The influence of color on anthropomorphic food packaging: parents’ purchase intention, the attractiveness of a product and children’s gender

This paper approaches the anthropomorphism marketing technique. It has been covered by different researches in product design and in different industries, such as the automobile industry. However, none of them applied it to the food packaged products, in FMCG industry. In addition, only a few studies mention it along with the variation of color. This paper studies how the anthropomorphism and colors influence consumers’ purchase intention and the attractiveness of products. For this purpose, this study was based on actual facts: Milaneza anthropomorphic packaging. It was carried out using different versions of the anthropomorphic package, with four different colors – green, orange, blue and pink. Firstly, the 259 respondents had to evaluate the attractiveness of a non-anthropomorphic and two anthropomorphic packages (green and orange). Secondly, they had to arrange all packages according to their acquisition preference. The main findings suggested that anthropomorphism influences product attractiveness; however, there is no clear evidence to suggest that it changes consumers’ purchase intention or that sex-typed colors and children’s gender are correlated, in pasta category, when using anthropomorphic packages