Love Is Blind: How Sensory Liking Impacts Perceptions of Unbranded Products

Brand elements have been shown to impact perceptions of things even unrelated to the brand or product such as the consumer’s environment (Rahinel and Nelson 2016) and group identity (Torelli et al. 2017). Even though brands have been demonstrated to impact perception, companies regularly use “blind” testing in the product development process. We suggest that this may be a mistake as it may lead to a different sensory experience in the testing process than would be experienced after purchase, when a brand is present. While individuals may sense the same thing, their perceptions of these sensations may differ drastically. Individual perceptions of a sensory experience (i.e. how sweet, salty, strongly scented/flavored a stimulus is) are malleable, in that they are often influenced by environmental factors. Judgments about the taste or smell of a product have been shown to be affected by things such as ambient lighting (Oberfeld et al. 2009) and package design (Becker et al. 2010). Given the prevalence of brand imagery and the malleability of sensory perceptions, we hypothesize that the presence of a brand during consumption can impact perceptions of the sensory experience. Research on cultural symbolism supports this idea by demonstrating that taste evaluations can be impacted by the values a product embodies (Allen, Gupta, and Monnier2008) and other product information (Lahne, Trubek, and Pelchat 2013).