Psychological Bias Caused by Notification of Brand Name in Sensory Evaluation of Mango Fruit Drink

Abstract

Consumer buying habit of food product is driven by brand name. The objective of this study is to examine whether brand name have an effect on the evaluation of sensory-based attributes in the process of purchasing a product. Brand name plays an important role even it causes psychological bias in sensory evaluation of mango fruit drink. In this study we conducted five different sensory test-blind test, open test, interchange sample test, duplicate test and brand recognition test to check the bias caused by notification of brand name. Same respondents were evaluated for all the tests. Sensory evaluation was done on attributes like color, smell, taste, sweetness, mouth feel, viscosity and overall acceptance using the 1-9 hedonic scale. Tests results proved that brand name does cause bias during sensory evaluation of mango fruit drink. People knew mango drinks by their brand name and not by their taste or product quality. More successful the brand more rating it got during open and interchange sample test. After conducting the test it is observed that different product may taste more or less the same but brand name is unique which guides the sensory evaluation. People were not able to identify the brand by tasting it in brand recognition test. On an average only 20% of the consumers successfully identified the brand by taste.