Fragrance, Flavour & Synaesthesia
Sensations® is a vital QualiQuant® tool we created, which we are very proud of, having won the ESOMAR Congress Award for Best Case History for ‘How Does Your Cappuccino Feel?’ in 2013, through our extensive collaboration with Mane. The Sensations® tool allows us to discover unconscious feelings about fragrance and flavour that are not accessible by other modes of research. This provides us with unique and invaluable insight into consumers’ feelings and helps us help technicians to engineer fragrances and flavours that truly meet consumer and brand needs.
Our Sensations® methodology uses the principles of the psychology of Synaesthesia to overcome the problems presented by traditional flavour testing techniques; limited vocabulary of consumers in terms of describing flavour and fragrance and limited methods of flavour testing (i.e. hedonic questions and verbal rating scales which lack sensitivity and make it hard to discriminate between one flavour and another).
We are able to develop a rich, emotionally based, description of flavours and fragrances and to create a visual and verbal language that our clients can use to help engineer brand positioning using our Sensations® methodology.
For example, we can look at how flavour and fragrance are experienced in terms of the other senses, i.e. sight in terms of colours associated with it, touch in terms of material associations, smell in terms of odour associations, hearing in terms of musical mood associations, etc.
Knowing how people experience and associate flavours and fragrances in relation to their other senses allows us to build a projective world around each flavour or fragrance tested. Synaesthesia is thought to be the basis of long-term memory, imagination, emotion, and language, which leads to improved brand relationships through better sensory and emotional engagement with consumers resulting in stronger brands and higher brand shares.
Our Sensations® Tool has allowed us to dig far beneath the surface of consumers’ perceptions, bringing to light extraordinary insights into emotional responses to flavour and fragrance.
Read the paper here!
The QRi Team x
employer’s perspective, and some might still be opposed to ink peeking over an employees’ collar or out of a cuff. But, recently a phenomenon has arisen in which people – employees and customers – are tattooing the logos and slogans of the companies they work for or the brands they love!
