Creating memorable products: Actual liking and remembered liking

Product choice is influenced by the remembered liking for that product at the time that the choice is made. Little research has been carried out on memory for the liking of foods, and yet remembered liking at the time of purchase may be more influential on choice than liking ratings obtained during actual product consumption. A recent study examines how liking ratings made during consumption are integrated to produce an overall remembered evaluation. Its results enable quantifying differences between actual and remembered liking experiences.

Introduction

Product choice is partly influenced by the remembered liking for that product at the time of consumption. The relationship between actual and remembered liking has received almost no attention in the food literature. How do my hedonic responses, made ‘on-line’ as I consume the product, become integrated to form a holistic retrospective memory? If we understood this process, we could design products so as to maximize remembered liking in order to ensure repeat purchase and use.From pain research it is known that the pattern of the pain intensity interferes with memory: an acute pain pattern with a peak just before the end of the pain experience scores higher on remembered pain intensity than a chronic pain pattern with no peak at the end (the so-called ‘peak-at-end effect’; Ariely, 1998 and Kahneman et al., 1993). The present study was an initial attempt to extrapolate these negative effect findings from pain research to the positive affective experiences in the food domain. We hypothesised that products that deliver the maximum of the sensory stimuli at the end (peak-at-end rule) of the eating experience will score higher on remembered liking than products that follow a constant or a different liking pattern. The food product used was a crunchy cheese snack filled with soft processed cheese. The cheese filling varied in salt and cheese flavour intensity (Low and High) to examine four different sensory patterns: (1) a high constant pattern, (2) a low constant pattern, (3) a peak-at-end pattern and (4) a drop-at-end pattern (see Table 1).