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Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations
Chapter 5
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Agnes Giboreau Institut Paul Bocuse, Ecully, France
Chapter Outline 1. Introduction 109 2. Key Points to Design Contextualized Consumer Studies110 3. Make a Laboratory Be a RealLife Situation (A Living Lab) 112
4. Make a Real-Life Situation Be a Laboratory114 5. Conclusion 115 References 116 Further Reading 116
1. INTRODUCTION The evidence for the effects of context on consumer perception and behavior has been widely demonstrated, raising many questions for consumer sciences. Context is always described as a fundamental dimension of eating, should it be regarding the pleasure of the meal as a whole (Meiselman, 2009) or its relation to culture (Fischler & Masson, 2007), psychology (e.g., Köster, 2009; Shepherd & Raats, 2006) or physiology (Blundell & Bellisle, 2013). From a theoretical point of view, research in cognitive psychology has largely helped to identify factors and processes influencing perception and action (behavior) and continues to bring useful knowledge. The role of context is a complex question, as many factors contribute to the ecology of a situation: physical (spatiotemporal and environmental), social (human interactions and language), and individual (mental and physiological). For the consumer, all dimensions are integrated in a holistic picture of the context. From a methodological point of view, it is not possible to control all contextual parameters because of the high number of factors, modalities and interactions. As a consequence, more and more consumer studies are conducted at home to bring context into evaluation tests. However, the wide variability in Methods in Consumer Research, Volume 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101743-2.00005-4 Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
109
110 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
usage conditions brings “noise” to the variable of interest and may reduce the outcome of the results. Thus, consumer scientists and professionals look for intermediate ways between real-life and laboratory conditions to improve the ecological validity of experimental environments. Designing more realistic conditions should be realized at a reasonable cost and within an acceptable time frame. As presented earlier in Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume, evoked contexts or virtual environments are possible ways to bring context. Those approaches are based on representations of context rather than providing a real environment. In the present chapter, two alternatives are proposed to provide real settings and conduct in situ evaluations: (1) make the laboratory be a reallife situation (living lab) or (2) make a real-life situation be a laboratory (field experiment). First, a series of key points is addressed with the aim of helping scientists select in situ testing conditions in relation to the objective of the test. Second, the living lab approach is detailed as an environment specifically designed to conduct consumer tests in real-life situations. Third, a methodological approach to the field experiment is presented to conduct investigations in real-life situations, with a particular emphasis on critical parameters to have under control.
2. KEY POINTS TO DESIGN CONTEXTUALIZED CONSUMER STUDIES The most important thing to keep in mind when designing an in situ study is to consider all dimensions of context and not focus only on environmental ones. Table 5.1 presents some of the most relevant elements to consider. The wide range of examples given in Table 5.1 illustrates the impossible task of creating controlled contexts for consumer tests if all factors have to be identical or balanced between subjects. Conducting consumer tests in a laboratory means to define fixed parameters for physical factors on one hand and to minimize social and individual factors on the other hand. Lab tests are useful to compare products at the sensory level but they hardly explain between-subject differences in hedonic data. Most consumer studies end with clustering data, and unfortunately they rarely identify actionable criteria to characterize subjects in the different clusters. Defining targets corresponding to each taste group becomes a real challenge for marketing teams. Rather than explaining differences between targets after a hedonic test, it is thus useful to describe the variety of consumers before the test. On one hand, ethnography allows one to better understand consumer segments in relation to their specific practices. On the other hand, observational methods bring useful information to marketing to segment the market. However, when the question is to evaluate or compare products, no ideal situation is known to cope with both the constraints of controlling the context and the constraints of dealing with variable subjects.
TABLE 5.1 Categories of Contextual Factors Potentially Influencing Consumers’ Responses Subcategory
Examples for the Food
General context
Geography
Regular, occasional location
History
Unique/repeated event, celebration, holiday, routine
Economy
Paid, free, gift, brand
Space
Size of the plate, distance to other subjects, size/volume of the room
Time
Time of day, duration devoted to eating
Atmospherics
Light, temperature, noise/music
Meal structure
Food eaten before or simultaneously (side dish, sauce, bread), beverage drunk before or simultaneously (water, soda, wine)
Delivery
Container (color, shape, volume, weight, material), cutlery
Interaction at service
Verbal and nonverbal interactions with the staff or person in charge of the food, waiting conditions (queuing, talking)
Interaction at table
Links with other guests (friends, family, colleagues)
Information
Language, label, price
Culture
Region, generation, education, economics
Knowledge
Familiarity with the product or the brand, general liking of the culinary category
Personality
Sensitivity to risk, to reward, to affect; neophobia
Motivation
Status of the meal for the subject—emotional value, attention dedicated to food, communication, duration
Homeostasis
Hunger, thirst, temperature, physical activity
Physical context
Social context
Individual context
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Chapter | 5 111
Category of Factors
112 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
Each application case (food category, brand, market, target group, concept and product being developed) is specific and this specificity has to be crossanalyzed with the specificity of the consumers of interest. Contextual categories and subcategories listed in Table 5.1 should be considered to design protocols for consumer studies. For each subcategory, the questions are: Is it of interest to compare different situations in this category? If yes, which situations should be considered in the protocol (two or three conditions)? Or are slight differences acceptable although they might have an impact on hedonic responses and be part of the unexplained variance? In other words, when variability within a contextual category is expected to be high, there are two methodological options: 1. to test products under natural conditions and keep the variability as part of the “noise”, the natural variance of responses; 2. to control, to select restricted conditions by making a selection from all possible ones (i.e., split the protocol into contrasting situations and obtain the adequate number of subjects for each relevant situation), for example, to conduct a test in a workplace canteen and collect liking of coffee when served in ceramic or cardboard cups. Decisions on which option to follow for each contextual factor are made on scientific and operational knowledge and depend on the objective of the study. Another crucial point is the data to be collected. Participating in a study represents a bias in itself compared to a natural situation. Thus, questionnaires have to be as short as possible so that consumers will not be affected by a long series of questions. For this reason, observational approaches are often followed in living labs: video recording, choice between options, weight of served/consumed quantities.
3. MAKE A LABORATORY BE A REAL-LIFE SITUATION (A LIVING LAB) The principle of a living lab is to collect consumer data in a real environment. To do so, technological equipment is used to record relevant data from users who have agreed to be observed. Let us consider the case of Le Restaurant, a living lab (ENOLL) at the Institut Paul Bocuse (France). Opened in 2008, Le Restaurant—the experimental platform of the Institut Paul Bocuse—is a research and innovation structure developed by a team of scientists and professionals in the fields of culinary arts, food service, and hospitality. The platform has now reached its maturity as a living lab, labeled ENOLL, the European Network of Living Labs, and serves for scientific research and applied studies. The living lab provides a unique setting allowing testing in actual eating situations. It is a fully modular experimental laboratory. It includes a restaurant and a kitchen with high-tech equipment, including high-yield preparation materials and audiovisual recording devices. The living lab is designed
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Chapter | 5 113
to replicate actual cooking and consumption situations. Both the floor and the ceiling of the restaurant and the kitchen are modular to adapt to different equipment configurations, allowing for the construction of different contexts. Thanks to the availability of food service professionals, it is easy to create every type of restaurant environment (traditional, collective, brewery, cafeteria, etc.) as well as changing the kitchen configuration for specific needs. This includes changes in the ambience with adjustable temperature, sound system, visual environment, lighting, air quality, furniture, and so on. To ensure fully natural conditions, measurement methods partially include subject-involving procedures (such as questionnaires) and give privilege to those based rather on observation, so the customers do not feel like subjects in an experiment. Examples of settings in the living lab are presented in Fig. 5.1. Studies are conducted with the regular clientele of Le Restaurant or, if needed, a targeted population is recruited (e.g., children, elderly) and the design is defined accordingly. Users are key components of each study, which is a very specific dimension of our living lab in the field of food sciences and innovation. Depending on the specific technique used, they are involved as actors in reallife situations—captured through in situ methods, or as collaborators—when expertise is needed and explicated. Consenting users are not necessarily aware of the whole range of issues of the study; discrete data acquisition material and (a)
(c)
(b)
(d)
FIGURE 5.1 Examples of settings in the living lab of the Institut Paul Bocuse. (a) Cafeteria, (b) high school, (c) brasserie, (d) fine dining restaurant.
114 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
an adequate contextual setting provide a strong sense of a real-life situation to the users. This is particularly true for the experimental restaurant when it is used during the daily opening (commercial restaurant) period. Among the preferred techniques are ethnographic studies through video, experimental economics (design of incentive-compatible mechanisms aimed at eliciting economic value in contextualized situations), and interviews and short questionnaires for sensory and hedonic evaluation (with the help of tablet equipment). The living lab allows researchers to evaluate the dynamics of food consumption and the liking of food at different moments in the meals, taking into account and providing information on the kinetics of consumption (Allirot et al., 2014; Cliceri, Petit, Garrel, Monteleone, & Giboreau, 2017; Fernandez, Bensafi, Rouby, & Giboreau, 2013). For instance, a study dedicated to bread consumption compared preference before and after a meal in relation to choice during the meal (Iborra-Bernad, Wathelet, & Giboreau, 2012). Two breads, a white bread and a whole wheat bread, were first evaluated in a controlled environment and then offered during a regular lunch. Volunteer customers of the restaurant participated (n = 117). The video analysis confirmed a large majority (80%) of consumers chose first their preferred bread, in coherence with their declared liking before the meal. However, thanks to the following of consumption over the course of the meal and the evaluation of the consumers’ judgment at the end of the meal, the results showed a significant decrease in preference for the whole wheat bread (from 48% to 31%, P ≤ .05) together with a decrease in consumption. This illustrates that declarative liking and actual consumption are not always correlated and emphasizes the value of conducting multiple-level approaches and real-life situation studies. In summary, a living lab is a powerful tool to study users’ choice and preference in real-life situations. An experimental restaurant operated by professionals coupled with scientific protocols allows researchers to keep good control over several contextual factors, such as the physical (atmospherics, table art, portions, staff, food offerings) and some social (staff, information) factors, together with the integration of consumers’ variability, including cultural, psychological, and physiological contextual factors.
4. MAKE A REAL-LIFE SITUATION BE A LABORATORY In some cases, it is preferable to obtain consumer results in a free-living situation, i.e., a situation in which the contextual factors are not at all managed by the experimenters and allowed to be as they naturally are. This is particularly true in public health–oriented projects for which the objective is to evaluate the impact of an intervention (e.g., at school, Morizet, Depezay, Combris, Picard, & Giboreau, 2012; in nursing homes, Pouyet, Benattar, Cuvelier, & Giboreau, 2015; Pouyet, Cuvelier, Benattar, & Giboreau, 2015; at the hospital, Navarro et al., 2015). Examples of settings of field experiments are presented in Fig. 5.2.
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Chapter | 5 115
(a)
(b)
FIGURE 5.2 Examples of field experiments. (a) School cafeteria, (b) nursing home.
The principle of evaluating consumers in real-life settings is to select one principal variable and make sure this variable is collected as precisely as possible. Food intake is very often the variable of interest. In that case, weighing the food remaining on plates is the best measure. To do so, several steps are needed to guarantee the recorded data are as accurate as possible and linked to the identification of individuals. A study was conducted in a school cafeteria following a real-life experimental procedure. The objective of this study was to evaluate food waste in relation to food liking (Baldridge, Morizet, Hanicotte, Giboreau, & Schwartz, 2012). The consumption and the liking of dishes were measured over 5 days in a primary school (students 8–11 years of age). Served quantities were standardized. Pictures of individual trays were taken at the clearing point. A total of 776 pictures of trays were analyzed showing that the most wasted food was vegetable dishes, and more specifically the cooked vegetables served cold as a starter. In parallel, 248 interviews of children were conducted and allowed the measure of the liking of each food. The Pearson coefficient relating waste to liking was highly significant (r = −0.997, P < .0001). This study confirmed the prominent role of liking in food consumption in children and led to the selection of the least-liked food to be reworked from a culinary and sensory point of view. In summary, collecting consumer data in real-life settings is a valuable option complementing lab and living lab approaches and is particularly useful when the specificity of the studied context does not allow one to recruit consumers for a lab test or to reproduce an ecological environment. In such cases, the lab has to go to the field.
5. CONCLUSION The study of the context effect on consumers concerns many disciplines and is a fascinating area for researchers. It is also a wide open field for innovation as interactions between product and context offer multiple combinations. Finally,
116 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
it is also a challenge for consumer scientists to design in situ relevant fieldwork conditions, and real-life settings may become the most common approaches for product testing.
REFERENCES Allirot, X., Saulais, L., Disse, E., Nazare, J. A., Cazal, C., & Laville, M. (2014). Integrating behavioral measurements in physiological approaches of satiety. Food Quality and Preference, 31, 181–189. Baldridge, S., Morizet, D., Hanicotte, C., Giboreau, A., & Schwartz, C. (2012). Consommation de légumes en restauration scolaire: analyse du gaspillage et des raisons de non consommation. In Journées Francophones de Nutrition, December 12th – 14th Lyon. Blundell, J. E., & Bellisle, F. (2013). Satiation, satiety and the control of food intake. Cambridge: Woodhead. Cliceri, D., Petit, E., Garrel, C., Monteleone, E., & Giboreau, A. (2017). Effect of glass shape on subjective and behavioral consumer responses in a real-life context of drinking consumption. Food Quality and Preference, 60, 19–30. Fernandez, P., Bensafi, M., Rouby, C., & Giboreau, A. (2013). Does olfactory specific satiety take place in a natural setting? Appetite, 60(1), 1–4. Fischler, C., & Masson, E. (2007). Manger français, européens et américains face à l’alimentation. Paris: O. Jacob. Iborra-Bernad, C., Wathelet, O., & Giboreau, A. (2012). Measuring bread use in a French restaurant. A naturalistic approach: Grid analysis for the French culture. In Measuring behavior 28–31 August, Utrecht. Köster, E. P. (2009). Diversity in the determinants of food choice: A psychological perspective. Food Quality and Preference, 20(2), 70–82. Meiselman, H. L. (2009). Meals in science and practice. Cambridge: Woodhead. Morizet, D., Depezay, L., Combris, P., Picard, D., & Giboreau, A. (2012). Effect of labeling on new vegetable dish acceptance in preadolescent children. Appetite, 59(2), 399–402. Navarro, D. A., Boaz, M., Krause, I., Eli, A., Chernov, K., Giabra, M., et al. (2015). Improved meal presentation increases food intake and decrease readmission rate in hospitalized patients. Clinical Nutrition, 1–6. Pouyet, V., Benattar, L., Cuvelier, G., & Giboreau, A. (2015). A photographic method to measure food item intake. Validation in geriatric institutions. Appetite, 84, 11–19. Pouyet, V., Cuvelier, G., Benattar, L., & Giboreau, A. (2015). Influence of flavour enhancement on food liking and consumption in elderly subjects with poor, moderate or high cognitive status. Food Quality and Preference, 44, 119–129. Shepherd, R., & Raats, M. (2006). In The psychology of food choice. London: Cabi.
FURTHER READING Giboreau, A., & Body, L. (2012). Le marketing sensoriel: de la stratégie à la mise œuvre. Paris: Vuibert.
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Agnes Giboreau Institut Paul Bocuse, Ecully, France
Chapter Outline 1. Introduction 109 2. Key Points to Design Contextualized Consumer Studies110 3. Make a Laboratory Be a RealLife Situation (A Living Lab) 112
4. Make a Real-Life Situation Be a Laboratory114 5. Conclusion 115 References 116 Further Reading 116
1. INTRODUCTION The evidence for the effects of context on consumer perception and behavior has been widely demonstrated, raising many questions for consumer sciences. Context is always described as a fundamental dimension of eating, should it be regarding the pleasure of the meal as a whole (Meiselman, 2009) or its relation to culture (Fischler & Masson, 2007), psychology (e.g., Köster, 2009; Shepherd & Raats, 2006) or physiology (Blundell & Bellisle, 2013). From a theoretical point of view, research in cognitive psychology has largely helped to identify factors and processes influencing perception and action (behavior) and continues to bring useful knowledge. The role of context is a complex question, as many factors contribute to the ecology of a situation: physical (spatiotemporal and environmental), social (human interactions and language), and individual (mental and physiological). For the consumer, all dimensions are integrated in a holistic picture of the context. From a methodological point of view, it is not possible to control all contextual parameters because of the high number of factors, modalities and interactions. As a consequence, more and more consumer studies are conducted at home to bring context into evaluation tests. However, the wide variability in Methods in Consumer Research, Volume 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101743-2.00005-4 Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
109
110 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
usage conditions brings “noise” to the variable of interest and may reduce the outcome of the results. Thus, consumer scientists and professionals look for intermediate ways between real-life and laboratory conditions to improve the ecological validity of experimental environments. Designing more realistic conditions should be realized at a reasonable cost and within an acceptable time frame. As presented earlier in Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume, evoked contexts or virtual environments are possible ways to bring context. Those approaches are based on representations of context rather than providing a real environment. In the present chapter, two alternatives are proposed to provide real settings and conduct in situ evaluations: (1) make the laboratory be a reallife situation (living lab) or (2) make a real-life situation be a laboratory (field experiment). First, a series of key points is addressed with the aim of helping scientists select in situ testing conditions in relation to the objective of the test. Second, the living lab approach is detailed as an environment specifically designed to conduct consumer tests in real-life situations. Third, a methodological approach to the field experiment is presented to conduct investigations in real-life situations, with a particular emphasis on critical parameters to have under control.
2. KEY POINTS TO DESIGN CONTEXTUALIZED CONSUMER STUDIES The most important thing to keep in mind when designing an in situ study is to consider all dimensions of context and not focus only on environmental ones. Table 5.1 presents some of the most relevant elements to consider. The wide range of examples given in Table 5.1 illustrates the impossible task of creating controlled contexts for consumer tests if all factors have to be identical or balanced between subjects. Conducting consumer tests in a laboratory means to define fixed parameters for physical factors on one hand and to minimize social and individual factors on the other hand. Lab tests are useful to compare products at the sensory level but they hardly explain between-subject differences in hedonic data. Most consumer studies end with clustering data, and unfortunately they rarely identify actionable criteria to characterize subjects in the different clusters. Defining targets corresponding to each taste group becomes a real challenge for marketing teams. Rather than explaining differences between targets after a hedonic test, it is thus useful to describe the variety of consumers before the test. On one hand, ethnography allows one to better understand consumer segments in relation to their specific practices. On the other hand, observational methods bring useful information to marketing to segment the market. However, when the question is to evaluate or compare products, no ideal situation is known to cope with both the constraints of controlling the context and the constraints of dealing with variable subjects.
TABLE 5.1 Categories of Contextual Factors Potentially Influencing Consumers’ Responses Subcategory
Examples for the Food
General context
Geography
Regular, occasional location
History
Unique/repeated event, celebration, holiday, routine
Economy
Paid, free, gift, brand
Space
Size of the plate, distance to other subjects, size/volume of the room
Time
Time of day, duration devoted to eating
Atmospherics
Light, temperature, noise/music
Meal structure
Food eaten before or simultaneously (side dish, sauce, bread), beverage drunk before or simultaneously (water, soda, wine)
Delivery
Container (color, shape, volume, weight, material), cutlery
Interaction at service
Verbal and nonverbal interactions with the staff or person in charge of the food, waiting conditions (queuing, talking)
Interaction at table
Links with other guests (friends, family, colleagues)
Information
Language, label, price
Culture
Region, generation, education, economics
Knowledge
Familiarity with the product or the brand, general liking of the culinary category
Personality
Sensitivity to risk, to reward, to affect; neophobia
Motivation
Status of the meal for the subject—emotional value, attention dedicated to food, communication, duration
Homeostasis
Hunger, thirst, temperature, physical activity
Physical context
Social context
Individual context
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Chapter | 5 111
Category of Factors
112 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
Each application case (food category, brand, market, target group, concept and product being developed) is specific and this specificity has to be crossanalyzed with the specificity of the consumers of interest. Contextual categories and subcategories listed in Table 5.1 should be considered to design protocols for consumer studies. For each subcategory, the questions are: Is it of interest to compare different situations in this category? If yes, which situations should be considered in the protocol (two or three conditions)? Or are slight differences acceptable although they might have an impact on hedonic responses and be part of the unexplained variance? In other words, when variability within a contextual category is expected to be high, there are two methodological options: 1. to test products under natural conditions and keep the variability as part of the “noise”, the natural variance of responses; 2. to control, to select restricted conditions by making a selection from all possible ones (i.e., split the protocol into contrasting situations and obtain the adequate number of subjects for each relevant situation), for example, to conduct a test in a workplace canteen and collect liking of coffee when served in ceramic or cardboard cups. Decisions on which option to follow for each contextual factor are made on scientific and operational knowledge and depend on the objective of the study. Another crucial point is the data to be collected. Participating in a study represents a bias in itself compared to a natural situation. Thus, questionnaires have to be as short as possible so that consumers will not be affected by a long series of questions. For this reason, observational approaches are often followed in living labs: video recording, choice between options, weight of served/consumed quantities.
3. MAKE A LABORATORY BE A REAL-LIFE SITUATION (A LIVING LAB) The principle of a living lab is to collect consumer data in a real environment. To do so, technological equipment is used to record relevant data from users who have agreed to be observed. Let us consider the case of Le Restaurant, a living lab (ENOLL) at the Institut Paul Bocuse (France). Opened in 2008, Le Restaurant—the experimental platform of the Institut Paul Bocuse—is a research and innovation structure developed by a team of scientists and professionals in the fields of culinary arts, food service, and hospitality. The platform has now reached its maturity as a living lab, labeled ENOLL, the European Network of Living Labs, and serves for scientific research and applied studies. The living lab provides a unique setting allowing testing in actual eating situations. It is a fully modular experimental laboratory. It includes a restaurant and a kitchen with high-tech equipment, including high-yield preparation materials and audiovisual recording devices. The living lab is designed
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Chapter | 5 113
to replicate actual cooking and consumption situations. Both the floor and the ceiling of the restaurant and the kitchen are modular to adapt to different equipment configurations, allowing for the construction of different contexts. Thanks to the availability of food service professionals, it is easy to create every type of restaurant environment (traditional, collective, brewery, cafeteria, etc.) as well as changing the kitchen configuration for specific needs. This includes changes in the ambience with adjustable temperature, sound system, visual environment, lighting, air quality, furniture, and so on. To ensure fully natural conditions, measurement methods partially include subject-involving procedures (such as questionnaires) and give privilege to those based rather on observation, so the customers do not feel like subjects in an experiment. Examples of settings in the living lab are presented in Fig. 5.1. Studies are conducted with the regular clientele of Le Restaurant or, if needed, a targeted population is recruited (e.g., children, elderly) and the design is defined accordingly. Users are key components of each study, which is a very specific dimension of our living lab in the field of food sciences and innovation. Depending on the specific technique used, they are involved as actors in reallife situations—captured through in situ methods, or as collaborators—when expertise is needed and explicated. Consenting users are not necessarily aware of the whole range of issues of the study; discrete data acquisition material and (a)
(c)
(b)
(d)
FIGURE 5.1 Examples of settings in the living lab of the Institut Paul Bocuse. (a) Cafeteria, (b) high school, (c) brasserie, (d) fine dining restaurant.
114 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
an adequate contextual setting provide a strong sense of a real-life situation to the users. This is particularly true for the experimental restaurant when it is used during the daily opening (commercial restaurant) period. Among the preferred techniques are ethnographic studies through video, experimental economics (design of incentive-compatible mechanisms aimed at eliciting economic value in contextualized situations), and interviews and short questionnaires for sensory and hedonic evaluation (with the help of tablet equipment). The living lab allows researchers to evaluate the dynamics of food consumption and the liking of food at different moments in the meals, taking into account and providing information on the kinetics of consumption (Allirot et al., 2014; Cliceri, Petit, Garrel, Monteleone, & Giboreau, 2017; Fernandez, Bensafi, Rouby, & Giboreau, 2013). For instance, a study dedicated to bread consumption compared preference before and after a meal in relation to choice during the meal (Iborra-Bernad, Wathelet, & Giboreau, 2012). Two breads, a white bread and a whole wheat bread, were first evaluated in a controlled environment and then offered during a regular lunch. Volunteer customers of the restaurant participated (n = 117). The video analysis confirmed a large majority (80%) of consumers chose first their preferred bread, in coherence with their declared liking before the meal. However, thanks to the following of consumption over the course of the meal and the evaluation of the consumers’ judgment at the end of the meal, the results showed a significant decrease in preference for the whole wheat bread (from 48% to 31%, P ≤ .05) together with a decrease in consumption. This illustrates that declarative liking and actual consumption are not always correlated and emphasizes the value of conducting multiple-level approaches and real-life situation studies. In summary, a living lab is a powerful tool to study users’ choice and preference in real-life situations. An experimental restaurant operated by professionals coupled with scientific protocols allows researchers to keep good control over several contextual factors, such as the physical (atmospherics, table art, portions, staff, food offerings) and some social (staff, information) factors, together with the integration of consumers’ variability, including cultural, psychological, and physiological contextual factors.
4. MAKE A REAL-LIFE SITUATION BE A LABORATORY In some cases, it is preferable to obtain consumer results in a free-living situation, i.e., a situation in which the contextual factors are not at all managed by the experimenters and allowed to be as they naturally are. This is particularly true in public health–oriented projects for which the objective is to evaluate the impact of an intervention (e.g., at school, Morizet, Depezay, Combris, Picard, & Giboreau, 2012; in nursing homes, Pouyet, Benattar, Cuvelier, & Giboreau, 2015; Pouyet, Cuvelier, Benattar, & Giboreau, 2015; at the hospital, Navarro et al., 2015). Examples of settings of field experiments are presented in Fig. 5.2.
Situational Factors and the Design of In Situ Evaluations Chapter | 5 115
(a)
(b)
FIGURE 5.2 Examples of field experiments. (a) School cafeteria, (b) nursing home.
The principle of evaluating consumers in real-life settings is to select one principal variable and make sure this variable is collected as precisely as possible. Food intake is very often the variable of interest. In that case, weighing the food remaining on plates is the best measure. To do so, several steps are needed to guarantee the recorded data are as accurate as possible and linked to the identification of individuals. A study was conducted in a school cafeteria following a real-life experimental procedure. The objective of this study was to evaluate food waste in relation to food liking (Baldridge, Morizet, Hanicotte, Giboreau, & Schwartz, 2012). The consumption and the liking of dishes were measured over 5 days in a primary school (students 8–11 years of age). Served quantities were standardized. Pictures of individual trays were taken at the clearing point. A total of 776 pictures of trays were analyzed showing that the most wasted food was vegetable dishes, and more specifically the cooked vegetables served cold as a starter. In parallel, 248 interviews of children were conducted and allowed the measure of the liking of each food. The Pearson coefficient relating waste to liking was highly significant (r = −0.997, P < .0001). This study confirmed the prominent role of liking in food consumption in children and led to the selection of the least-liked food to be reworked from a culinary and sensory point of view. In summary, collecting consumer data in real-life settings is a valuable option complementing lab and living lab approaches and is particularly useful when the specificity of the studied context does not allow one to recruit consumers for a lab test or to reproduce an ecological environment. In such cases, the lab has to go to the field.
5. CONCLUSION The study of the context effect on consumers concerns many disciplines and is a fascinating area for researchers. It is also a wide open field for innovation as interactions between product and context offer multiple combinations. Finally,
116 PART | I Doing Consumer Research
it is also a challenge for consumer scientists to design in situ relevant fieldwork conditions, and real-life settings may become the most common approaches for product testing.
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FURTHER READING Giboreau, A., & Body, L. (2012). Le marketing sensoriel: de la stratégie à la mise œuvre. Paris: Vuibert.