Brand expertise, impulsiveness and materialism aggravate unhealthy food products buying among young adults despite pricing and sin tax interventions

Building upon the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) and the hedonic motivation theories, this study aims to assess the effects of consumer awareness variables viz. unhealthy product knowledge (PK), brand expertise (BE), perceived price and tax policy interventions (PTP), and personality traits variables vz. materialism (MT) and buying impulsiveness (BI) on consumers’ purchase intention toward unhealthy products. The study used a between-subjects experimental design to form control (n = 341) and experiment (n = 355) groups before treating the experiment group with health warnings and persuasive audio-visual commercials. After stimuli creation, both groups were asked to fill a questionnaire. We employed CB-SEM in AMOS v.24.0 to assess the model’s global fit indices, reliability and validity, hypotheses testing. The results affirm that the model meet the criteria of global fit indices and meet the assumptions of reliability (unidimensionality of the scales) and validity (convergence and divergence). Further, the results of hypotheses testing show that BE, MT, and BI increase purchase intention, demonstrating that hedonic motivations prevalent in youngsters override health warnings. Surprisingly, PTP and PK do not appear to influence purchasing intent, reinforcing impulsive buying and materialistic personality traits of respondents. The findings imply that companies counterbalance statutory health warnings with attractive advertising. Because PTP and PK have little effect on purchase intentions, the government can maximize revenue by taxing unhealthy products, thereby protecting public health. The findings provide valuable insights into consumer behavior for marketing academics, retailers, consumer marketing companies, and indirect tax policymakers.