Promoting healthy or preventing unhealthy? An experimental investigation in the context of food products sold through smart vending machines

Smart vending machines are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and account for important market shares of food and beverage consumption out-of-home. Recent reviews highlight the lack of adequate literature on many aspects concerning consumer behavior. Since food vending machines are always scrutinized for contributing to over-consumption and unhealthy lifestyles, studies that investigate how to improve nutrition interventions would be welcome. The present study aims at contributing to this stream. Through a between-subjects experimental design, we manipulated the product type (vice vs virtue) and the message type (prevention vs promotion-focused) to verify which strategy would be more effective in increasing (decreasing) the intention to buy healthier (unhealthier) products from vending machines. Results show how prevention-focused messages seem more effective in reducing the intention to buy vice products than promotion-focused messages to increase the consumption of virtue products.