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Background - how developers and marketers "understand products"
A decade or more ago, consumer research in the food and drink categories concentrated on making the product better and on identifying new product opportunities. Researchers rose to the occasion with numerous methods. The most frequently used methods were focus groups and depth interviews to identify drivers of acceptance, followed by more quantitative methods to test products, or to discover general patterns across products. The investigative approach involved in the research was often "category appraisal" or "product optimization." In category appraisal, the goal is to discover how the products in the market (i.e. category) differ from each other, whether market holes exist that can be filled with new products, and what sensory characteristics of the product "drive acceptance" ([26] Moskowitz, 2001; [30] Munoz et al. , 1996).
The effect of context on preference and choice has been well documented in the literature ([47] Lynch et al. , 1991; [48] Simonson and Tversky, 1992). It is clear that category knowledge and attribute importance reflect individual differences among consumers with important implications for segmentation, targeting, and positioning ([23] Malaviya and Sivakumar, 1998). Likewise, it is has also been demonstrated that in many purchase environments, consumers use information from a number of product categories (e.g. fruits and yogurt for health benefits) before making a decision, a decision scenario that generated research addressing consumer choices across categories ([6] Chiang and Wilcox, 1997).
Finally, in product optimization, also known as response surface methods, the objective is to develop and test a number of alternative new products that represent quantitative variations of ingredients/processes, obtain consumer responses of acceptance and sensory attributes, and then create a mathematical model relating the independent product features under the developer's control to the consumer ratings and to other variables such as cost of goods ([5] Box et al. , 1978). It is clear, therefore, that the array of approaches to find out what is important has been filled by a variety of methods. Most of these methods begin with qualitative analysis, and go to somewhat larger-scale studies that can be best described as quali-quant. The insights are there from qualitative analysis, but the quantitative rigor is established by the analysis of many test stimuli rather than one...