ROCHESTER — A while back I wrote a column on the power of suggestion. In that story, I described an event from my childhood that's become a family classic — the day my sister set Thanksgiving on fire.
The story goes ... my mom told us not to touch the lit candles on her impeccably set Thanksgiving table. But that suggestion, of course, compelled my sister to do the opposite. She reached out, touched a candle, knocked it over and in an instant, the table was ablaze (the adults acted quickly to save the meal by extinguishing the flames, removing charred napkins and covering the burn hole in the table cloth).
I thought of that story the minute I read about the new chocolate chip cookie taste test study from The Ohio State University. Researchers there explored the power of suggestion — in particular, the power of negative suggestion — in regards to how people think food tastes.
For the study, they labeled two identical chocolate chip cookies from the same package differently. One was labeled "customer complaint" and the other was labeled "new and improved." Then they asked a group of taste testers to try the two cookies and judge each on likability, freshness and a range of other qualities. They also performed the same test with crackers.
The cookies labeled "customer complaint" received lower ratings than the cookies labeled "new and improved."
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“We had both negative and positive bias — but the negative bias was much bigger. That negative context had more impact than saying ‘new and improved’ had on generating better ratings,” said Christopher Simons, associate professor of sensory science at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study.
“On one hand, it’s not surprising. On the other hand, the degree of the impact was really surprising,” Simons said.
He says this could be a lesson here for product developers. Rather than optimizing positive attributes for a new product idea, perhaps there would be value in teasing out what customers perceive as negative and adjusting accordingly.
The research is published in the journal Food Quality and Science.
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