SENSORY PERCEPTION AND CONSUMER PREFERENCE
LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION
Sensory marketing?
- Marketing that engages the consumers’ senses and affects their perception, judgment and
behavior (Krishna, 2012)
- Five senses: haptics (touch), olfaction (smell), audition (sound), gustation (taste), and vision
(sight)
- Effect on: attitude (liking), learning & memory, behavior
- Effects often subconsciously but with predictable effect?
You can only interpret a colour as red, if brain says that particular wave length I call red. It is not the
product that is red, it is the brain that interprets a certain pattern as red.
An example of sensory effects
- Van Holland, Hendriks and Aarts (2005)
- Experimental condition:
o half of subjects: all cleaner citrus scent
o other half of subjects: no scent (control)
- Dependent measures:
o 1. Lexical decision task (how quickly correctly recognise cleaning-related words)
▪ We expect that knowledge about cleaning will be activated and that you will
react faster on the cleaning related words than other words
o 2. Spontaneous mention of cleaning-related activities
o 3. Actual cleaning behaviour (when eating biscuit)
An example of sensory effects
In scent-condition faster response to cleaning-related words.
Scent facilitates access to behavior concepts related to scent. In the
control words condition, the condition (control or scent) does not
affect how fast you recognize words. In the cleaning words condition,
people recognize the words faster in the scent condition. The control
condition in unaffected.
Study 2: link to behavioral intention?
- Dependent:
o “write down five activities that you are planning to do during the rest of the day”
- Participants in scent condition:
o more frequently (36%) list cleaning activity compared to control group (11%)
- Explanation: Citrus scent enhanced the accessibility of the cleaning concept, and increased the
probability of mentioning cleaning activities in plans for future
Study 3: Link to actual behavior?
- Experimental setup:
o Fill in questionnaire in (non-)scented booth
o Eat biscuit in other non-scented booth
- Dependent measure: Observe extent to which respondents keep table clean from crumbles
- Result:
o Respondents removed crumbles more often (M=3.5) in scent condition compared to
control condition (M=1.9)
- Interpretation: Direct? link between scent perception and behavior
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,What does the experiment tell us?
- Scent (as a sensory influence)
o Can have non conscious effect on cognition (thinking) and behavior (doing)
o Through associations with scent, the cleaning concept came into consciousness
(accessible)
- There are many of such effects
o Sensory labels of food
▪ Depending on how you label food, can have a huge effect on how much
people are going to like the product
o Signature scents in hotels
o Packaging cues (such as Orangina)
o Crispy food sounds
How sensory input affects response?
4 effects that sensory can have
- Direct affective response to the physical/sensory stimulus
o sensory liking / sensory product quality
o if a product has a nice taste, it is liked better
- An affective response to the match between the physical / sensory aspects of the stimulus and
the internal representation or schema associated with the stimulus
o (in-)appropriateness and schema affect
- Affective response to the meaning to the stimulus beyond the physical / sensory aspects
o Associations with other concepts in knowledge structures (pine & Xmas)
o If you smell pine, there will be activated all sorts of memory about Xmas (probably)
o It is not so much the sensory cue that gives the effect, it is the inferences that you
make from that sensory cue
- By affecting the judgmental and decision environment (Isen)
o Sensory can induce affect which affects decision making
o When you are in a good mood, you make decisions differently than when you are in a
bad mood
What is sensory perception & consumer preference?
- The senses are the window to the outside world
- Senses include: vision, audition, gustation, olfaction and somesthesis sight, sound, taste, smell
and touch/texture
- They bring outside information inside the human system
- Provide the basic inputs from which we make sense of the world → your brain gives meaning
to it
- The sensory information guides perception, preference and behavior
- Understanding how this works and how this translates back into offering, allows for better
marketing strategy
How this works? (simplified)
We have an external environment and there are sensory stimuli that meet the receptors, they come
into the system and then the information is being decoded in relation to what you already know. That
processing leads to action.
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,Studied from different angles
- Product vs. environmental (ambient) stimulation
- Core product versus extended product
- Focus on product design versus focus on market behavior
- Focus on sensory quality versus focus on total perception
- Focus on single point in time versus focus over time
- Different types of behavior
How it relates to what you already know?
We start with the physico-chemical features. Perception is the basis of liking.
Psychophysics = how the physical world translates into psychological perception.
Belief formation = how sensations result in perception
Attitude behaviour gap = consumers often don’t do what you tell them to do
The process
You can start everywhere, we start with the environmental stimulus. There is information in the
environment that you can ignore or you can attend to, if you attend to that information it implies that
the information is reaching your senses. Information from your senses is transduced into the system,
so you feel something, it goes through the nerves and it ends up in your brain. In your brain, that signal
is contrasted to information that you already have in your brain. Because you have that knowledge
and that signal, it leads to perception. You
recognize something and you take action.
Blue arrows point to stimuli, green to
processing and red to perceptual responses.
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, Perceptual process - slow motion
A lot of information in the wood, a lot you will not see and ignore. There is one specific information
you attend to. The physical information reaches their retina (eye), it gives an electrical energy which is
transduced through the senses to the brain. And only then, you can say: oh hey it’s a moth. Then you
make sense of a moth and because you recognizes it as a moth, you can take action. Perception is
determined by an interaction between bottom-up processing, which starts with the image on the
receptors, and top-down processing, which brings the observer’s knowledge into play.
Environmental stimulus = everything in the wood
Attended stimulus = focus on the moth
Stimulus on the receptors = image on retina
Transduction = electricity created
Processing = signals in neurons
Perception = perceiving something on the tree
Recognition = recognizing it as a moth
Action = walking towards the moth
Some important notions
- Physico-chemical energy intrinsic to the food
- transduces into the neurochemical and neuroelectric events
- in the peripheral nervous system
- via receptor organs for each modality
- to yield basic sense data (quality, magnitude, duration)
- basic sense data conveyed through central nervous system
- with a lot of cross-modal sensory interactions
- to yield a perception
- to which an hedonic tone can be attached
How different from “traditional” sensory?
- From food technology and experimental psychology, there is huge tradition of product-related
sensory research
- Focussing on implications for product design & optimisation
- This course focuses on implications for consumer behavior
How is this different from what you know?
- Sensory channels combine and interact
- Not just mind → body, but also body → mind
- Basis of “grounded cognition theory”
o Bodily state
▪ Facial expresses affects funniness ratings of cartoons
▪ Cartoons are funny → you smile, when you smile → the cartoons are funny
o Situation action
▪ Vertical head nodding affects agreement with editorals
▪ You do more agree when vertical head nodding (interaction of brain and body)
o Mental simulation
▪ Imagining listening to music activates auditory cortex
▪ Seeing cookies activated primary taste cortices
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