Unlocking Consumer love: Transforming taste into market leadership

Everyone has an opinion! It should be sweeter, richer, have more depth of flavor. More or less salt, sourness, umami. It needs more fizz, less fizz, a cleaner taste. It needs more flavor.

But taste is personal. Everyone seeks something slightly different, and we end up looking for the best compromise, aiming to maximize likes—though not loves—and offend the fewest consumers.

The result is often a bland, inoffensive product that does "quite well" but neither revolutionizes the market nor defines a career for its creator.

But there is a better way.

The most successful products taste great because their flavor has meaning to the consumer. Red Bull signifies energy, 7up refreshment, Snickers is substantial and satisfying. It’s not just the brands but the very taste of the product that encapsulates this meaning.

We can treat taste as a mere physiological experience and measure consumer preferences, or we can advance to understanding how taste affects our consumers emotionally. What do we want our product experience to mean to our consumers, and how can we elicit the exact emotional response from them?

It’s not just about asking consumers how they feel after consuming our products. We need to understand their emotional needs, their entire emotional journey while consuming it. How and why the sensory features of the consumption journey deliver this emotional journey, and how we can improve it.

The Marketing Clinic are global experts in the psychology of taste. We help keep global brands like Nescafé and Lay’s Potato Chips (including Walkers Sensations) on top. We understand why home-cooked fish and chips in the UK should differ from everyone's favorite takeaway version, and why the most popular indigestion tablets in the US should not taste better than they do (even though they could).

Most significantly, we can tell you what you need to do to make your consumers love your product.

Stop making cosmetic tweaks to the taste and focus on what your brand's delivery actually means to the consumer.

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Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:

Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands