What is the best flavour for my product?
Everyone has an opinion! It needs to be sweeter, richer, have more depth of flavour? Have more or less salt, sourness, umami? It should have more fizz, less fizz, a cleaner taste. It needs more flavour.
But taste is so personal, everyone is looking for something slightly different and inevitably you end up with a compromise, treading a narrow path to get the maximum likes – although not loves – and offending the fewest number of consumers.
The result is so often a bland inoffensive product that does “quite well” but neither revolutionises the market nor makes a career for its creator.
The Best Flavours communicate meaning to the consumer
The most successful products taste so good because their taste has a meaning to the consumer. Red Bull means energy, 7up refreshing, Snickers is substantial and satisfying. It is not just the brand that encapsulates this meaning, but the very taste of the product.
You can think about taste as just a physiological experience and try to measure consumers likes and dislikes, or you can move into the next league and understand how flavour affects your consumers emotionally. What do you want your product experience to mean to your consumers and how are you going to elicit exactly the right emotional response from them?
Understanding how Flavor affects Emotions
It is not just about asking consumers how they feel after consuming your products. You need to understand their emotional needs from your product, their whole emotional journey whilst consuming it. How and why the sensorial features of the consumption journey deliver this emotional journey and how you can improve it.
The Marketing Clinic are Global experts in the psychology of flavour . Brands like Nescafé and Lay’s Potato Chips work with us to keep their brands on top. Like you they have a multitude of data on their brands but have needed the experts to show them how to connect each stage of the consumers’ sensory experience with the emotions it triggers and how to utilise this knowledge to create the best flavor experience for their particular consumers.
So if you need to make your consumers love your product we can help uncover the key emotional journey that you need to deliver to keep them coming back time and time again. Stop making cosmetic tweaks to the taste of your product and focus on what your brand delivery actually means to the consumer.
chrislukehurst 