Lecture 4 - Perception Testing

For today's lesson we were asked to create a perception test. Francine and myself decided to do a taste test. This involved picking three different types of chocolate so that the class could taste them and decided which one they liked the most. We removed the packaging to make sure that the brand didn't influence their decision. The chocolate we chose was: Tesco value, Tesco (mid-priced), and Tesco finest. We placed each chocolate (broken up) on separate pieces of paper named chocolate 1,2 and 3. Eleven people volunteered to do our test and the results were as followed: value = 2, mid-priced = 4, and finest= 5. We then told the class what chocolate was on each piece of paper and they were surprised that the difference between them all wasn't bigger. If I was to do this test again I would give each person participating a glass of water, so that they can get the true taste of the chocolate without tasting like their all the same.

The next experiment shown was testing to see if people knew the difference between: coke, pepsi, and pepsi max. Not many people offered to participate in this experiment, but all the people who did, instantly knew the difference between them all. This may be because they are popular brands that people drink regularly, therefore they would not be hard to differentiate. An alteration that could made to this would be to change the products so that it tests coke against a similar supermarket branded item.

The third experiment only tested two products, these were McVities digestives and Tesco's own branded digestives. Obviously most people preferred Mcvities, I believe this may be because they were brand influenced due to the brand stamp been stamped on the biscuit.

Finally; the last test looked at three different types of cookies. Just like most other groups they used: Tesco value, Tesco (mid-priced), and maryland - a branded product. They also put the cookies on separate pieces of paper so no-one would be biased towards a particular brand. The results shown that most people preferred the Tesco (mid-priced) cookie due to the flavour. Overall this was a sound experiment as they didn't give away which cookie was which, however to make the experiment more reliable than they would need more participants.