Abstract: In the post-pandemic consumer market, heightened attention to environmental quality, personal health, and product safety has fueled rapid global growth in demand for natural products. However, existing research on Perceived Product Naturalness (PPN)—consumers’ subjective judgment that a product originates from nature, contains no non-natural ingredients, and has undergone minimal processing—still has notable shortcomings. The antecedents of PPN are highly fragmented and lack a unified, theoretically grounded classification framework. Divergences remain regarding the relative effectiveness of different naturalness cues, such as explicit claims, sensory signals, and production methods. Moreover, the strength of PPN’s impact on consumer responses and its boundary conditions have yet to be systematically elucidated. To address these gaps, this study conducts a meta-analysis of 229 independent effect sizes from 59 empirical studies published over the past two decades, aiming to construct an integrated theoretical framework encompassing the antecedents, consequences, and moderators of PPN. Drawing on dual-system theory and cue diagnosticity theory, all naturalness cues are classified into two types: heuristic cues and systematic cues. Heuristic cues are simple peripheral signals that consumers can process quickly, including sensory information, explicit natural claims, and natural ambiance cues in the consumption environment. Systematic cues are more diagnostic, product-intrinsic information requiring deeper cognitive processing, including ingredient composition, degree of processing, and raw material traceability. This classification offers a new analytical framework for understanding how different cues shape consumers’ perceptions of naturalness.
The results indicate that both heuristic and systematic cues significantly enhance PPN, yet the overall effect of systematic cues is stronger, suggesting that consumers are persuaded not only by superficial symbolic signals but more so by verifiable, product-based evidence. Notably, within heuristic cues, sensory information and consumption environment cues outperform explicit brand natural claims, a finding that reconciles previous disagreements. Against a backdrop of frequent greenwashing scandals and declining trust in corporate communication, consumers have become skeptical of unsubstantiated natural claims, whereas embodied sensory experiences and natural settings provide more immediate and credible perceptions. Further analysis shows that PPN positively influences consumer attitudes, choices, and behavioral intentions, but its effect on attitudinal outcomes is significantly stronger than on behavioral outcomes. This indicates that perceived naturalness first operates at the evaluative level, with its translation into actual purchase behavior constrained by factors such as price, availability, and efficacy expectations. The study also identifies boundary conditions at the consumer, product, and situational levels: the effect of PPN is stronger for food and utilitarian products, for samples with a higher proportion of women, and under conditions of high environmental threat; the effect intensifies significantly after major public health events and is more pronounced among younger consumer groups.
This research makes several contributions. Theoretically, it resolves the fragmentation of PPN antecedents by establishing a clear dual-cue classification framework, reconciles prior divergences by quantitatively comparing the relative effectiveness of different cues, and extends boundary condition research from individual and product levels to the macro-situational level by introducing environmental threat as a situational moderator. Practically, the findings offer guidance for natural marketing strategies: companies should prioritize investment in verifiable systematic cues (e.g., short ingredient lists, transparent production processes) over vague natural slogans, strategically allocate resources to health-related product categories, and strengthen communication on safety and ingredient transparency when environmental or health threats intensify.

Key words: perceived product naturalness, meta-analysis, dual-system theory, consumer responses, cue diagnosticity theory