Relationship between wine-evoked emotions and consumers’ preferences and willingness to Pay

Abstract

A labelled discrete choice experiment (DCE) combined with a blinded wine tasting was conducted among 180 Catalans red wine drinkers to assess their preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for three different wines: conventional, organic, and selected vintage organic wines in the context of habitual purchase. The DCE was carried out before and after wine tasting and a comparison between pre and post responses was undertaken to measure the effect of wine taste on wine repurchase. Facial expression analysis was conducted to test whether different wine typologies evoke different emotions and if these emotions influence consumers’ wine choices and WTP. Moreover, we tested for hypothetical bias in the DCE subjecting half of the sample to a hypothetical DCE and the other half to a nonhypothetical DCE. Results show that consumers’ preferences for the three wine typologies in both hypothetical and nonhypothetical DCE were not statistically different. However, consumers’ preferences were significantly influenced by wine taste, evoked emotions and actual liking. Our findings showed that there was a positive and significant association between wine evoked emotions (positive experience) and wine choices, especially in the case of organic and selected vintage organic wine. However, wine evoked emotions did not affect significantly consumers’ WTP for each of the three wine typologies. Our findings also showed that organic or selected vintage organic wines were preferred by women and participants with high environmental involvement. Our findings improved our understanding of wine choices, contributed to the application of DCEs for eliciting preferences and provided useful information to winemakers.