Investigating consumers' representations of beers through a free association task: A comparison between packaging and blind conditions

Food behavior has been shown to be influenced by top-down processes such as expectations generated from the mental representations of product. Investigating how a product is represented in consumers' mind is therefore essential to a better understanding of food behavior. As traditional and typical products are particularly prone to expectation effects, these products are well suited to explore consumer's mental representations. Among traditional products, beers are certainly of interest for both product development and marketing. A free association task was conducted in two evaluation conditions. Participants were asked to state what came to their mind while evaluating 14 bottles of beers with the full packaging information provided (packaging condition) and while tasting the same 14 beers in blind (tasting condition). A total of 67 participants took part in this study. Results showed that different mental representations were activated in the two evaluation conditions. The elicited terms refer to eight semantic categories (Sensory, Description, Affect, Consumers, Nature, Moment, Character, and Culture). Elicited terms are of three types: Affective, sensory/analytical, and semantic/experience-based. Affective terms were elicited in both conditions but more negative terms were reported in the tasting condition. Sensory/analytical terms were differently elicited according to the evaluation condition (e.g. color and design of the label for the packaging condition and taste and flavor in the tasting condition). The semantic/experience-based representations set contains terms linked to general knowledge about beers and experience-based knowledge such as contextual information collected from personal experience with the product. Semantic/experience-based terms were elicited in both evaluation conditions but differences were found according to the level of familiarity with the beers: Unfamiliar beers are more linked to general knowledge whereas familiar beers are more linked to experience-based knowledge. Finally, results highlighted that although perceptual characteristics of beers remain an important component of consumers' representations, semantic and experience-based associations are a key component to explain organization of mental representation in consumers' minds. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.