In an age of nutrition labels, sustainability scores, and AI disclosures, when does giving consumers more information actually help them, and when does it just check a box? In a study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Pierre Chandon, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, and Andde Indaburu, a PhD candidate in Marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, examine this question through the lens of simplified nutrition labels. Drawing on research that includes a field study of more than 200,000 fast-food meals, they show how labels like Nutri-Score can shape, or fail to shape, consumer decisions, revealing a broader lesson for businesses and policymakers: providing useful information does not guarantee that consumers will use it, or that everyone will respond to it in the same way.
Businesses often operate on the assumption that “more information is always better.” Do you think that’s still true, or have we reached a point where consumers are just overwhelmed by information?
I don’t think more information is always better, but I also don’t think the problem is simply that consumers are overwhelmed by information. I think additional information can be very valuable, but businesses should ask three questions before deciding to provide it.
First, why is this information important to communicate? In our research, we wanted to make the nutritional quality of meals more transparent. The reason for providing that information is clear: helping consumers understand nutritional quality can help them make healthier choices. More generally, before adding information, businesses should ask what purpose that information is supposed to serve and why consumers need it.
Second, how will consumers interpret that information? Providing the right information is not enough if consumers misunderstand it or use it to make other inferences. In our case, Nutri-Score worked as intended: it helped consumers identify which options were healthier. But we also wanted to make sure that seeing a good or bad Nutri-Score did not change how consumers perceived other important attributes. For example, a healthy label could lead people to assume that a product is less tasty, more expensive, or less filling. We found that Nutri-Score did not create these spillover effects. So businesses need to think not only about what they communicate, but also about everything consumers might infer from that information.
Third, who is this information actually important to? Even when information serves a useful purpose and is interpreted correctly, it may not influence everyone equally. In our research, Nutri-Score improved the nutritional quality of the meals chosen by middle-class consumers, while having no effect, and in our field study, even a negative effect, among less privileged consumers. So businesses and policymakers also need to think about the different groups they are trying to reach and ask whether the information will actually matter to each of them.
Companies today disclose everything from nutrition facts and sustainability metrics to AI use and data privacy practices. What separates a disclosure that genuinely helps consumers from one that’s really just checking a regulatory box?
First, consumers need to have some understanding of the information being provided. Companies often disclose information about very complex topics. In nutrition, for example, you can provide information about saturated fat, carbohydrates, sodium, or other nutrients, but that information is only useful if consumers understand what those numbers mean. We see the same problem with sustainability. There is a whole stream of research on “carbon innumeracy”: people have a very difficult time understanding the magnitude of carbon emissions. So simply providing technically accurate information does not mean that consumers can actually understand it and use it. Sometimes companies also need to educate consumers or simplify the underlying information.
Second, the information needs to be available at the right place and at the right time. If the goal is genuinely to help consumers make a decision, the information should be available when they are making that decision and without requiring additional effort. Nutri-Score is a good example because the information is displayed directly next to the food options. Consumers do not have to visit a website or search a report to find it. By contrast, information buried in a sustainability report, privacy policy, or legal disclosure may technically be available, but consumers have to actively look for it. So where a company puts the information tells us a lot about whether the goal is simply disclosure or actually helping consumers use it.
Third, the information needs to be presented in a way that is easy to interpret. France recently introduced an environmental cost for clothing that combines different environmental impacts into a score expressed in “impact points.” A higher number means a greater environmental impact. The intention is very good, but imagine that a consumer sees a shirt with a score of 400 points. It is difficult to know whether 400 is good or bad, or how large that environmental impact really is. The direction is clear, but the magnitude is difficult to interpret without a reference point. Nutri-Score takes a different approach. It translates complex nutritional information into a closed scale from A to E, combined with colors from green to red. Even without being nutrition experts, consumers can immediately understand what the score is telling them.
So for me, checking a regulatory box means making information available. Genuinely helping consumers means going further: making sure they can understand the information, putting it where they can actually use it, and presenting it in a way that is easy to interpret.
Your research suggests that the same piece of information can lead to very different decisions depending on who’s receiving it. How should businesses think about designing communications for increasingly diverse audiences?
One of the key findings from our research is that making the same information available to everyone does not mean that everyone will respond to it in the same way. Different segments may simply care about different things. This connects to something we know well in marketing: the importance of framing information. If a particular message does not resonate with a particular audience, businesses can consider what actually matters to that group and frame the information accordingly. For example, imagine that a specific audience does not care much about nutrition but cares a lot about getting a filling meal. If some of the healthier sandwiches also happen to be larger, highlighting the size or weight of the sandwich rather than its nutritional quality could potentially be more effective for that audience. So I think businesses need to understand what matters to each audience and use that to decide which information to highlight and how to communicate it.
Consumers say they value transparency, but transparency doesn’t always change behavior. Why is there often such a gap between what people say they want and what actually influences their decisions?
Yes, consumers value transparency in and of itself, even if it doesn’t lead them to change their behaviors. Transparency is valued because it reduces the intrinsic information asymmetry between firms and consumers. It is also a matter of respect: no one values ignorance! These are already good reasons for companies to be transparent.
In addition, it’s true that there is often a gap between what people say they value and what they actually do. This isn’t true just for transparency, but in many other domains, such as sustainability, healthy eating, or prosocial behavior. And I don’t think that it means people don’t genuinely mean it when they say these things matter to them. Transparency about nutrition may not lead to changes for many reasons. For example, people may have already been aware of the nutritional quality of the food. More generally, consumers can genuinely care about transparency, but price, quality, convenience, or brand may matter even more to them when making a purchase. Finally, consumers can only choose from the options available to them. So I don’t think the gap necessarily means that consumers don’t care about transparency. It shows that caring about something is only one of many factors that ultimately determine behavior.
Many companies are investing heavily in personalization. Do you see a future where disclosures and labels become more personalized too, or is there still real value in keeping them standardized?
I think there is value in both standardization and personalization, but at different levels. There is real value in keeping the label itself standardized. For example, Nutri-Score is based on a consistent scientific scoring method that converts nutritional information into the same A-to-E scale for every product. That consistency is important because consumers know what the label means and can compare products using the same reference. Where I see more potential for personalization is in deciding which information to emphasize to different consumers. Our research shows that Nutri-Score is more effective for people who already care about nutrition. For those consumers, emphasizing nutritional quality makes sense. But another audience might care much more about price, taste, or how filling a product is. For them, making those attributes more salient could potentially be more effective. So businesses could keep the measures themselves standardized while personalizing which information they make most visible. Nutri-Score is a little different because it is a public policy tool. The goal is to help everyone make healthier choices, not just people who already care about nutrition. So rather than showing nutritional information only to people who care about it, policymakers also need to think about how to make nutrition more relevant to people who currently care less about it.
More generally, I think personalization is quite similar to providing more information. Just because we can personalize something does not mean that we should. I would go back to the same three questions I mentioned earlier: Why is this information important to communicate? How will people interpret it? And who is it actually important to? Those questions can help businesses decide when personalization is actually useful.
What’s a common assumption about consumer behavior – one that businesses or policymakers often take for granted, that your research, or the field more broadly, has shown to be wrong or oversimplified?
One assumption our research challenges is that if you give people useful information, they will use it. Nutri-Score is a good example because when we asked consumers about it, 93% said displaying the label was a good initiative, and 85% said it helped them eat better. So, based on what consumers told us, you might expect that making the label available would influence almost everyone’s choices. But when we looked at actual behavior, that was not the case. The information mainly influenced the choices of people for whom nutrition was already important when deciding what to eat. So I think the broader lesson is that information does not influence behavior simply because people understand it or say that it is useful. It really starts to influence decisions when the information is important enough to the person to matter in the choice.
From nutrition labels to financial disclosures to online shopping, where do you think businesses have the biggest opportunity to improve how they communicate with consumers right now?
One area where I see a particularly big opportunity is sustainability, which is also a major focus of my research. According to the 2025 Sustainable Market Share Index, products marketed as sustainable represent 25.4% of the branded CPG market in the USA (the share is even higher in the U.K. at 36.8% and in Germany at 42.0%), while accounting for 44.9% of U.S. CPG market growth between 2013 and 2025. So we are already talking about a significant share of the market, and one that continues to grow. Yet I think we still have a major communication problem. Consumers are exposed to many sustainability claims and metrics, but we still lack a simple, widely recognized way to assess how sustainable one product is relative to another. Nutrition has made more progress in that direction with labels like Nutri-Score. I think there is a real opportunity to do something similar for sustainability: develop a simple, credible, science-based label that allows consumers to quickly understand and compare the environmental impact of different products.
Where do you think this kind of research is headed? What’s a question about consumer decision-making you’re personally itching to answer?
One question that really fascinates me, and one of the reasons I became a researcher, is how marketing can help people make better choices, both for themselves and for the planet. So the broader question behind my research is really: how can marketing advance sustainability and well-being? That can take many different directions. Here, we have been discussing my work on nutrition and healthier choices with Pierre Chandon, a Professor at INSEAD in France. In my dissertation, I also study how consumers interpret sustainability information with Boston University Professors Remi Trudel and Daniella Kupor, as well as biases in how AI systems represent and communicate sustainability with Remi Trudel and Gordon Burtch. So there are many directions I am excited to explore, but what connects them is the idea that marketing can be a tool for positive change.
