The impact of the means of context evocation on consumers’ emotion associations towards eating occasions

Abstract

The joint investigation of the product, the consumer, and the consumption context is necessary for furthering the understanding of eating occasions (snacks and main meals), including their construction and enjoyment. The study of people’s experience of eating occasions is less advanced than the understanding of acceptability, preference, and choice of individual food/beverage items and/or their combination in meals. The current research contributes to narrowing this gap by focusing on emotions as a dimension of eating experiences and enjoyment. Under evoked consumption contexts (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner), the emotion associations for several products (potato crisps, chocolate brownie, and kiwifruit) were obtained from consumers (n=399) using a questionnaire method. Emotion associations were explored in relation to: (1) the way in which the food stimulus was evaluated by participants (tasting food vs. seeing a food image); (2) the serving presentation of the food stimulus (image of food shown in isolation vs. image of food served on a plate with cutlery); and (3) the means in which the consumption context was evoked (written vs. written and pictorial). Consumers’ product emotion associations when tasting a food stimulus vs. seeing an image of the same food were highly similar. There was some evidence that more specific means of presenting the food stimuli (with tableware vs. without tableware) and consumption contexts (written and pictorially vs. written only) influenced perceived appropriateness of the product in the focal consumption context. This resulted, for example, in a higher frequency of use of negative emotion terms in the less appropriate consumption contexts. Overall, through the use of evoked consumption contexts this research has contributed new understanding of product-specific emotional associations during eating occasions from a methodological approach. In addition to the aforementioned results a more general finding was the apparent reliance by participants on past product experiences when completing the emotion questionnaire.