Search results

Cultivating customer loyalty is extremely crucial for fast-food players to remain competitive in the industry. This research is discovering the path to cultivate customer loyalty through experience that is built based on auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory and visual cues.

Quantitative research has been conducted by distributing survey questionnaires to customers at selected fast-food restaurants in urban areas. The collected data has been analyzed by descriptive and structural equation modeling analysis.

The customers' loyalty to fast food can be cultivated through gustatory, haptic and olfactory cues. However, auditory and visual are not functioning as marketing cues to cultivate customer loyalty.

The fast-food players may emphasize gustatory, haptic and olfactory marketing cues to cultivate customer loyalty. These cues can be shared through experience.

This study has discovered the potential ways to cultivate customer loyalty in dining at fast-food restaurants within the Malaysian market.

To argue that childhood obesity is minimally influenced by media sources. Rather, our evolved gustatory preferences for fatty and sweet caloric foods, which were adaptive in our evolutionary history, yield maladaptive outcomes in today’s plentiful environments.

The approach is discursive relying on several literature streams to make the key points of the current paper.

Obesity, whether in children, adolescents, or adults, is minimally linked to media images. The “media‐obesity” postulated relationship stems from the blank slate viewpoint of the human mind, which places undue importance on environmental cues and related socialization forces.

Highlights the fact that social scientists have expended too much intellectual capital in investigating largely illusory links between food advertising and childhood obesity, when in reality this relationship is tenuous at best.

Policy makers should spend less time worrying about the regulation of media images as these have little effect on behaviors with deleterious consequences (including childhood obesity).

One of the few papers (if not the only one) in the marketing literature to apply evolutionary‐based theorizing in understanding the forces that shape individuals’ food consumption habits.

This study measures the effect of each of the five senses on arousal, satisfaction and intention to revisit a live racing event. Spectators' arousal was significantly influenced by sights, sounds and smells. Spectators' sense of smell, taste, and touch directly impacted satisfaction. Interestingly, olfactory stimuli had an effect on both arousal and satisfaction. Spectators' arousal had a significant indirect effect on their revisit intention. The study proposes that motorsports marketers make use of olfactory stimuli to provide racing spectators with memorable experiences.

This paper aims to explore the influence of four types of imagery stimuli (i.e. visual, olfactory, gustatory and auditory) on food craving intensity based on the Elaborated Intrusion theory and the central role of mental imagery in the food craving experience. The roles of overall perception of sensory imagery attributes and perceived availability in moderating this process were also tested. The aim is to extract the positive aspects of food cravings by increasing them and shifting them toward healthy foods.

In an online experiment, 314 participants were randomly primed with each imagery condition. After being exposed to either healthy or unhealthy food pictures, participants completed a questionnaire measuring their craving state, trait food craving, imaging ability, BMI, dietary restraint, hunger and mood. At the end, the impact of food craving intensity on marketing outcomes (i.e. willingness to pay, price sensitivity and food intake) were tested.

As predicted, visual imagery was found to be the strongest stimulus inducing food craving followed by olfactory, gustatory and auditory stimuli. Furthermore, the results indicate that perceived availability of food is the only important variable moderating this process. Additionally, the results show that hunger makes consumers more susceptible to food cravings than mood. Moreover, food craving intensity showed significant impact on the two marketing outcomes: willingness to pay and food intake.

First, the authors used a cheeseburger as unhealthy food and salad as healthy food, future studies can increase the generalizability of the findings by using other types of food. Second, physiological and psychological disorders should be considered and studied as influential factors on food cravings in future studies. Third, future studies should include some behavioral measures besides the analysis of state and trait craving. Fourth, although the main objective of this study was to compare the effect of different imagery stimuli on consumers’ food craving, there was no control (no-stimulus) condition.

Marketing strategists may benefit from the fact that encouraging consumers to visualize some specific type of food product along with informing them about its availability will elevate their craving for that food product. Hence, using this strategy in shopping environments could be beneficial. In the context of improving people’s diet, our results showed that encouraging people to visualize healthy foods (e.g. fruits and vegetables) might be more helpful than priming them with the benefits of eating healthy.

There has been a recent enthusiastic interest in identifying the role of food related mental imagery and stimuli in consumers’ decision making and their final consumption (Christian et al., 2016). Nevertheless, very few studies in marketing have paid attention to these underpinning stimuli driving food craving and the significant influence of this food craving phenomenon on marketing outcomes.

Nature is the single and most complex system that has been always studied, and no one can compete Mother Nature, but we can learn from her, by many new methodologies through biology. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper, being inspired by the mechanism through which our Mother Nature handling human taste, a proposed model for clustering and classification hand gesture is introduced based on human taste controlling strategy.

The model can extract information from measurement data and handling it as the structure of tongue and the nervous systems of human taste recognition.

The efficiency of proposed model is demonstrated experimentally on classifying the sign language data set; in the high recognition accuracy obtained for numbers of ASL was 95.52 percent.

The aim of this paper is to determine chemical and sensory differences of between craft and industrial/or commercial beers. Beer market is nowadays booming and consumers are in the search of new and healthier products.

Here, commercial and craft beers were chemically analyzed and sensory evaluated. Chemical analysis included pH, bitterness, color, total polyphenol content and antioxidant activity. Likewise, 40 sensory descriptors were evaluated by trained panelists, including visual, olfactory and gustatory attributes. In addition, an electronic nose (e-nose) was tested to determine its suitability to discriminate beer type and/or style according to their volatiles profile.

Craft beers presented higher values of color, bitterness and antioxidant activity when compared to commercial beers. Sensory descriptors showed craft beers to be associated with the highest scores in visual, olfactory and gustatory descriptors. Data from e-nose explained 97% of the total variability of the volatile compounds in the analyzed beers, indicating the suitability of this device to discriminate beer types.

Results are of interest for design of marketing and selling techniques for craft brewery managers. In addition, cheap and easy-managing device as e-nose resulted in a valuable tool to monitoring beer quality.

Sensory perception is an important factor to understand and effectively appeal to consumers. As consumers process information consciously and subconsciously, both perception levels (explicit and implicit) are essential to investigate. This paper aims to analyze the effects of explicit and implicit sensory perception on brand experience and brand-related performance indicators and then investigate the correlations between the senses and experience dimensions.

The authors conducted a field experiment in a coffee house. For data collection, the authors used a questionnaire for explicit measures and a response latency measurement for implicit measures. For data analysis, structural equation modeling and a correlation analysis were conducted.

The results reveal positive relationships between explicit and implicit sensory perception, brand experience and brand performance in the context of gastronomy. Furthermore, implicit perception acts through explicit perception, and brand experience plays a major role as a mediator between sensory perception and consumer responses. Moreover, visual and haptic perception reveal the highest weights in the structural model and the strongest correlations with the experience dimensions.

This paper contributes to consumer research by providing empirical evidence for the importance of both the explicit and implicit sensory perception to effectively appeal to consumers. The results give valuable insights on the effectiveness of sensory marketing in generating memorable brand experiences and positive brand performance. Furthermore, the findings provide new knowledge on which senses (explicit and implicit) are related to different types of experiences.

This study aims to identify the sensory inputs that tourists use to shape their nightlife experiences.

The situations in three Southeast Asian cities, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore were examined, using tourist reviews posted on tripadvisor.com. A total of 460 data units concerning Bangkok, 373 data units concerning Kuala Lumpur and 453 data units concerning Singapore were compiled and manually analyzed to reveal the frequency of the primary sensory inputs used by the reviewers. Bivariate correlation analysis was additionally performed to reveal the co-occurrences of the sensory inputs that tourists used to form their impressions of each city.

The findings suggest that gustatory inputs were powerful yet unspecific, while visual inputs were vivid and conspicuous. Audio inputs added certain meaningful contributions to some extent for some tourists. However, the distribution of the sensory inputs differed across the three cities. Moreover, the contributions of the olfactory and tactile inputs are largely missing.

With the management of nightlife businesses (small or micro servicescapes), a thoughtful selection for the drink menu is necessary. When possible, a signature drink should be invented and promoted for each place. With the projection and promotion of tourist destinations as nightlifescapes, a sensory marketing approach should be considered. For example, nightlifescapes could be presented and promoted with unique drinks, good views of the city’s landmarks and interesting local music.

Prior to this study, little research has been carried out to investigate tourists’ nightlife experiences and their impressions of nightlifescapes. In addition, little has been done to identify the sensory inputs that tourists use to explain their experiences and impressions.