Take a look at the image above.

I think it’s fair to say it looks nothing like a cereal you would expect to find on the breakfast table of most households these days, particularly those with children.

It’s not just breakfast cereals either. Most food aimed at children is brightly coloured, heavily branded and, quite often, involves a colourful and familiar character.

Sometimes it’s a character created by the brand, like Ronald McDonald or Tony the Tiger, at other times characters from well-known or currently popular cartoons and movies are licensed and added to food packaging.

It would be easy to think that this use of characters is simply designed to make whatever product it is splashed on more noticeable and more attractive.

This makes sense: one of the first things an infant learns is to recognise faces. So by the time a child has the language skills and opportunity to influence a visit to the supermarket, he or she is likely to notice the familiar figure and be attracted to it.

But the role of branding with well-known characters goes further than that: it actually influences the way children perceive the taste of the product.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania devised an experiment to explore the impact media characters have on children aged between four and six years old.

They showed children boxes of cereal that were either labelled as “Healthy Bits” or “Sugar Bits” (in both cases the cereal was the same). Some boxes included well-known media characters and others didn’t.

The results showed that when a character was present, children said they liked the cereal more. And when they tasted the ‘Healthy Bits’ cereal, the presence of a media character led to them reporting that they enjoyed the cereal more.

When ‘Sugar Bits’ didn’t have a character, the children reported being less satisfied with the taste.

So it’s easy to see why so many kids brands have characters on them.

What’s fascinating to me is that there is evidence within the study of misattribution (an unrelated element being unconsciously referenced and leading to a change in perception of something else).

Even by the age of four our brains are referencing contextual information and allowing it to influence our perceptions.

For parents, of course, this presents another issue. Since food brands with poor nutritional value have traditionally made use of this style of branding, healthy brands have tended to shy away from it.

Unfortunately, with children conditioned to associate characters with more appetising tastes, putting healthy alternatives in front of them may produce initial resistance: children may genuinely experience the product as inferior to the media-character-branded alternatives they’re used to seeing.

Source: M. A. Lapierre, S. E. Vaala, D. L. Linebarger.Influence of Licensed Spokescharacters and Health Cues on Children’s Ratings of Cereal Taste. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 2011; 165 (3): 229 DOI: 10.1001/archpediatrics.2010.300

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