Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

“Quality does not sell itself”

“Quality does not sell itself” PurposeFood quality is a multi-dimensional concept comprising both objective and subjective components. Quality as defined from an industry perspective usually relies on different instrumental assessment and on ratings of “experts” which may not necessarily align with consumers’ perception of quality. The purpose of this paper is to deal with consumers perceptions of intrinsic quality in coffee from a sensory scientific and behavioral economic perspective.Design/methodology/approachIn a blind taste test (n=205), naïve consumers tasted two cups of coffee and decided which they preferred. The two coffees varied greatly in their “objective” quality (based on expert grading) and retail value. Consumers were then revealed that one of the cups contained a coffee that was much more expensive than the other, and that they could get a free cup of their preferred coffee if they could correctly identify the most expensive one.FindingsThe results showed that preferences were equally distributed among the high- and low-quality samples, and that consumers did not perform better than chance level in the identification task. These results suggest that current grading systems used in the industry may be poorly correlated with the way consumers actually experience coffee, and thus that quality inference in the marketplace is more likely influenced by external cues (e.g. brand, label and price) than to intrinsic product quality. Nevertheless, the results also show that consumers who correctly answered the identification task were also significantly more likely to prefer the high-quality sample. This tentatively suggests that better sensory expertise is correlated with a preference for higher quality, though future studies are needed to confirm the correctedness of this interpretation.Originality/valueThis work highlights the difficulty of objectively defining food quality, and the limited usefulness of experts’ ratings widely used in the industry. Managerial implications of these findings, as well as implications for consumer policy, are discussed. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png British Food Journal Emerald Publishing

“Quality does not sell itself”

Download PDF
13 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/quality-does-not-sell-itself-p0uXsts3Hb

References (34)

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN
0007-070X
DOI
10.1108/BFJ-03-2016-0127
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

PurposeFood quality is a multi-dimensional concept comprising both objective and subjective components. Quality as defined from an industry perspective usually relies on different instrumental assessment and on ratings of “experts” which may not necessarily align with consumers’ perception of quality. The purpose of this paper is to deal with consumers perceptions of intrinsic quality in coffee from a sensory scientific and behavioral economic perspective.Design/methodology/approachIn a blind taste test (n=205), naïve consumers tasted two cups of coffee and decided which they preferred. The two coffees varied greatly in their “objective” quality (based on expert grading) and retail value. Consumers were then revealed that one of the cups contained a coffee that was much more expensive than the other, and that they could get a free cup of their preferred coffee if they could correctly identify the most expensive one.FindingsThe results showed that preferences were equally distributed among the high- and low-quality samples, and that consumers did not perform better than chance level in the identification task. These results suggest that current grading systems used in the industry may be poorly correlated with the way consumers actually experience coffee, and thus that quality inference in the marketplace is more likely influenced by external cues (e.g. brand, label and price) than to intrinsic product quality. Nevertheless, the results also show that consumers who correctly answered the identification task were also significantly more likely to prefer the high-quality sample. This tentatively suggests that better sensory expertise is correlated with a preference for higher quality, though future studies are needed to confirm the correctedness of this interpretation.Originality/valueThis work highlights the difficulty of objectively defining food quality, and the limited usefulness of experts’ ratings widely used in the industry. Managerial implications of these findings, as well as implications for consumer policy, are discussed.

Journal

British Food Journal – Emerald Publishing

Published: Oct 3, 2016

There are no references for this article.