Preference mapping in practice

Abstract

Consumer research involving the assessment of products, be they food, beverages, fragrances or household products, traditionally takes the form of the paired preference test, preference ranking or hedonic scaling, usually on two, but sometimes three or four products. The tests are generally easy to conduct, easy to analyse, and are generally thought to give a good measure of relative acceptance or product preference. However this type of research does suffer from several disadvantages, the most important of which is that it can be very limited in providing clear diagnostic information about why a product performs the way that it does. The reasons for this are several-fold:

• Consumers have a very limited vocabulary when it comes to describing their perceptions of products.

• what this book tries to do

• They often use attribute scales incorrectly and are subject to various biases when completing questionnaires.

• Interpretation of paired test data can be more difficult than it first appears.