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SensoGram 33: "Too Good For Words" Part 2: A Solution
In the last SensoGram, “Too Good For Words” we discussed a potential constraint in sensory evaluation; the difficulty in obtaining objective descriptors of a good product experience. While consumers can readily tell us what is wrong with a product (e.g. too salty, too hard), their vocabularies dry up when trying to objectively describe a good, or even reasonable, product. Descriptions shift to hedonic terms – blissful, wonderful, great.
Importantly, measurement of the hedonic response remains central to sensory research. The inability of consumers, however, to move beyond the hedonic with regard to good product experiences can be a cause of frustration for researchers and particularly product developers wishing to optimise their product to ultimately achieve market success. Consumers can tell us that they like a product, but can’t articulate what could be changed to improve it further – in truth, they just don’t know. So how do we overcome this challenge?
A Solution
The answer lies in experimentation. Since we can definitely measure consumers’ liking responses to products, we can take the guesswork out of product development by presenting a variety of prototypes of a given product. It’s really just the simple idea of trial and error.
As an example, consider the search for the ideal salt level in plain salted potato chips. One approach to this would be to ask the consumer whether the chip should be more or less salty and “adjust” the product to try to achieve the apparent desired level of salt.
There are three problems with this approach that limit its value:
- Whilst the consumer can describe a product as “too salty”, just how much salt is ideal is not clear,
- Perhaps more importantly, the consumer may not identify the salty taste with their overall response; that is, they can describe the salt level as ‘just right” but give an overall response that is poor because they feel that some other feature is affecting the taste, and
- We have discovered in a number of fields that the optimum level of a key characteristic is in fact away from (often higher than) the just right point.
Rather than present a single variant and have consumers estimate by how much the salt should be increased or decreased, we present a number of variants ranging in salt level. By doing so, we are able to establish the relationship between salt level and the consumers’ liking response, and thus empirically identify the ideal.
This approach works well because the ingredient level is systematically varied across products. When attributes are manipulated (varied) in this way, we can exceed mere description of the products; we are now able to establish the elusive cause and effect relationship between those attributes and the consumer liking response. Salt level is just an example here; the ingredient or product attribute could be sweetness, flavour strength, colour, etc.
The relationship between manipulation and measurement (i.e. experimentation) is the cornerstone of scientific progress, and progress in sensory science is no exception. Consumers may not be able to directly tell us how to improve already well-liked, or even reasonable, products, but this need not mean the end of the road for product development. It is through experimentation that we are able to identify optimal product formulations.
SensoMetrics provides expertise in both experimental design and, importantly, precise measurement of the consumer response.
An excellent product may be exponentially more successful in the marketplace than a reasonable or even good product, so why be content with a product that is good? Perhaps through some well-planned experimentation you could unveil a product that is great!
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