Tag Archives: Product testing

Highlights of Pangborn 2015

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Pangborn 2015The international sensory symposium of the year, Pangborn 2015 has come to an end, leaving sensory and consumer researchers with a lot to think about.  I just wanted to share the highlights and three key themes of the conference here to get us all thinking about what the next two years may hold in product-based research.

 

Global research – The whole world is conducting sensory and consumer science, and Pangborn 2015 really opened up the world to all the possible insights, from Australia to China, from the US to Thailand.  Delegates learnt about the opportunities and challenges working across international markets and languages.

Speedy sensory – Rapid techniques in product evaluation, such as Mapping, Sorting and Check-All-That Apply (CATA) were put under the microscope at Pangborn, both for general research, and for assessments with specific target consumers.  As expected all rapid methods offer a trade off between speed, efficiency and the level of detail achieved.  As presented by Tracey Hollowood, and something I’ve personally embraced in my own publications, are the opportunities offered by hierarchical sorting approaches to gain fantastic sensory differences and product insight efficiently, while offering the closest option to profiling.  I’d be happy to share my thoughts and ideas on this as well as my paper for anyone interested!

Controlled context – Sensory scientists are always seeking to control all factors of product assessment, from sample preparation and presentation to the surrounding environment and even lighting. However, more consumer researchers are interested in assessing products within the context of where and when they would typically be used.   This is particularly interesting for consumer Central Location Testing (CLT) to determine whether a product fits the context and environment that it would usually be used in.  Therefore finding the ideal trade off between controlled, strict and accurate product testing, to more ‘in-the-moment’ assessments in context is still heavily under debate.

As expected, Pangborn 2015 was a fantastic mix of current research developments, intriguing novel applications for testing techniques as well as branching into newer unchartered territories of mobile apps, global consumer understanding and more implicit methodologies.

Generating consumer descriptions of products – It’s not all talk

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Consumer language

As a sensory and consumer scientist, understanding how consumers perceive and describe products is an essential aspect of market research.  However, consumers can struggle to find the language to express and articulate product characteristics, often selecting liking and hedonic terms they feel more comfortable using.  This leads to difficulties understanding why consumers like or dislike products and could provide limited optimisation guidance for product development teams.

An ideal approach is preference mapping, allowing consumers to just rate their liking of the products, while a trained sensory panel score the samples for their characteristics.  The consumer liking data is then combined with the sensory map of product characteristics to really understand what attributes drive consumer liking and is a robust insightful tool.  However, this approach can be expensive and time consuming, and in this ever demanding world of faster insights, may not be suitable in every case.  This means asking consumers to describe products in detail, a tricky task.

So what is the best way to gain the most product information and insight directly from consumers?  Is there a practical way to get participants to really give product characteristic descriptions?  A recent study in Food Quality and Preference has compared a range of different consumer methods, to find that the highest number of descriptive terms were provided by consumers when assessed samples at an individual level or by presenting triads of samples in a repertory grid.  This is in contrast to assessing and comparing a wider number of product in the full sample set, which can lose some of the detail.

These study findings align with my own experience of product testing with consumers, where found pairwise comparisons offer the best option to get detail from consumers.  For example, if consumers are trying to describe the characteristics of plain biscuits, it is easy to compare and contrast two products for differences in key attributes such as colour, baked character, crumbliness, cereal flavour, crunchiness, sweetness and so on.  By providing both products, consumers can say things like “This biscuit is drier than that one”, and help them to express the differences in the products.  This can allow consumers to generate descriptions as well as elements of liking and crucially provide R&D teams with as much sample focussed detail to drive development and product optimisation