USE OF THE DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION TO PREDICT THE NUMBER OF CONSUMERS WHO DISCRIMINATE

Three brands of chocolate milk were evaluated for liking, sweetness, creaminess and natural flavor by 48 consumers, using 100mm line scale. The mean sweetness score for one brand was significantly different to the other two and all other attributes were similar. Discriminant analysis on scores from the line scales showed that 63.8% of the evaluations of the least sweet brand (Brand A) were classified by the discriminant function as belonging to the least sweet brand. 19.1% of the scores for Brand B and 17.0% for Brand C were classified as identifying Brand A. A simple count of the number of consumers ranking each brand as least sweet showed that 63.8% chose Brand A, 19.1% Brand B and 17.0% Brand C. This suggests that the discriminant function provides a measure of the proportion of assessors who can tell the difference or, a measure of the degree of confusion between samples.     

SOME SOURCES OF BIAS IN CONSUMER TESTING

Data sets from three studies were examined to determine the effects of brand identification and package design on consumer responses during product evaluation. In these studies, consumers evaluated products with or without brand identification, compared products in standardized conditions, and compared products in different package designs with different or identical product contents. Measurement of consumer responses for all studies was based on 9-point hedonic scale. The results of the study showed that consumers were less critical in their evaluation when the samples being assessed were identified by brand names. Brand identification and package design, when not concealed in the comparison of product contents, resulted in consumer response bias. Also, the popularity of a brand influenced consumer's perception of products.     

Memory Color Effect Induced by Familiarity of Brand Logos

Background

When people are asked to adjust the color of familiar objects such as fruits until they appear achromatic, the subjective gray points of the objects are shifted away from the physical gray points in a direction opposite to the memory color (memory color effect). It is still unclear whether the discrepancy between memorized and actual colors of objects is dependent on the familiarity of the objects. Here, we conducted two experiments in order to examine the relationship between the degree of a subject’s familiarity with objects and the degree of the memory color effect by using logographs of food and beverage companies.

Methods and Findings

In Experiment 1, we measured the memory color effects of logos which varied in terms of their familiarity (high, middle, or low). Results demonstrate that the memory color effect occurs only in the high-familiarity condition, but not in the middle- and low-familiarity conditions. Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between the memory color effect and the actual number of domestic stores of the brand. In Experiment 2, we assessed the semantic association between logos and food/beverage names by using a semantic priming task to elucidate whether the memory color effect of logos relates to consumer brand cognition, and found that the semantic associations between logos and food/beverage names in the high-familiarity brands were stronger than those in the low-familiarity brands only when the logos were colored correctly, but not when they were appropriately or inappropriately colored, or achromatic.

Conclusion

The current results provide behavioral evidence of the relationship between the familiarity of objects and the memory color effect and suggest that the memory color effect increases with the familiarity of objects, albeit not constantly.     

Brands and Inhibition: A Go/No-Go Task Reveals the Power of Brand Influence

Whether selecting a candy in a shop or picking a digital camera online, there are usually many options from which consumers may choose. With such abundance, consumers must use a variety of cognitive, emotional, and heuristic means to filter out and inhibit some of their responses. Here we use brand logos within a Go/No-Go task to probe inhibitory control during the presentation of familiar and unfamiliar logos. The results showed no differences in response times or in commission errors (CE) between familiar and unfamiliar logos. However, participants demonstrated a generally more cautious attitude of responding to the familiar brands: they were significantly slower and less accurate at responding to these brands in the Go trials. These findings suggest that inhibitory control can be exercised quite effectively for familiar brands, but that when such inhibition fails, the potent appetitive nature of brands is revealed.     

Consumer nueroscience: a new area of study for biomedical engineers

In scientific literature, the most accepted definition of consumer neuroscience or neuromarketing is that it is a field of study concerning the application of neuroscience methods to analyze and understand human behavior related to markets and marketing exchanges. First, it might seem strange that marketers would be interested in using neuroscience to understand consumer's preferences. Yet in practice, the basic goal of marketers is to guide the design and presentation of products in such a way that they are highly compatible with consumer preferences. To understand consumers preferences, several standard research tools are commonly used by marketers, such as personal interviews with the consumers, scoring questionnaries gathered from consumers, and focus groups. The reason marketing researchers are interested in using brain imaging tools instead of simply asking people for their preferences in front of marketing stimuli, arises from the assumption that people cannot (or do not want to) fully explain their preference when explicitly asked. Researchers in the field hypothesize that neuroimaging tools can access information within the consumer's brain during the generation of a preference or the observation of a commercial advertisement. The question of will this information be useful in further promoting the product is still up for debate in marketing literature. From the marketing researchers point of view, there is a hope that this body of brain imaging techniques will provide an efficient tradeoff between costs and benefits of the research. Currently, neuroscience methodology includes powerful brain imaging tools based on the gathering of hemodynamic or electromagnetic signals related to the human brain activity during the performance of a relevant task for marketing objectives. These tools are briefly reviewed in this article.     

Objective measures of emotion related to brand attitude: a new way to quantify emotion-related aspects relevant to marketing

With this study we wanted to test the hypothesis that individual like and dislike as occurring in relation to brand attitude can be objectively assessed. First, individuals rated common brands with respect to subjective preference. Then, they volunteered in an experiment during which their most liked and disliked brand names were visually presented while three different objective measures were taken. Participant's eye blinks as responses to acoustic startle probes were registered with electromyography (EMG) (i) and their skin conductance (ii) and their heart rate (iii) were recorded. We found significantly reduced eye blink amplitudes related to liked brand names compared to disliked brand names. This finding suggests that visual perception of liked brand names elicits higher degrees of pleasantness, more positive emotion and approach-oriented motivation than visual perception of disliked brand names. Also, skin conductance and heart rate were both reduced in case of liked versus disliked brand names. We conclude that all our physiological measures highlight emotion-related differences depending on the like and dislike toward individual brands. We suggest that objective measures should be used more frequently to quantify emotion-related aspects of brand attitude. In particular, there might be potential interest to introduce startle reflex modulation to measure emotion-related impact during product development, product design and various further fields relevant to marketing. Our findings are discussed in relation to the idea that self reported measures are most often cognitively polluted.     

Two-Stage Categorization in Brand Extension Evaluation: Electrophysiological Time Course Evidence

A brand name can be considered a mental category. Similarity-based categorization theory has been used to explain how consumers judge a new product as a member of a known brand, a process called brand extension evaluation. This study was an event-related potential study conducted in two experiments. The study found a two-stage categorization process reflected by the P2 and N400 components in brand extension evaluation. In experiment 1, a prime–probe paradigm was presented in a pair consisting of a brand name and a product name in three conditions, i.e., in-category extension, similar-category extension, and out-of-category extension. Although the task was unrelated to brand extension evaluation, P2 distinguished out-of-category extensions from similar-category and in-category ones, and N400 distinguished similar-category extensions from in-category ones. In experiment 2, a prime–probe paradigm with a related task was used, in which product names included subcategory and major-category product names. The N400 elicited by subcategory products was more significantly negative than that elicited by major-category products, with no salient difference in P2. We speculated that P2 could reflect the early low-level and similarity-based processing in the first stage, whereas N400 could reflect the late analytic and category-based processing in the second stage.     

A behavioral-economic analysis of the essential value of brands

Recently, Hursh and Silberberg (2008) have advanced a behavior-economic approach to measure the value of reinforcers, in which demand elasticity is measured relative to the point at which price is zero, a technique that allows for comparisons across reinforcers that show different consumption patterns or across different dosages or magnitudes of the same reinforcer. The authors have proposed an exponential model in which the elasticity coefficient measures the essential value of reinforcers. The application of the exponential model in various experiments has shown that it provided a good fit to the data and supplied different theoretically consistent results. Considering that this previous research has either been experimentally based or has involved nonhuman participants, the present work examined the application of the model to the analysis of changes in consumption of brands with changes in prices, employing data from actual consumers buying brands of food products in grocery shopping, differing in the level of informational (i.e., socially mediated) and utilitarian (i.e., product mediated) reinforcement they offered. Purchase information concerning two products was obtained from a consumer panel, which included data related to purchases of more than 1600 consumers during 52 weeks. The model, calculated for different brands, fitted the data only moderately, but its parameters showed good reliability across stores. The essential value of brands showed significant increases with increases in brand informational reinforcement. The results indicate the reliability of the measure of essential value as its application is extended from the closed setting of the laboratory to the open settings of the marketplace and to symbolic secondary reinforcers.     

Comparison of two commercial preparations of buffered peptone water for the recovery and growth of Salmonella bacteria from foods

This study compared the performance of two commercial preparations of buffered peptone water. Performance was assessed in terms of ability to resuscitate and recover low numbers of stressed cells, buffering capacity, growth of Salmonella bacteria in pure culture and growth of Salmonella in food pre-enrichments. Although both the preparations of BPW had similar chemical compositions, differences in their recovery performance were found. Brand A recovered significantly higher numbers of heat-injured Salmonella (mean = 0.57 log10 cfu ml(-1) difference) in pure culture compared with brand B when dealing with very low inoculum levels. Although brand B had higher buffering capacity, the pH at the end of the pre-enrichment was found to be similar in both media, even in foods such as milk powder which showed the greatest decline in pH. Both brands were comparable in their ability to grow unstressed Salmonella from different food types. In unstressed cell studies, similar cell numbers were recovered at the end of a 24 h incubation period from both media, although brand B yielded a higher biomass. In the food study with unstressed cells, performance was related more to the food type and the likely association between this and the level and type of competitor organisms present, rather than to the brand of medium used.     

A Data-Driven Approach to Reverse Engineering Customer Engagement Models: Towards Functional Constructs

Online consumer behavior in general and online customer engagement with brands in particular, has become a major focus of research activity fuelled by the exponential increase of interactive functions of the internet and social media platforms and applications. Current research in this area is mostly hypothesis-driven and much debate about the concept of Customer Engagement and its related constructs remains existent in the literature. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel methodology for reverse engineering a consumer behavior model for online customer engagement, based on a computational and data-driven perspective. This methodology could be generalized and prove useful for future research in the fields of consumer behaviors using questionnaire data or studies investigating other types of human behaviors. The method we propose contains five main stages; symbolic regression analysis, graph building, community detection, evaluation of results and finally, investigation of directed cycles and common feedback loops. The ‘communities’ of questionnaire items that emerge from our community detection method form possible ‘functional constructs’ inferred from data rather than assumed from literature and theory. Our results show consistent partitioning of questionnaire items into such ‘functional constructs’ suggesting the method proposed here could be adopted as a new data-driven way of human behavior modeling.     

The flipside of the flagship

Flagships remain a key approach for motivating and mobilizing conservation actions and interests. This study quantified attitudes towards two endemic globally threatened Amazona parrots, one of which was developed as a popular flagship in the 1980s. We used a mixed methods approach that included qualitative and quantitative interviewing and a newspaper content analysis to provide empirical evidence that the process of creating this conservation flagship inadvertently fostered negative attitudes and behaviors towards its non-flagship congener. We argue that, similar to other commercially branded goods and services, popular conservation flagships can produce powerful standards of comparison that may decrease the attractiveness and public acceptance of non-flagship species. These results parallel findings from the fields of consumer research and marketing psychology showing that “top-of-the-line” products may hurt sibling models. We therefore suggest that this is an important unintended consequence of the flagship approach and encourage the conservation community to learn from commercial brand developers who have been wary of the potential for exclusionary contrast effects of flagship brand deployment.     

The behavioral economics of consumer brand choice: patterns of reinforcement and utility maximization

Purchasers of fast-moving consumer goods generally exhibit multi-brand choice, selecting apparently randomly among a small subset or "repertoire" of tried and trusted brands. Their behavior shows both matching and maximization, though it is not clear just what the majority of buyers are maximizing. Each brand attracts, however, a small percentage of consumers who are 100%-loyal to it during the period of observation. Some of these are exclusively buyers of premium-priced brands who are presumably maximizing informational reinforcement because their demand for the brand is relatively price-insensitive or inelastic. Others buy exclusively the cheapest brands available and can be assumed to maximize utilitarian reinforcement since their behavior is particularly price-sensitive or elastic. Between them are the majority of consumers whose multi-brand buying takes the form of selecting a mixture of economy -- and premium-priced brands. Based on the analysis of buying patterns of 80 consumers for 9 product categories, the paper examines the continuum of consumers so defined and seeks to relate their buying behavior to the question of how and what consumers maximize.     

Predicting consumer behavior: using novel mind-reading approaches

Advances in machine learning as applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data offer the possibility of pretesting and classifying marketing communications using unbiased pattern recognition algorithms. By using these algorithms to analyze brain responses to brands, products, or existing marketing communications that either failed or succeeded in the marketplace and identifying the patterns of brain activity that characterize success or failure, future planned campaigns or new products can now be pretested to determine how well the resulting brain responses match the desired (successful) pattern of brain activity without the need for verbal feedback. This major advance in signal processing is poised to revolutionize the application of these brain-imaging techniques in the marketing sector by offering greater accuracy of prediction in terms of consumer acceptance of new brands, products, and campaigns at a speed that makes them accessible as routine pretesting tools that will clearly demonstrate return on investment.     

Extracting representations of cognition across neuroimaging studies improves brain decoding

Cognitive brain imaging is accumulating datasets about the neural substrate of many different mental processes. Yet, most studies are based on few subjects and have low statistical power. Analyzing data across studies could bring more statistical power; yet the current brain-imaging analytic framework cannot be used at scale as it requires casting all cognitive tasks in a unified theoretical framework. We introduce a new methodology to analyze brain responses across tasks without a joint model of the psychological processes. The method boosts statistical power in small studies with specific cognitive focus by analyzing them jointly with large studies that probe less focal mental processes. Our approach improves decoding performance for 80% of 35 widely-different functional-imaging studies. It finds commonalities across tasks in a data-driven way, via common brain representations that predict mental processes. These are brain networks tuned to psychological manipulations. They outline interpretable and plausible brain structures. The extracted networks have been made available; they can be readily reused in new neuro-imaging studies. We provide a multi-study decoding tool to adapt to new data.     

LIBS: A Quality Control Tool for Food Supplements

In the present paper the ability of calibration free laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (CF-LIBS) as a quality control tool to monitor the composition of different minerals present in food supplement samples belonging to Indian brands (brand-A and brand-B) has been demonstrated. LIBS spectra of these two food supplements (brand-A and brand-B) available in the form of tablet have been recorded. As reported by manufacturers of these two food supplements, LIBS spectra of brand-A contains the spectral signatures of minerals like Ca, Mg, C, P, Zn, Fe, Cu, and Cr whereas LIBS spectra of brand-B shows the presence of spectral lines like Ca, Mg and C. The spectral signatures of Na and K are also found in both brands whereas spectral signature of Ti is observed only in brand-B but these elements are not mentioned on the nutritional label of the brands. The quantitative analysis of mineral contents in food supplements has been done using CF-LIBS for brand A and brand B to verify the content of the minerals reported by the manufacturer of the food supplements. Our results show that Ca and Mg are the main matrix elements of these brands. The concentration of minor and trace elements estimated using CF-LIBS technique is found in agreement with the reported nutritional values of both the brands. The concentration of major elements Ca and Mg are also estimated from Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy which is in close agreement with CF-LIBS result.     

浅谈麻醉机的外形设计中人性化考虑

本文就国内市场上进口和国产品牌麻醉机的外形和显示方面作了比较,探讨在这方面的人性化设计思路对用户使用的影响,也让用户,生产厂家看到到国内产品和进口品牌的外形差距,建立产品设计生产符合医疗使用流程和安全的意识。     

公立医院品牌保护的探索与实践

随着医疗体制改革的深入,在市场竞争规律调控下,医院品牌影响力成为医院发展的重要因素。因此,实施品牌战略,是现代医疗市场竞争对医院长远健康发展的必然要求。本文通过对阜外心血管病医院“三位一体”品牌保护体系的分析阐述,并借助典型案例进行深入探讨,旨在为公立医院的品牌管理提供一些思路和借鉴。     

Aging and consumer decision making

Research on consumer decision making and aging is especially important for fostering a better understanding of ways to maintain consumer satisfaction and high decision quality across the life span. We provide a review of extant research on the effects of normal aging on cognition and decision processes and how these age-related processes are influenced by task environment, meaningfulness of the task, and consumer expertise. We consider how research centered on these topics generates insights about changes in consumption decisions that occur with aging and identify a number of gaps and directions for future research.