Emotions of quality: a case study on beer products

Abstract

Quality assurance is very important for food products manufacturers to survive in the extremely competitive markets. Quality, in a simple context in which solely the intrinsic product attributes are focused on, is widely considered as consumer liking [1].

Very often, to better understand product position for the purpose of consumer satisfaction, consumer liking has been related to sensory attributes in traditional sensory and consumer research. Nevertheless, apart from sensory attributes, the current trends of research have focused on emotions, which have come to play a major role in consumer liking.

Our initial goal was to look for relevant emotions to explain consumer liking on beer products. Precisely, this study aimed to address the two following questions: (1) whether or not emotions could be connected with respect to specific products via sensory attributes, if that is the case, (2) whether products, evoking either positive or negative emotions, would be more or less appreciated by consumers. Two experiments were performed on 8 commercial beer products. In the first experiment, an emotional profile was created by check-all-that-apply questionnaire. The emotional data was then related to consumer liking data collected from the second experiment in order to obtain the preference mapping.

The results showed that the products evoking positive emotions (e.g., optimism, eager, curiosity, etc.) were highly appreciated by consumers, while the products evoking negative emotions (e.g., loneliness, lost, laziness, rage, etc.) received low appreciation.

These results suggested that product quality (i.e., liking in this context) can be better understood through the prism of emotions, the so-called emotions of quality, which were evoked via sensory attributes. It could help researchers and marketing professionals better understand emotions evoked from their products in the one part, and elucidate to approach firm products to ideal products in the other part.