Emotions elicited while drinking coffee: A cross-cultural comparison between Korean and Chinese consumers

Abstract

Consumers assess products not only based on their physical aspects but also on their emotion-evoking components. Many methods, such as EsSense Profile®, GEOS, and ScentMove, have been developed for evaluating various kinds of products. Research has suggested the need for developing a specialized lexicon for specific food or beverage categories. The English emotion lexicon, the Coffee Drinking Experience1CDE: Coffee Drinking Experience.1(CDE), was developed specifically for coffee. However, while emotions can be expressed by words, they can also be affected by culture and context. Thus, our objectives are 1) to develop coffee emotion lexicons in Korean and Chinese, 2) to compare the differences of emotions evoked while consuming different kinds of coffee, and 3) to compare the differences between Chinese and Korean consumers while consuming the same coffee samples. To address these aims, we conducted two studies. First, we conducted a consumer-led translation of 86 emotion terms from the CDE into Korean and Chinese. Second, consumers checked the intensity of emotion terms while drinking six commercial coffee samples. The order of the Chinese and Korean consumers’ overall preferences was the same: all-in-one coffee received higher scores than black coffee. Finally, using a logistic stepwise regression analysis, the Chinese and Korean lexicons were reduced to 53 and 29 terms, respectively.