Overcoming consumption barriers for conscious food products: The role of vivid sensory imagery

Despite of their rising importance, concepts such as conscious consumption face major challenges. Besides other factors, lay theories attributing lower sensory pleasure to conscious products represent potential consumption barriers. Literature provides reason to assume that sensory imagery could be a concept with high relevance for conscious consumption. However, up to date extant studies come to contradictory conclusions. The present paper focuses on understanding and combating lay theory based consumption barriers towards conscious (sustainable, organic and regional) food products. We draw on literature on sensory imagery and the availability-valence hypothesis and report an experimental study, involving sensory testing and VR technology, investigating the effects of vividness of sensory imagery on consumers’ pre- and post-consumption responses and behavioral intentions.
We conducted an experimental study (n = 160), which was conceptualized as a mixed design study, whereby the degree of stimulated sensory imagery (control group without stimulation vs. verbally presented sensory information vs. individual sensory images generated by storytelling vs. vivid sensory images created by VR technology) served as between-subjects factor and the type of conscious product (sustainable vs. organic vs. regional) as within-subjects factor. Consumer responses before and after tasting serve as dependent measures.
The study was planned and analyzed with various ANOVAs and the Scheffé post-hoc-test, in which the between-subject factors were the priming stimuli groups. Result show that the highest scours are reached by priming with storytelling.
As an example, the taste expectation of the organic stimulus (F (3,158) = 4.162, p = .007) with storytelling shows significantly higher mean values than the comparison groups (Scheffé p = .041).
Thus, our results provide some first empirical evidence of effects of stimulating the individual imagination have greater effects than media display through VR technology or verbal sensory product descriptions to reduce barriers to consumption.