Abstract
Emotional responses elicited by foods are of great interest for new product developers and marketing professionals, as consumer acceptance proved to be linked to the emotions generated by the product in the consumers. An emotional measurement is generally considered an appropriate tool to differentiate between the products of similar nutritional value, flavour, liking and packaging. Novel methods used to measure emotions include self-reporting verbal and visual measurements, and facial expression techniques. This study aimed to evaluate the explicit and implicit emotional response elicited during the tasting of two different brands (A and B) of energy drinks. The explicit response of consumers was assessed using liking (nine-point hedonic scale), and emotions (EsSense Profile®—Check-All-That-Apply questionnaire), and implicit emotional responses were evaluated by studying facial expressions using the Affectiva Affdex® software. The familiarity of the product and purchase intent were also assessed during the study. The hedonic rating shows a significant difference in liking between the two brands of energy drink during the tasting session. For the explicit emotional responses, participants elicited more positive emotions than the negative emotions for both energy drinks. However, participants expressed “happy”, “active” and “eager” emotions more frequently for energy drink A. On the other hand, the implicit emotional responses through facial expressions indicated a high level of involvement of the participants with energy drink B as compared to energy drink A. The study showed that overall liking and the explicit and implicit emotional measurements are weakly to moderately correlated.
Highlights
Globalization, which involves a fierce competition among companies to retain consumers and simultaneously to find new ones, is the driving force that keeps food and other industries innovating to make well-informed decisions in the marketplace
There was a significant difference in the overall liking of the energy drinks
In the case of explicit emotions, the magnitude of the self-reported positive emotions was slightly higher than negative emotions in both sample types
Summary
Globalization, which involves a fierce competition among companies to retain consumers and simultaneously to find new ones, is the driving force that keeps food and other industries innovating to make well-informed decisions in the marketplace. Sensory and consumer sciences provide a few tools in this context [2,3,4,5] to better understand products [6,7,8,9] and population categories [10], and to minimize the risk of failure [10,11]. One of the most popular and extensively used methods to quantify affective responses in sensory science is the acceptability test using the nine-point hedonic scale [12]. A novel sensory and emotional approach is the use of non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, which can communicate highly detailed information about the individual’s experiences [16]
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