From Product Disclosure to Brand Trust: How Voluntary Negative-Attribute Disclosure Shapes Cross-Product Responses in Digital Food Interfaces

Digital food interfaces increasingly enable brands to foreground decision-relevant information at the point of choice, including attributes that may disadvantage a focal product. This emerging practice raises a counterintuitive question: can voluntarily revealing a negative attribute of Product A build brand trust that shapes responses to Product B? Across three online experiments, we examine the cross-product effects of voluntary negative-attribute disclosure, the parallel roles of cognitive and affective trust, and the boundary conditions of disclosure unexpectedness and product fit. Studies 1 and 2 showed that voluntary negative-attribute disclosure increased target-product trust relative to self-promotion. Study 1 further identified cognitive and affective trust as parallel brand-level pathways to target-product trust and purchase intention. Objective description produced comparable downstream responses, while voluntary negative-attribute disclosure generated stronger cognitive trust, revealing a distinctive pattern of trust formation. Study 2 showed that high unexpectedness weakened both pathways, yet affective trust retained downstream influence as the cognitive pathway attenuated. Study 3 showed that under low product fit, both pathways continued to support purchase intention, while their translation into target-product trust was constrained. Together, the findings extend transparency research from focal-product effects to cross-product consequences and show how voluntarily foregrounding an unfavorable product attribute can transform a product-level disclosure into brand-level trust with implications across a product portfolio.