Lecture Description

Beyond its major role of preservation, packaging is an overlooked (and powerful) branding and marketing tool. Packaging plays an important role in attracting the consumers’ attention and creating sensory, hedonic, and symbolic expectations, which may affect actual product experience.

In our latest series of experiments, we investigated whether the color of the coffee packaging would impact specialty coffee consumers’ evaluation. In a first study, we demonstrated that different packaging colours affected consumers’ sensory, hedonic (i.e., liking), symbolic (e.g., modern, commercial), and functional (e.g., organic, decaf) expectations. In a second study in which the consumers were presented with a coffee bag and then tasted a coffee sample, we showed that their expectations were actually transferred over to perception of the coffee itself, affecting purchase behavior. Moreover, we observed different clusters of consumers based on individual preferences of overall coffee flavour notes (e.g., fruity, nutty, floral).

Despite the global popularity and consumption figures for specialty coffee, there has been remarkably little research on packaging design on consumers’ perception of, as well as their preferences concerning, coffee. Adding value to a product also includes understanding how to create pleasure for the customer. Innovative packaging should optimize meaningful communication though design that guides consumers in their purchase decisions.

Date: Friday, June 23, 2023
Time: 11:45pm - 12:45pm EET

Location: Lecture Room 2

Presenter:

Dr. Fabiana Carvalho
University of Campinas

Fabiana Carvalho is a Brazilian neuroscientist who received her MSc in Biochemistry and her PhD in Psychobiology studying neural processes of perception and memory. She has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a project investigating sensory perception as an anticipatory and constructive process instead of a mere passive and reactive process.

She is currently a collaborating researcher at the University of Campinas, Brazil. Her research project “The Coffee Sensorium” is focused on understanding multisensory flavour perception. She is interested in scrutinizing the influence of extrinsic factors (that is, ambiance) on the expectation and perception of flavour in specialty coffee. This research project has been conducted in collaboration with Prof Charles Spence at University of Oxford, UK.