Many new food products fail. Yet, they had been highly liked during consumer testing. Clearly, there is more to choosing foods than just liking a product in a test.
This leads researchers to explore other ways of measuring how consumers experience foods.
Emotions drive food choices
We need to understand how food makes people feel. What is their emotional response? Different sensory characteristics of food such as
taste
smell
texture
appearance
make people feel different emotions. These emotions drive decision making when purchasing and consuming food.
For example, the meaty appearance or smell of a plant-based burger could make someone feel worried or nervous that it’s real meat, and so they chose not to eat it.
Industry uses emotional response to food products
The food industry also uses food-evoked emotions for:
Product differentiation
- Differentiating between products that are similarly liked
Marketing
- Aligning marketing and branding with food-evoked emotions or vice versa
Product development
- Developing products with specific emotion-evoking properties
- Assessing if changes in product formulation result in positive or negative emotions
- Matching emotional profile of competitor product
Identifying consumer groups
- Grouping consumers according to their emotional response
Methods to measure emotions
Methods to measure emotional repose to food products are either direct (explicit) or indirect (implicit).
| Direct Methods | Indirect Methods |
|---|---|
| Require people to think about how they feel. We use: | Do not require people to think about how they feel. We measure (amongst others): |
| – verbal questionnaires (emotion words) – visual questionnaires (cartoons, emoji, or pictures) | – heart rate – facial expression – brain activity |
Ideally, we combine these methods.
Where a combination is not possible, we recommend self-report questionnaires. After all, the best way to know if someone feels an emotion is to ask.
Verbal self-report questionnaires are the most popular. Consumers are given a list of emotions. From these, they select or rate the ones they associate with the product. These emotion lists can be generic to all food (e.g., EsSense ProfileTM) or specific to the food of interest (e.g., a consumer-defined list).
As part of our research, we are generating a consumer-defined emotions list specific to plant-based burgers.
Emotions are context dependent
Depending on location, people can have different feelings towards the same food. When measuring emotions, it is recommended to mimic real consumption situations. This better captures the emotions people feel in real life.
To generate our consumer-defined emotions list, we are recreating situations typical to eating a burger (e.g., in a living room or a pub). For that, we use digital immersive technology. This helps study participants imagine they were in these situations when they assess how the burger patty makes them feel.
See also Rebekah’s previous blog post to learn more about the use of context and digital immersive technology in consumer research.
Rebekah Orr, 28 October 2021