more pronounced in healthier categories than in unhealthier categories. Our findings imply that health symbols can help overcome lay beliefs among consumers regarding a product’s overall healthiness. As such, adding a health symbol provides easy-to-process information about product healthiness for the consumer and can increase product sales for the manufacturer.

制造商越来越多地采用健康符号，将产品的整体健康状况转化为单一符号，以传达其杂货产品的整体健康状况。本研究考察了在产品上添加包装正面健康标志对性能的影响如何因产品而异。我们使用超过四年的扫描仪数据研究了政府支持的健康标志计划在 29 个包装类别中的销售影响。结果表明，健康标志在积极否定先前存在的信念时最具影响力，即产品不是该类别中最健康的产品之一。更具体地说，我们发现健康标志对 (i) 具有正面口味声明的产品、(ii) 价格较低的产品和 (iii) 自有品牌产品更有效。此外，这些结果在更健康的类别中比在不健康的类别中更为明显。我们的研究结果表明，健康标志可以帮助克服消费者对产品整体健康的非专业信念。因此，添加健康标志可为消费者提供有关产品健康的易于处理的信息，并可以增加制造商的产品销量。