I remember my transition from academia to industry and the first sensory test I ever reviewed: Traditional Yogurt vs. Greek Yogurt. The data was clear. People generally liked Traditional Yogurt more than Greek Yogurt. Yet, in my refrigerator, and in many others, Greek Yogurt was the stocked option. Logically, that made no sense. Why were we buying yogurt that we liked less?
This anomaly, which I have since encountered across categories, started my journey. Obviously, consumers perceive the products they consume. What is much less clear is how they assign meaning to those perceptions.
Meaning is much more difficult to measure than a sensorial response. It is influenced by context, experience, memory, and expectations. It influences “wanting,” and it shapes enjoyment. No one has produced a systematic, valid, and reliable means of measuring meaning. That research whitespace became, and remains, my ambition. I never again want to give the feedback that one product is ‘better’, only to have few buy it. That finding may be true, but it is useless.
That, among many other reasons, is why I joined Sensory Spectrum. This company is the gold standard in sensory research. It wrote the textbook on everyone’s shelves. Its rigor, technical and executional quality, and product expertise are solid and secure. If the sensory foundation is stable, every interpretation built upon it becomes more secure. That is the platform on which I want to build behavioral and psychological measures of product desirability.
Know the product. Know the people. Predict the possibilities.
As an experimental psychologist, I see humans as complex decision-making organisms. Far from machines, our behavior is shaped by context, incentives, experience, and the many competing forces that pull at our choices. I want to understand why behaviors occur, the contexts that influence them, and the incentives that maintain them.
As an industry expert, I choose which questions to answer as a function of what actually matters. If Overall Liking is the metric that best predicts purchase behavior, then a CLT with that primary metric makes sense. However, if you are buying allergy medicine for your child, trust likely matters more, provided all options are at least acceptable to the child. Trust is advertised through marketing, but it is delivered through the product. Packaging, usability, readability, and perceived real-world impact may be sufficient to keep an unappealing-tasting product in the cupboard over an unknown alternative.
The approach I hope to bring to Sensory Spectrum is simple: What are consumers perceiving? Having experienced the product, what meaning do they attach to it? How does their memory shape their behavior?
Simple does not mean easy. But across 15 years, I have learned how to leverage divergent methods to drive successful innovation.
For those of you who know me, you know I’m a hypothesis-testing kinda gal. Tell me what you believe to be true about your product, and I will design an experiment to prove your beliefs WRONG. Because only when you cannot disprove yourself can you be confident. In the words of Carl Sagan, “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
Sensory Spectrum is a science-first company. It provides a foundation upon which we can legitimately begin to ask the psychological, emotional, and behavioral questions that companies are seeking to answer. It is a company where questions, debate, and disagreements are not scary. They are sources of discovery.
[Written by a human, intended for human cognitive consumption]
