The use of immersive technologies to improve consumer testing: The role of ecological validity, context and engagement in evaluating coffee

Traditionally, sensory consumer testing is completed in isolated sensory booths where the influence of non-product (e.g., environmental) attributes is controlled. However, these highly controlled environments strip away meaningful contextual (visual, auditory and olfactory) information important in forming consumer perceptions, liking and behaviors. Moreover, boredom and lack of panelist engagement associated with typical testing paradigms can result in uninformative or misleading consumer data. We utilized an immersive environment depicting a virtual coffeehouse, replete with visual, auditory and olfactory cues found regularly in this setting, and compared liking scores for five coffees to those obtained from the same individuals in a traditional testing environment in which contextual information was absent. We found significant differences in preference order and liking for coffees evaluated by the same people in the two settings and showed hedonic data collected in the virtual coffeehouse to be more discriminating and a more reliable predictor of future coffee liking unlike data collected in traditional sensory booths. Additionally, we found consumers to be more engaged in the testing when evaluating coffees in the virtual coffeehouse, an outcome that likely also contributed to improved data quality. These results suggest that during product evaluations, extrinsic contextual information is processed simultaneously with the intrinsic product attributes to influence hedonic assessments and shape reward outcomes. Further, these results suggest that methodological changes to current testing strategies have the potential to improve the reliability of consumer data providing food and consumer product companies significant savings on product development costs and failed launches. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.