I’m American. But I married into a French family and lived in France for a while. The experience opened my eyes to many things. Simple things. Like how much food one should put on one’s plate. That turned out to be, at least in part, a learned assumption of mine.
When I applied this assumption at one of my first French meals, I ‘surprised’ my father-in-law. Why did I serve myself so much food? He wasn’t the only one. Expectations about an appropriate amount of food are culturally different.
Over time I changed how much I served myself and a smaller portion began to be ‘right for me’. My experience is anecdotal, but there is research that makes me look at it differently. Brunstrom & Rogers (2009) conducted research on expected satiation and satiety, proposing that people learn expectations about the consequences of consuming foods. Those learned expectations can influence how much we choose before we even begin eating. Familiarity and previous experience shape these expectations.
Reflecting on this makes me want to know just how much consumers learn mental models of products. Not just “what will this taste like?” but “what will this do for me?” This is more than predicting what a product should taste like, or compare with, but what outcome I have learned to expect from it.
Most new products are tested at a single point in time. Consumers walk in with category expectations. I’m trying a chocolate chip cookie, I have a screen of expectations that influence my perception, and from this I can declare its value. But commercial success depends on more than this. What does the experience of this cookie teach me about what it can and cannot deliver? What will I expect the next time? Will I change this calculus as a function of context? Or on whether it goes with other products I already value?
The focus in consumer research has long relied on Overall Liking as a primary success metric. Even when people objectively say that they have concerns about this metric, business teams have a difficult time confidently using anything else. But I think liking is one measure of the relationship between sensory expectation and product experience. It can’t fully predict success because it fails to measure how context, expectations, experienced consequences, and choice evolve across repeated use. A person learns the value of each product. And Overall Liking is only one part of that value.
In the study of 17 foods, expected liking was a very poor predictor of the energy content of the portions people selected (r=.06), while expected satiation was a much stronger predictor (r=-.80). The researchers were measuring prospective portion selection and what people expected the food to do for them was more predictive of how much they selected than how much they expected to like it.
It makes me wonder whether we could become better at predicting product success if we measured not only whether consumers like a product today, but what they learn to expect from it tomorrow.
References
Brunstrom, J. M., & Rogers, P. J. (2009). How many calories are on our plate? Expected fullness, not liking, determines meal-size selection. Obesity, 17, 1884–1890. View research
Brunstrom, J. M. (2011). The control of meal size in human subjects: A role for expected satiety, expected satiation and premeal planning. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 70, 155–161. View research
