Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity

4. Profiling the Perfect Consumer

four Profiling฀the฀Perfect฀Consumer At least some part of the population will adopt an unfamiliar but nutritious food simply because it’s more healthful, but a larger portion will do so only if the taste of this food is preferable to alternatives. To better understand the types of people who have adopted a healthful unfamiliar food, it could be beneficial to profile those who did so because they like the taste. In contrast to health-motivated food choices (“I eat it because it’s supposed to be good for me”), taste-motivated preferences have long been shown to provide an enduring motivation fordietary change. Why should we care why someone eats a food as long as he or she eats it? One concern with a health-motivated segment for any product is that their behavior often is seen as more fickle than that of those who consume a product for more hedonic reasons such as taste. When the health risk is no longer a salient concern or when there is another option, a health-motivated segment may not continue to consume the product. This is exacerbated by attribution motivations, which can lead them to see themselves as having eaten the food because of health benefits and not because they enjoyed the food itself. To understand why a person adopts an unfamiliar food for taste-related reasons, it is useful to profile those who have already adopted that type of food for taste-motivated reasons. Doing so can provide insights 04.45-60_Wans.indd฀฀฀47 3/30/05฀฀฀2:50:37฀PM 48 • tools for targeting that can be used to identify the types of people who are most likely to adopt the food, and it can provide further insights into how to encourage such adoption. The practical consequence of unlocking these correlates of taste-motivated consumption can be seen in the U.S. yogurt industry. In 1978, 7.8 percent of the population consumed 75 percent of yogurt. Although for most people it was a nutrition-motivated choice, for others the decision was taste motivated. Based on insights from this taste-motivated segment, companies such as Dannon and General Mills (Yoplait) focused their product development strategies on better-tasting yogurts. Per capita consumption doubled in the next decade, and yogurt is now a common food in many U. S. kitchens. With yogurt, it was clear that a taste-motivated segment of yogurt lovers were responsible for driving innovation, new product introduction, and profitability in the early years of yogurt’s growth. This taste-motivated segment also was largely responsible for the enthusiasm and the word-of-mouth persuasion that stimulated repeated trial among similarly predisposed but uninitiated nonusers of yogurt. As an illustration for this chapter, consider soy. Today, soy is in a similar situation as yogurt was thirty years ago. Of the small percentage of Westerners who regularly and intentionally consume soy foods, the majority claim to do so because of its perceived health benefits, not its taste. Indeed, the belief that a product contains soy (even when it does not) has been shown to cause many nonvegetarian Americans to rate the taste of the product as grainy, chalky, dry, and unappealing, yet to also rate it as “tasting healthy.” To introduce the concept of taste-motivated segmentation, this chapterillustrateshowthepersonalityandbehaviorpro fileofataste-motivated segment of soy consumers differs from a health-motivated segment and from a segment that does not regularly and knowingly consume soy. Developing these profilescan inform product development andcommunication strategies for firms that want to expand the consumption base for a new or unfamiliar food. More generally, these methods are appropriate for similar research with other underconsumed products (such as fruits and vegetables) or those produced or processed with unfamiliar techniques (such as those that have been genetically altered or irradiated). 04.45-60_Wans.indd฀฀฀48 3/30/05฀฀฀2:50:37฀PM Profiling฀the฀Perfect฀Consumer • 49 What฀Differentiates฀a฀Taste-Motivated฀Segment฀from฀a฀ Health-Motivated฀Segment? To determine what characteristics might be associated with taste-motivated preferences for a product, qualitative and quantitative studies need to be conducted. Standard criteria have proved useful in profiling people who are predisposed to favoring specific foods (such as carbohydrate cravings ) where there is evidence of these criteria. In most cases, however, existing scales and characteristics may not be known. Results฀from฀Exploratory฀Qualitative...