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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the benefits of using tasting as a PT in research designed to explore consumers' thoughts and feelings toward food and beverage products. While tasting is commonly used in the food industry during product development and modification, it is suggested here that when used as a projective technique (PT) tasting has the potential to generate data relating to numerous aspects of the consumption experience that cannot be obtained via other means.
PTs utilise ambiguous stimuli that require research subjects to be creative in their responses. The idea is that subjects have to project their inner selves into their responses and in the process provide insight into their motivations and feelings. The more traditional PTs include ink blots, picture response, word associations, sentence completion, dialogue bubbles, shopping lists, thematic apperception tests, and mental scenarios ([32] Rook, 1988). More unusual methods involve subjects painting their feelings or reciting their favourite jokes ([30] Richman, 1996). It seems that there are virtually no limits to the stimuli that can be employed in projective exercises ([23] Levy, 1985), and as a result the method may have many potential variations that could be useful to consumer researchers. This paper focuses on the process of tasting as a projective method and the insight this approach may generate for marketers of food and beverage products.
A brief background of PTs is provided below, including a discussion of the major benefits and problems understood to be associated with this method of data collection. Examples of consumer research studies that have productively employed PTs are outlined, with particular focus placed on those that have specifically explored the consumption of beverages. The outcomes of a study of wine consumption are then used to make a case for the usefulness of tasting as a projective method.
The use of PTs
PTs have long been used in clinical psychology where the emphasis, at least initially, was on diagnosing psychosis. This was achieved by using projection to access the unconscious mind, a process often associated with the work of Sigmund Freud ([24] McGrath et al. , 1993). In more recent decades, projective methods have been employed in other research areas including marketing. The most well-known marketing research study to use PTs...