Establishing the consumer relevance of a sensory difference using the same-different method

John Castura/ June 15, 2018/ Invited, Symposium/ 0 comments

Establishing the consumer relevance of a sensory difference is essential to reach a conclusion of ‘similarity’ or ‘difference’ between products. Rousseau and Ennis (2013) propose conducting a designed same-different study using a Thurstonian-derived model to obtain discriminal sensory distances (d’) and the consumer-based threshold tau.

This threshold corresponds to a decision boundary where a momentary sensory distance between two products will result in a “same” response if it is smaller than tau, a “different” response otherwise. Thus tau can be interpreted as a quantification of consumer relevance.
We conducted an empirical consumer study to evaluate this proposal. In addition to collecting same-different data from consumers, we collected tetrad results in order to compare the discriminal distances estimated with each method. Results indicate that d’ estimates from the tetrad method are lower than those from the same-different method (this could be due at least in part to increased perceptual noise) and that the tau estimate from the same-different must be adjusted if it is to serve as the consumer relevance threshold when using the tetrad test method.
In this presentation, we will outline the successive steps that were followed and provide suggestions for future consumer relevance investigations.

Castura, J. C. (2018). Establishing the consumer relevance of a sensory difference using the same-different method. In: Symposium 2: Consumer Relevance of Sensory Measurements (Rousseau, B., Castura, J. C., van Hout, D., Ennis, J. M.). Current Topics in Sensory and Consumer Science Symposia and Master Classes. 8 May. Williamsburg, VA, USA. (Invited.)

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