Hand-Feel Touch Cues and Their Influences on Consumer Perception and Behavior with Respect to Food Products: A Review

Abstract

There has been a great deal of research investigating intrinsic/extrinsic cues and their influences on consumer perception and purchasing decisions at points of sale, product usage, and consumption. Consumers create expectations toward a food product through sensory information extracted from its surface (intrinsic cues) or packaging (extrinsic cues) at retail stores. Packaging is one of the important extrinsic cues that can modulate consumer perception, liking, and decision making of a product. For example, handling a product packaging during consumption, even just touching the packaging while opening or holding it during consumption, may result in a consumer expectation of the package content. Although hand-feel touch cues are an integral part of the food consumption experience, as can be observed in such an instance, little has been known about their influences on consumer perception, acceptability, and purchase behavior of food products. This review therefore provided a better understanding about hand-feel touch cues and their influences in the context of food and beverage experience with a focus on (1) an overview of touch as a sensory modality, (2) factors influencing hand-feel perception, (3) influences of hand-feel touch cues on the perception of other sensory modalities, and (4) the effects of hand-feel touch cues on emotional responses and purchase behavior.

Color-Induced Aroma Illusion: Color Cues Can Modulate Consumer Perception, Acceptance, and Emotional Responses toward Cooked Rice

“…Subsequently, adding colorants decreased hedonic ratings of aroma, flavor, mouthfeel, and overall impression. Such lower likings of yellow, orange, and green color samples with respect to aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel might be associated with disconfirmation between expected and actual perceptions (i.e., contrast effect), resulting in a decrease in hedonic ratings [ 9 , 69 , 70 , 75 , 76 ]. Another plausible explanation for decreased hedonic ratings of the artificially colored cooked rice sample is lower familiarity levels of those samples ( Figure 6 ).…”

Gastrophysics: Nudging consumers toward eating more leafy (salad) greens

“…Hence, if the packaging feels natural, at either a perceptual level or because of any semantic associations, then consumers will probably rate the contents of the packaging as higher with respect to those attributes as well. What is more, a large body of research shows that if one can get the consumer to touch the product then the likelihood of purchase goes up (see Gallace & Spence, 2014;Pramudya & Seo, 2019;Spence & Gallace, 2011). That said, one also needs to be aware of the problem of 'tactile contamination', whereby people do not want to purchase those products that have already been touched/handled by other shoppers (Argo, Dahl, & Morales, 2006).…”

Chewing gums with yerba mate and different flavors: An initial study with consumers

“…Pramudya and Seo (2019) discussed the importance of extrinsic and intrinsic cues on consumer acceptance and stated that consumers may modify their liking based on a confirmation or disconfirmation of expectations. If positive, they will repeat the consumption and, if negative, they will reject the product.…”