Crowdsourcing in the food industry: the impact of creator’s body type and gender on healthy food consumption

Abstract

Instead of resorting exclusively to marketing experts or designers, organizations are almost required to generate the desired results with the contribution of the “crowd” of consumers. With crowdsourcing activities, companies not only achieve great results, but also change the consumer role from passive to active and ready to collaborate in companies’ offers. The current research suggests that, in a crowdsourcing context, the physical appearance of the individual (normal vs. obese body type) who created a certain food product, has an influence in the perception towards the same food product. This study further tests the moderating influence based on gender, investigating the changes in the healthy eating behavior of male and female participants after randomly confronted with a picture of a normal versus an obese individual that created the product. This effect of the creator’s body type and gender on healthy food consumption is justified by the gender differences in terms of physical self-perception and social comparison. In two studies we test our hypothesis, evaluating the perception of healthiness and tastiness in two different sets of food products commonly perceived as healthy and unhealthy (pilot study) and the effect of creator’s body type and gender on healthy food consumption (study 1). The findings have implications for research and practice regarding body image and healthy food literature.