Usually food research looks at the physical and chemical product characteristics. This is also revered to as ‘hard sciences’. The psychological sciences look at the use of a product, the consumer side of it, its choice and its perception. The Total Product Experience is important in the hard sciences. The Total Product Experience is built on four principles:

Top-down effects: ideas, expectations, information and emotions in combination with direct sensory perception affect the liking and perception of the product.

Unconscious influences: a lot of information about products and their sensory perception is consciously and volitionally available to the consumers.

Multi sensory perception: humans use all their sensory systems to perceive products and the systems interact in many ways.

Consumer-product interactions: oral ingestion is not the only interaction consumers can have with a food product. The interaction is much wider.

The following text will be about these four principles.

Multi sensory perception

Human beings possess more senses than the five most people know. Everybody knows that our senses are hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting. Many distinct sensory systems are put together under the sense of touch and the internal senses are usually ignored altogether. There are actually twelve distinct sensory systems that can be distinguished! Often, the senses of cold, heat and pain are overlooked, but these are very important in food perception. All those systems can interact in numerous ways. There are a lot of interactions, think about handling, preparing and consuming food. Almost every system is involved in food consumption. You look and see the food, you smell the food, you feel the food, its texture in your mouth and you can even hear the sound the food makes when you break it into small pieces in your mouth. But you can also feel the carton when you open u food box and hear the cracking noise a wrapping paper makes. Interactions between flavour, taste and texture are and will always be important for food products and with the recent developments in multisensory science, you are able to use these interactions to a larger extent than seems to be happening right now. Internal states, like emotions, also need to be studied because they can be seen as contributing to multisensory interactions.

Top-down effects

There is an overlooked interplay of conception (forming ideas and understanding abstractions) and perception. When the stream of information comes from the sensory system, this is called bottom up. However, this information does not build the total picture of what we perceive of a food product. There is much more information that we add to this picture and this comes from our brains. For instance, we may have previous experience with a product, memories of an advertisement about this product and our own thoughts and ideas which all exert their influence on how you perceive and what you perceive. One study presented subject with a certain odour. The subjects who were told that the odour came from a cheese liked the odour more than subjects who were told that the same odour was a body odour. The brain regions that were activated depended on the cognitive labels received. Another study showed a similar effect. Participants were told that they would receive a very sweet drink and other participants were told that they would receive a not-so-sweet drink. The very sweet label resulted in the activation of the primary taste brain region. These top down effects as labels can impact low-level neural perceptual processes. It seems that they change the perceptual reality of the subject. Research has also found that emotions have shown to exert these types of influence on food perception, but many of these influences are often unconscious.

Unconscious influences

According to studies, many of the emotions, perceptions and sensations related to a food product will remain out of our conscious awareness. Many food impressions are stored in memory inattentively and these impressions help to build our total experience of a product, they affect our dislikes and likes, they shape our expectations and in doing so they affect our buying behaviour. Consumers usually can’t relate the motivation for their food choice reliably. Behaviour is not always the result of consciously willing it. Some researchers speak about adaptive unconscious, which guides us through a complicated environment and helps us with decisions through intuition. This is all happening without our conscious knowledge and even without the possibilities of knowledge (people can’t observe how they are unconsciously categorizing things, just as they can’t observe how their stomach works). This has a big implication for food choice. It is difficult to talk to consumers to find out anything about their motivation for buying certain products. The only thing you will receive, is the part of the conscious awareness, shaped through an explicit reasoning process. But this might be unrelated to any psychological process that actually makes the consumers’ behaviour. So basically you will only get information about how consumers reason explicitly and how they express themselves about products. This can be useful for advertisement purposes, but it is of limited worth in understanding how consumers’ purchase behaviour and dislikes are shaped. Research has shown that sensory perceptions can be stored in memory and that they can later shape choice in an implicit way (the consumer is not aware of it). So it seems that there are sensory perceptions being processed outside our awareness but stored in our memory. Even the experience of smell and taste are things one is not completely aware of.

Unconscious influences of emotions are also possible. Inductions of affective states can take place without the subject being aware of it.

Consumer-product interaction

Usually people think that the eating or drinking experience begins when somebody puts foods or drinks in their mouth. But, the interaction between the consumer and the product takes place long before ingestion occurs. The first contact somebody has with a product is usually hearing about it, seeing it in the store or seeing an advertisement or commercial. Then, the consumer might feel the packaging material or look at it in more detail. When you buy a product in a shop, you will have to open the packaging, unwrap it, perhaps shake it. It will be eaten directly or prepared and our senses of smell, sight, taste, pain, audition and temperature will work together to build a sensory experience out of all those impressions. The liking or disliking of the product will be passed on to the memory. In this way, the Total Product Experience will emerge. This is the combination of events, memories and sensations that occur during, before or after the sensation proper. The different disciplines involved in product development can be harmonized by the use of the Total Product Experience.

Conclusion

With all that being said, what good is it for the consumer scientists? We have known the principles for a while, but scientists have not explored their methodological consequences fully. The only thing that is fully explored, is multisensory perception. There are many studies about consumption that look at multisensory perception. The effect of cognition on perception should be explored more thoroughly. It is not difficult to produce a product with a good taste, but it is hard to present this product in such a way that consumers repeatedly want it. Top-down effects, like packaging, information and marketing will make the difference. Scientists must find a way to understand the interplay between cognitive input, perception, liking and purchase behaviour. They also need to look more at consumer-product interactions. Some studies about food behaviour are done without the consumer actually using the product, in the form of questionnaires. Other studies only focus on the in-mouth aspects of a product. Studies should not only look at product-oriented sensory testing, but also look at consumers and a product-as-marketed. Researchers do know that there are many non-rational effects on choice and behaviour, but there are not many resulting innovations in the field of food perception. Sensory science is developing from a product oriented approach to a wider field with an increasing psychological and consumer-oriented view.