Who eats matters: How eating-agent identity in short-form retail videos influences consumers’ purchase intentions

Short-form retail videos frequently depict food consumption, yet little is known about whether the identity of the visible eater shapes how consumers evaluate the product. We conceptualize eating-agent identity as a contextual product cue and develop a cue-based inference account in which a pet eater makes nature-related meaning salient and, through visible consumption, connects that meaning to the focal food. Consequently, consumers infer greater product naturalness and greater healthiness, increasing purchase intention. This inference depends on how the consumption episode is structured: visible human assistance attenuates the pet advantage by altering the product-use relationship, whereas sponsorship disclosure changes the surrounding commercial context without necessarily disrupting that relationship. Five preregistered online experiments with 2462 retained participants from Chinese consumer panels support this account. Study 1 establishes the effect and examines alternative explanations. Study 2 demonstrates the sequential pathway through perceived naturalness and perceived healthiness. Study 3 manipulates naturalness information to provide causal evidence for the perceived naturalness component of the proposed pathway, Study 4 identifies eating autonomy as a boundary condition, and Study 5 shows that the focal pathway remains evident in the sponsorship disclosure context. The findings distinguish visible product users from promotional sources and reveal a scene-based route through which the contextual features of consumption episodes shape food attribute judgments.