Strategic research on the basis of sensory test data and marketing

Lia Berikashvili

Sensory test of a product is one of the main methods of deriving information about quality of the product. It plays significant role in the process of developing a new product.

Optimization of the product’s sensory indices is possible by means of conducting specific strategic researches. In contrast to complicated tactical analysis, advantage of this method is that it enables full scale studying of corresponding sector of the market, defining customers’ needs and revealing latent trends. Such kind of researches helps to reduce advertising and marketing expenses.
As opposed to marketing research, in case of sensory studying emphasis is placed on gathering and processing of the information concerning consumer’s attitude toward some product. Evaluation of product’s sensory indices doesn’t depend on such aspects as attractiveness of wrapping, price, positioning of advertising campaign and effectiveness.
Important role in strategic researches play effective means of deriving significant information and creative ideas while relating to consumers. Consequently, it is essential to include in the sensory group of an enterprise, employees with experience in consumer relations.
When carrying out tactical and strategic researches it is essential to alternatively evaluate product. As defining important, sensory characteristics of the product from the consumers’ point of view, clearly demonstrates consumers’ demands and priorities.
As a rule, sensory aspects and their combinations are evaluated at the stage of elaborating concept and prototype (analog) that enables a firm to modify on the basis of derived information. At the same time, this significantly decreases the risk of entering market with non-competitive product.
Therefore, sensory group plays important role in production program the main aim of which is to ensure successful movement of a product at the market with minimal expenses.
One of the main aspects of strategic researches is revealing product’s latent abilities, in other words working out such combinations of sensory indices that give an opportunity to attract potential clients. This type of researches enable to reveal free market niche that on its part encourages successful movement of innovative products in the market.
The free niche might be defined as the set of sensory characteristics and the means of supplying product to the market. This enables sensory group to objectively compare existing analog and defined goals.
One of the main aspects of strategic research is identification of consumer segment or the group of consumers that react on offered product in the same way, but unlike some other groups. Multidimensional methods are often used for this aim, specifically factor and cluster analyses that enable to group the data by taking in account intercorrelation.
There are two main directions of sensory test used in strategic researches:
· Comparing products of business rivals on the basis of sensory characteristics;
· Evaluating prototypes and concepts in order to define potential abilities of new products and optimize existing ones.
In both cases, quite a number of products with similar characteristics are being evaluated, that are united under name of “category”, while the process of evaluating is called “review of category”.
Together with daily activities, significant task of the firm’s sensory group is review of category covering analytical and consumption sensory tests conducted periodically.
As a rule, review covers few famous brands of the given category, but considering characteristics of market segment to be studied, it might be broadened or restricted to one or two products. It is essential that consumers to consider the products as compatible with each other.
If the category of products to be reviewed has recently entered the market, it is necessary to conduct preliminary marketing researches in potential regions of sales.
Thereby, category review is a task that requires participation of various groups and departments of the production. However, here the decisive role is given to sensory group.
It is recommended to conduct two types of testing:
· Analyzing-descriptive;
· Assessing consumers’ perception;
Sensory testing should be conducted blindly as far as it might be possible. However, it is not always possible to do this, as the product characteristics might be well known to consumers.
Multidimensional methods of mathematical statistics, such as versatile scaling, factor, discriminant and cluster analyses are used in the process of data processing.
The aim of data processing is to build space diagram (map) that reflects main sensory characteristics of product group and enables to define product position toward the competitors.
The method of building such diagram is known as perceptive mapping. There are quite a number of statistical methods that enable to see interrelation of sensory data in an array.
In most cases the result of perceptive cartography is a two or three dimensional diagram. In order to receive such diagram it is necessary to reduce array indices to comparatively smaller composition that enables to carry out visualization of the results. Just that very simplification is an attractive characteristic of perceptive cartography.
However, in the process of such procedure, there is always some risk to lose significant detail defining product feature. In order to avoid this and separately evaluate indices, it is necessary to carry out preliminary data processing using dispersive analysis that gives information on quite a number of differences of the products according to some singular indicator.
Perceptive cartography has two main characteristics.
First – similar products are located on the diagram side by side, while different products are situated remotely from each other. Method is oriented on showing interrelations between groups of products.
Second – perceptive map enables to project the vectors related to the most important indices of the product. This gives opportunity to interpret disposition and space direction of various products.
Such procedure is carried out by means of factor analysis or multidimensional scaling.
One can separate following tasks of perceptive cartography:
· Studying of product class for the purpose of defining similar products and classifying leaders and backward products among them;
· studying demands of potential buyers;
· Defining opportunities of product modification for the purpose of optimizing its sensory indices and better perception from the side of consumers.
Perceptive maps have quite a number of restrictions; one of the important among them is static nature. They show customers’ reaction for the separate period of time that considerably restricts value of perceptive maps for defining future reaction of the customers.
In order to overcome this imperfection, it is necessary to study customer reaction again as it gets the information about product and changes its attitude toward it.
One of the advantages of perceptive maps is ability of interrelation between descriptive indices of a product and customers’ advantages. Another advantage is ability to create new hypotheses or to prove heretofore presented one; as one of the advantages of perceptive maps there can be named light interpretations in comparison with numeral models.
Among the methods of perceptive cartography great importance is given to the method of analyzing main components. This method has been used in sensory studies for a long time. Initial stage of this method is an evaluation of the indices that are describing the product.
Besides factor analysis discriminant analysis is being used in the process of perceptive cartography also. The result of it is a map that defines dispersion of various product evaluations, concerning deviation in the process of evaluating various products by the subjects.
Both of the methods are using matrix as a basis – product – attribute. Matrix consists of average evaluations by each attribute.
Another method of constructing perceptive map – is multidimensional scaling technique that is based on evaluation of similarities and differences between two objects.
Numerical assessment of the similarities and differences between two objects can be derived by means of linear scale with the diapason – “very similar” and “very different”.
Metric space of small sizes is designed as a result of procedure. Multidimensional diagram can be placed in it, the knots of which are objects, while the length is proportional to distance between the objects.
All the above mentioned methods require the use of descriptive dictionaries prepared by experts. While working with customers there are frequent problems due to their unfamiliarity with specific sensory terms.
In order to avoid this, free profiling method is used. The method consists in the following – every participant draws up own set of terms for describing product characteristics. In this case, data processing is done using Procrustean analysis. This is a variety of main component analysis that consists in optimization of multidimensional perceptive models using mathematical operations of centering, scaling and turning of corresponding multidimensional space.
It is recommended to use free profiling method in case if company is entering market with a new product and it wants to study consumers’ reaction.
It is worth of noting that besides abovementioned methods quite a number of statistical methods are being used for perceptive mapping. However, these methods had no wide application in the process of sensory testing.
Finally it should be noted that application of sensory data in strategic researches optimally enables to accentuate on those directions of the production that are of high priority for the consumers and thus decrease the risk of unjustified expenses.

Literature:
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