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Interspecific American‐European hazelnut (Corylus americana × C. avellana) hybrids are being developed for the Upper Midwest region of the United States, which have potential economic and ecological benefits. Currently, researchers are working on pre‐commercialization initiatives to create a local hazelnut industry. However, a lack of knowledge on the sensory characteristics and consumer acceptability of the hybrid hazelnuts have been identified as potential limitations to production. This study investigated consumer responses to hybrid hazelnuts, employing hedonic ratings and check‐all‐that‐apply (CATA) questions. Twelve roasted hazelnut hybrids were subjected to consumer evaluation for liking (aroma, color, flavor, texture, and overall) and aroma and flavor descriptors. Consumers also evaluated two European hazelnut varieties for comparative purposes. Liking scores were significantly different (p < 0.05) across different hybrid varieties and when comparing specific hybrids with European varieties. CATA sensory profiles specific to different varieties were also observed and discriminating attributes were identified using multiple‐response methodologies. Penalty analysis based on CATA further identified the attributes roasty, hazelnut‐like, caramel‐like, chocolate‐like, sweet, and salty as primary drivers of aroma/flavor liking, while earthy, burnt, and bitter were identified as primary drivers of disliking. Overall, unique flavors that impacted liking were found in hybrid hazelnuts and, when compared with European hazelnuts, provided insights for breeding and post‐processing strategies to optimize product quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenge facing agriculture is the need to increase food production while at the same time reducing negative sustainability-related consequences. The use of synthetic chemical pesticides in conventional agriculture, which dominates worldwide, is particularly critical in terms of sustainability. Pesticide-free agriculture, which dispenses with synthetic chemical pesticides and uses mineral fertilizers, is an option that ensures sufficient yields and is associated with beneficial sustainability-related consequences. For the establishment of pesticide-free agriculture, knowledge about the evaluation of food from this agricultural system is central. The aim of the study was to analyze how consumers perceive food from pesticide-free agriculture in relation to established products from conventional and organic agriculture. By means of an online questionnaire, 559 German consumers were surveyed. Three products (fruit, vegetables, and cereals) were evaluated by the participants depending on the agricultural system in which they were produced (conventional, organic, and pesticide-free agriculture). Four criteria (health value, naturalness, environmental effects of production, and trustworthiness) were used for evaluation. The analyses show that fruit, vegetables, and cereals from pesticide-free agriculture were perceived as significantly healthier, more natural, more environmentally friendly produced, and more trustworthy than conventional alternatives. Although food from organic farming fulfills various requirements that go beyond the absence of pesticides, there were no significant differences between organically produced and pesticide-free fruit, vegetables, and cereals regarding the evaluation criteria. The organic and pesticide-free product variants were rated as above-average healthy, natural, environmentally friendly, and trustworthy. Overall, it is evident that consumers perceive pesticide-free foods as more advantageous compared to conventional products; there is a clear differentiation. In contrast, consumers do not differentiate between organic and pesticide-free foods. Clear communication of the characteristics of pesticide-free and organic food would be important to enable consumers to make a clearer distinction between the product categories and make an informed purchasing decision.

Amidst a growing shift towards eco-friendly choices in personal care products, the challenge of formulating herbal shampoos with efficacy comparable to synthetic counterparts persists. This study investigates the potential of incorporating patchouli extract and allantoin as additives in anti-dandruff shampoo formulations, assessing their impact on the technological properties of the product. With limited research on their efficacy, our investigation contributes valuable insights to the development of effective and consumer-friendly shampoos targeting dandruff concerns. Physicochemical characteristics (pH, surface tension, texture) were evaluated, alongside specific quality assessments such as wetting time, dirt dispersion, foaming, and cleaning action, in in vivo consumer research. Shampoo formulations incorporating 0.5% Patchoul'Up™ and 1% allantoin exhibited acceptable properties. However, the addition of plant-derived ingredients resulted in a beneficial decrease in surface tension (5.87%). Nevertheless, a decrease in cohesiveness (18%) over a 5-month period resulted in rheological changes, indicating potential instability (p < 0.05). While the consumer evaluation aligns with laboratory findings, continuous research is essential to ensure stability and validate the anti-dandruff potential of the formulation, both in vitro and in vivo. This involves expanding the number of volunteers, with a specific focus on individuals experiencing dandruff concerns, to assess the shampoo's efficacy and impact on diverse user experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the study was to compare carcass and meat quality among Lithuanian White, Lithuanian Indigenous Wattle and conventional hybrids as well as consumer sensory evaluations. The pigs were slaughtered at a live weight of approximately 95–100 kg. After 24 h of slaughter, carcasses were evaluated and sampled for the analysis of meat quality traits of loins and consumer evaluation of cooked loins and baked bellies. The pigs of both Lithuanian breeds had higher backfat thickness and depth of underbelly but lower loin area compared with hybrids. However, more fatty local breeds had higher intramuscular fat content but lower cholesterol content than hybrids. The loins from local pigs displayed higher pH and colour with lower lightness and yellowness but higher redness and also lower cooking loss, shear force and hardness than conventional hybrids. Pork from lean hybrids had a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids and more favourable lipid quality indices such as atherogenic (AI) and thrombogenic (TI) indices and the hypocholesterolemic/hypercholesterolemic (h/H) ratio; however, the peroxidisability index (PI) and iodine value (IV) were less favourable compared with local pigs. Consumers evaluated cooked loins and baked bellies. The loins from local breeds scored higher in juiciness, taste and overall acceptability compared with conventional hybrids. However, a higher overall acceptability was observed for the lean bellies of hybrids. The results can be used to increase pork consumption choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hedonic measurements in the frame of consumer tests of foods are prone to many different biases and the validity of test designs has been subject to much research with special emphasis on the role of context. While bringing elements of natural consumption context to the testing conditions is generally seen as an improvement, other aspects of the test design such as the task format have received little attention. In particular, the influence of analytical questions on hedonic responses has been studied in standardized contexts only. This study aimed to assess whether synthetic and analytical evaluation tasks result in different hedonic responses when the test is conducted in a natural consumption context. Bread and pizzas with different degrees of culinary preparation (homemade, readymade, and a combination of the two) were tested on three separate days in a university cafeteria. Overall liking scores of the bread and the three different pizzas were obtained either with a synthetic (hedonic question only) or with an analytical task (hedonic question plus intensity attributes). Care was taken to avoid any other changes to normal eating conditions, notably by recruiting on the spot only those customers who had spontaneously chosen pizza as part of their lunch. Liking scores of the homemade pizza were lower with the analytical task while the scores of the other two pizzas did not change significantly. Moreover, different rankings of the pizzas were obtained when the data were analyzed separately for each evaluation task format. The synthetic evaluation task would have led to the conclusion that the homemade pizza was the best liked and the readymade being the least liked, while the analytical evaluation task would have led to the conclusion that the "mixed" pizza would be liked significantly more than the other two. The effect of the task format (i.e., lower scores with the analytical task) was more pronounced when participants reported they had spent more time in the queue. These results strengthen the view that the task is part of the evaluation context and must be carefully considered when one wishes to design ecologically valid consumer tests.

The trajectory for widespread integration of edible insects into the human diet is still confronted by low acceptability especially among communities that traditionally or habitually do not consume insects. While the concern today is how best to present edible insects into food matrices that improve their acceptability, this development should be aligned with consumer intrigues into the choices of insectbased foods. This study determined the influence of socio-economic factors (age, education, marital status, occupation, and income levels), and breastfeeding status of mothers and care givers on acceptability of cricket-based porridges. Four composite porridge flours were developed by blending cricket flour with maize, wheat, and soy flour at four different levels. The reference formula (CP) had 0% cricket inclusion and was a composite of maize, wheat, and defatted soy flour in the ratio of 2:1:1 resembling Famila Baby weaning porridge flour, a common infant formula in Kenya. The other treatment flours were formulated by replacing an equivalent amount of soy flour with cricket flour at 25%, 50% and 75% to allow enrichment of Famila formula with cricket flour, and were coded as CPB1, CPB2 and CPB3, respectively. Porridge prepared from the flours were evaluated for acceptability among forty mothers and care-givers selected in Siaya County, Kenya. Non-cricket porridge was the most accepted across the respondents' socioeconomic dynamics. Acceptability of cricket-based porridges improved with age and level of education but reduced significantly for both married (p<0.000) and unmarried women (p<0.000). Women engaged in formal employment rated cricketbased porridges significantly higher (p<0.003) than other occupations. Income level generated mixed influences with non-cricket porridge still rated significantly higher (p<0.000) than cricket-based porridges across different income groups. Breastfeeding had insignificant influence on acceptability of the porridges (p=0.06). From this study, age, education, occupation and income showed varied influences on the acceptability of cereal-cricket porridges and should therefore be considered among key factors that shape consumer acceptability. Consequently, promotion strategies should consider the latter socio-economic factors in devising interventions to improve acceptability of edible insects and their products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability as a vital purchase criterion in sustainable consumption contexts is often biased by misguided information. In this context, we investigate the hindsight bias, i.e., consumers think in hindsight that they knew what would happen all along, may lead consumers to think they evaluated attributes of unsustainable or sustainable products correctly all the time while they did not, devaluating downstream marketing variables. This paper experimentally investigates the hindsight bias by manipulating information about a products' sustainability. We focus on two perspectives about hindsight biases, namely, marketing and psychology, to explore the interaction of surprise and sustainability. In a set of two online studies (Study 1: n = 300; Study 2: n = 461), we found a group‐based hindsight bias for high‐involvement, unsustainable products (Study 1) and individual hindsight biases for low‐involvement, unsustainable and sustainable products (Study 2). Contributing to both, mostly separately researched perspectives, we conclude that neither is predominantly correct. Instead, both perspectives jointly determine why consumers evaluate products differently. Confronted with surprising, sustainable information about unsustainable products causes a hindsight bias that increases purchase intention and word of mouth. In contrast, surprising, unsustainable information about sustainable products show opposed effects. Implications for marketing practice show when product information can unintentionally cause greenwashing and how product information should be communicated to underline a product's sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of cost transparency on consumers' perceptions of the brand and intentions to purchase its products. It also examines whether product-related attributes (product price and country-of-origin (COO) and consumer characteristics (socially responsible consumer behavior) moderate the effectiveness of cost transparency. Findings show that providing consumers with detailed cost breakdowns would lead to higher perceived quality and value and a more favorable brand attitude when compared to the conditions in which detailed cost information is not provided. The results also indicate that the cost transparency strategy is an effective way to generate a more favorable brand attitude, especially for lower-priced brands. Consumers who are more socially responsible in their behaviors perceived higher quality and expressed higher purchase intention for brands engaging in cost transparency practices. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how consumers perceive agricultural products affected by natural disasters, using apples in Japan as a case study. Typhoons and other natural disasters frequently damage the surface of apples during the production season, causing significant harm to farmers' businesses, particularly when a large typhoon hits the production area. To maintain the sustainability of agricultural production, consumers need to purchase damaged crops at a certain price. To assess the effect of product attributes, such as appearance and price, and personal attributes of respondents, we conducted a choice-based conjoint analysis using a mixed logit model. The estimated results using the main effect and cross-section models show that consumers generally devalue apples when they have scratches. However, by using consumer co-operatives on a daily basis and disseminating simple information about the relationship between scratches and natural disasters, we could mitigate this devaluation tendency and thus contribute to sustainable agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst a growing shift towards eco-friendly choices in personal care products, the challenge of formulating herbal shampoos with efficacy comparable to synthetic counterparts persists. This study investigates the potential of incorporating patchouli extract and allantoin as additives in anti-dandruff shampoo formulations, assessing their impact on the technological properties of the product. With limited research on their efficacy, our investigation contributes valuable insights to the development of effective and consumer-friendly shampoos targeting dandruff concerns. Physicochemical characteristics (pH, surface tension, texture) were evaluated, alongside specific quality assessments such as wetting time, dirt dispersion, foaming, and cleaning action, in in vivo consumer research. Shampoo formulations incorporating 0.5% Patchoul’Up™ and 1% allantoin exhibited acceptable properties. However, the addition of plant-derived ingredients resulted in a beneficial decrease in surface tension (5.87%). Nevertheless, a decrease in cohesiveness (18%) over a 5-month period resulted in rheological changes, indicating potential instability (p < 0.05). While the consumer evaluation aligns with laboratory findings, continuous research is essential to ensure stability and validate the anti-dandruff potential of the formulation, both in vitro and in vivo. This involves expanding the number of volunteers, with a specific focus on individuals experiencing dandruff concerns, to assess the shampoo’s efficacy and impact on diverse user experiences.

The objective of the study was to compare carcass and meat quality among Lithuanian White, Lithuanian Indigenous Wattle and conventional hybrids as well as consumer sensory evaluations. The pigs were slaughtered at a live weight of approximately 95–100 kg. After 24 h of slaughter, carcasses were evaluated and sampled for the analysis of meat quality traits of loins and consumer evaluation of cooked loins and baked bellies. The pigs of both Lithuanian breeds had higher backfat thickness and depth of underbelly but lower loin area compared with hybrids. However, more fatty local breeds had higher intramuscular fat content but lower cholesterol content than hybrids. The loins from local pigs displayed higher pH and colour with lower lightness and yellowness but higher redness and also lower cooking loss, shear force and hardness than conventional hybrids. Pork from lean hybrids had a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids and more favourable lipid quality indices such as atherogenic (AI) and thrombogenic (TI) indices and the hypocholesterolemic/hypercholesterolemic (h/H) ratio; however, the peroxidisability index (PI) and iodine value (IV) were less favourable compared with local pigs. Consumers evaluated cooked loins and baked bellies. The loins from local breeds scored higher in juiciness, taste and overall acceptability compared with conventional hybrids. However, a higher overall acceptability was observed for the lean bellies of hybrids. The results can be used to increase pork consumption choices.

People diagnosed with mental illness (hereon referred to as consumers) experience a disproportionately lower life expectancy of up 30 years compared to the general population. Systemic issues such as diagnostic overshadowing and stigma from healthcare professionals have inhibited the development of positive therapeutic partnerships that enable consumers to seek and engage support for their physical health concerns. Consumers have called for healthcare professionals to skillfully develop and prioritize therapeutic partnerships whilst coordinating and providing physical healthcare. The aim of this qualitative descriptive research was to explore consumer views and experiences of their interactions with a specialist mental health nursing role, the Physical Health Nurse Consultant. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 14 consumers from a large public Community Mental Health Service in the Australian Capital Territory. Interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed. Therapeutic partnerships were an overarching theme identified from the data and included three sub‐themes: personal attributes of the Physical Health Nurse Consultant; behaviour change engagement strategies; and impact of the therapeutic partnership. Consumers described the personal and professional attributes of the Physical Health Nurse Consultant that enabled the establishment and maintenance of their highly valued therapeutic partnership. This therapeutic partnership was perceived to positively impact their personal and clinical outcomes. With increasing support from consumers, clinical practice settings should move towards embedding a Physical Health Nurse Consultant role in routine practice. Further research exploring the co‐development of health behaviour change goals and, barriers and facilitators experienced by the consumers regarding the Physical Health Nurse Consultant is required to further role development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual Reality (VR) is shaping all human activities, and with the advent of the metaverse, buyers are going to experience new ways of doing shopping. What would happen if consumers will be asked to assess a product's attribute, i.e., packaging, in a virtual environment, instead of being able to physically hold the product, like in a traditional purchasing process? The aim of this study is to analyze consumers' evaluation of packaged products in immersive VR, manipulating packaging structural and haptic cues, and clarify potential differences with the consumers' responses in the real life. We conducted two focus groups (Study 1), with 16 participants, a mixed design experiment (Study 2), involving 167 consumers, to analyze consumers' attitudes, and a choice‐based conjoint analysis (Study 3), with 41 individuals, to study actual choice behavior. The main findings reveal that consumer behavior in VR is consistent with everyday life, except for minor variations. VR proves to be an efficient and rigorous research environment, also suitable for testing sensory cues and non‐tangible attributes. Finally, the article suggests managers can effectively use VR for product and packaging development, through a more sustainable process that requires fewer resources and time compared to traditional tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning from developments in other countries, Chinese firms heavily invest in design to develop products with differentiated advantages to upgrade their value chains. This research investigates Chinese firms’ design utilization performance by analyzing award-winning products in the past decade. Specifically, we first investigate on what level leading Chinese companies utilized design. Through a content analysis based on the jury’s comments on each award-winning product, results show that Chinese companies mainly utilized the functional and styling roles of design. Next, we further investigate the competitiveness of Chinese firms’ utilization of design in Chinese markets and non-Chinese markets. The comparison of consumers’ evaluations of selected award-winning products was conducted between products from leading Chinese brands and international brands. Results showed that in Chinese markets, consumers evaluated products from Chinese brands more positively than the international ones on all four dimensions (i.e., aesthetics, usage, meaning, and typological). In non-Chinese markets, represented by Dutch markets, western consumers evaluated international brands more positively than Chinese brands overall as well as on the dimension of meaning. Taken together, this research indicates that leading Chinese firms mainly utilize the styling and function roles of design. In terms of competitiveness of design utilization, Chinese firms are competitive on products’ aesthetics and usage, both at the national and international levels. They, however, lack the ability to leverage design at the international level through generating new meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making personalized product integration improvement based on consumer evaluation behavior plays a vital role in enhancing user satisfaction. However, the difference in consumer maturity leads to various standards of satisfaction decision-making in consumer evaluation behavior. Classical theories and models for describing product evaluation decision cannot granularly depict the well-thought-out decision-making process of consumer evaluation behavior and neglect the nonlinear influence of product attributes and consumer personality. Besides, existing studies usually adopt subjective methods like questionnaires and interviews to analyze consumer evaluation behavior, which have a limited number of data and questionable external validity. In order to fill these research gaps, consumer maturity indicators such as product cognition level, preference characteristics and evaluation characteristics are extracted from online reviews, and a three-phase Planned Behavior Model for Consumer Evaluation (PBMCE) is established based on the theory of planned behavior, including the attribute attitude formation phase, the evaluation intention formation phase and the evaluation result generation phase. Simultaneously, a Genetic Algorithm is developed to find the solution of the nonlinear three-phase PBMCE, and personalized product integration improvement strategies are proposed accordingly to achieve high user satisfaction. Finally, experiment results based on 5,200 users’ online reviews validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, indicating that our model can identify the importance of product attributes and consumer personality and characterize their nonlinear impacts on satisfaction decision.

Chocolate is a highly appreciated food around the world which is rich in polyphenols but usually sweetened to mask inherent bitterness and astringency. Here we aim to determine how roast time and temperature in cacao roasting affect bitterness intensity and consumer liking of chocolate. We have also determined the relationship between consumer liking and perceived bitterness, astringency, sourness, sweetness, and cocoa intensity. Unroasted cacao from three different origins was roasted according to a designed experiment into a total of 27 treatments which were evaluated for overall liking and sensory attribute intensities by 145 chocolate consumers. We demonstrate that bitterness, sourness and astringency of 100% chocolate can be reduced through optimizing roasting temperature and time. Reduction of bitterness, sourness and astringency were significantly correlated with increased acceptability of the unsweetened chocolate samples. Aside from roasting, cacao origin including base levels of bitterness, astringency, and sourness should also be considered when optimizing consumer acceptability. Perceived cocoa flavor intensity, being highly positively correlated to liking, is likely to also be an important consideration for raw material selection. As for optimal roast profiles, for the cacao origins in our study, more intense roasting conditions such as 20 min at 171 °C, 80 min at 135 °C, and 54 min at 151 °C, all led to the most acceptable unsweetened chocolate. Conversely, for the purposes of optimizing consumer acceptability, our data do not support the use of raw or lightly roasted cacao, such as 0 min at 24 °C, 11 min at 105 °C, or 55 min at 64 °C.

Hedonic measurements in the frame of consumer tests of foods are prone to many different biases and the validity of test designs has been subject to much research with special emphasis on the role of context. While bringing elements of natural consumption context to the testing conditions is generally seen as an improvement, other aspects of the test design such as the task format have received little attention. In particular, the influence of analytical questions on hedonic responses has been studied in standardized contexts only. This study aimed to assess whether synthetic and analytical evaluation tasks result in different hedonic responses when the test is conducted in a natural consumption context. Bread and pizzas with different degrees of culinary preparation (homemade, readymade, and a combination of the two) were tested on three separate days in a university cafeteria. Overall liking scores of the bread and the three different pizzas were obtained either with a synthetic (hedonic question only) or with an analytical task (hedonic question plus intensity attributes). Care was taken to avoid any other changes to normal eating conditions, notably by recruiting on the spot only those customers who had spontaneously chosen pizza as part of their lunch. Liking scores of the homemade pizza were lower with the analytical task while the scores of the other two pizzas did not change significantly. Moreover, different rankings of the pizzas were obtained when the data were analyzed separately for each evaluation task format. The synthetic evaluation task would have led to the conclusion that the homemade pizza was the best liked and the readymade being the least liked, while the analytical evaluation task would have led to the conclusion that the “mixed” pizza would be liked significantly more than the other two. The effect of the task format (i.e., lower scores with the analytical task) was more pronounced when participants reported they had spent more time in the queue. These results strengthen the view that the task is part of the evaluation context and must be carefully considered when one wishes to design ecologically valid consumer tests.

This study examines how consumers perceive agricultural products affected by natural disasters, using apples in Japan as a case study. Typhoons and other natural disasters frequently damage the surface of apples during the production season, causing significant harm to farmers’ businesses, particularly when a large typhoon hits the production area. To maintain the sustainability of agricultural production, consumers need to purchase damaged crops at a certain price. To assess the effect of product attributes, such as appearance and price, and personal attributes of respondents, we conducted a choice-based conjoint analysis using a mixed logit model. The estimated results using the main effect and cross-section models show that consumers generally devalue apples when they have scratches. However, by using consumer co-operatives on a daily basis and disseminating simple information about the relationship between scratches and natural disasters, we could mitigate this devaluation tendency and thus contribute to sustainable agricultural production.

Culture plays an essential role in the success of product design, especially in the age of a global economy where there is a high probability of discrepancy between the designer's intention and the consumer's response. However, the role of culture is often challenging to identify and measure. In the current paper, we employed Repertory Grids to investigate differences in UK and Chinese participants' evaluations of designs, which were themselves from both UK and Chinese students. The techniques of Honey's Content Analysis and Principal Components Analysis were applied to integrate the analysis of both the collected qualitative and quantitative data. The results show that the two groups tended to focus on a similar range of design aspects (i.e. aesthetics, form/shape, usability, creativity, and functionality), but apply different criteria in evaluating such aspects.The UK and Chinese designs were found to be distinctive from each other and tended to appeal more to the people from the same cultural background. The findings reveal the interplay between culture and design and underline the importance of integrating culture into design education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China as a hot luxury market has witnessed high growth in luxury sales despite the COVID-19. In recent years, many luxury companies have further improved their brand value and influence via cobranding strategies, however, their brand cooperation received mixed evaluations. Drawing on the conceptual blending theory and self-concept consistency theory, this paper constructs and verifies the structural equation model of consumer evaluation of luxury co-branding from the perspectives of the brands and the consumers. The study reveals that luxury co-branding fit, advertising types and the consumers' life-role transition have a positive impact on consumer evaluation. Both the type of advertising and consumers' life-role transition have a moderating effect on consumer evaluation. Specifically, (i) In luxury co-branding, the co-branded products paired with a high fit between the values of the cooperative brands are more likely to receive high consumer evaluation; (ii) The publicity of the brand image of the co-branded products has a stronger moderating effect on the perceived quality, appeal and purchase intention of luxury users than the publicity of the features of the cobranded products; (iii) For luxury brands with a high degree of joint fit, consumers who have not experienced life-role transformation have a stronger regulatory effect on consumers' perceived quality, attractiveness and purchase intention than consumers who have experienced life-role transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in organizational theory suggests that category-spanning organizations typically suffer penalties in evaluations, as consumers downgrade producers they see as violating authenticity norms. We challenge this view by linking two heretofore separate insights: first, that categorical boundaries erode as categories become taken for granted and, second, that consumers in a given category tend to become more heterogeneous as their numbers increase. We argue that newer consumers employ diverse evaluative schemata and rely less on established conceptions of authenticity than do veterans, leading to more generous evaluations as the ranks of consumers grow. Using the canonical case of craft beer, we test the effect of audience growth on consumer evaluations, particularly when producers violate categorical authenticity norms. Our analysis of an original dataset of more than 1.2 million unique ratings of craft beers from a popular online forum finds both that overall beer ratings increase and that penalties to authenticity norm violations attenuate as the number of new reviewers participating in the evaluative process rises. These results refine our understanding of shifting demands for categorical purity, conceptions of authenticity, and consumer evaluations as functions of market growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between the COVID‐19 threat and consumer evaluation of a product with authenticity appeals in advertisements. We propose that threatening situations like COVID‐19 motivate consumers to lower their uncertainty and increase their preference for products with authentic advertising messages. Because individuals react differently to threatening environments according to their early‐life experiences, commonly reflected in childhood socioeconomic status, we examined whether childhood socioeconomic status moderates the relationship between threat and consumer evaluation of authenticity in advertisements. First, secondary data from Google Trends provided empirical support for our predictions. In additional experimental studies, participants evaluated different target products in four studies that either manipulated (Studies 2 and 3) or measured (Studies 4 and 5) COVID‐19 threat. Our results provide converging evidence that consumers positively evaluate products with authentic advertising messages under the COVID‐19 threat. Consumers' motivation to lower their uncertainty underlies the effect of COVID‐19 threat on their evaluation of authentic messages (Study 3). This attempt to reduce uncertainty is more likely to occur for consumers with relatively higher childhood socioeconomic status (Studies 4 and 5). These findings suggest that using authenticity appeals during a pandemic could effectively reduce consumers' perceived uncertainty and generate positive consumer evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nankai Business Review is the property of Nankai Business Review Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nankai Business Review is the property of Nankai Business Review Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Green consumption is an important foundation for achieving stable and long-term economic development goals. With the rapid development of e-commerce and people’s widespread attention to sustainability, more and more consumers purchase green products online. Therefore, we consider consumer feedback mechanisms including evaluation and complaint and construct an evolutionary game model of green product quality supervision with the participation of governmental supervision department, third-party e-commerce platform, online seller and consumer, which analyzes the four parties’ evolutionary stable strategies. To verify the theoretical results, we conduct a numerical simulation by Matlab 2020b. Moreover, we study the conditions that make evolutionary stable strategy combination exist based on Lyapunov’s First Method. And we find that when consumer chooses complaint, (0, 0, 1) is likely to become an only evolutionary stable strategy combination. At this time, the online seller chooses to provide high-quality green product, third-party e-commerce platform chooses not to strengthen inspection, and governmental supervision department chooses to strictly supervise. Conversely, when the consumer chooses no complaint, (1, 0, 0) and (0, 0, 1) may become an evolutionary stable strategy combination. At this time, the online seller cannot be stable in providing high-quality green product. What’s more, governmental supervision department increases the penalty, which can incentivize a third-party e-commerce platform to strengthen inspection. Third-party e-commerce platform increases the reward and can promote online seller to provide high-quality green product. On the one hand, this paper enriches the theoretical basis of online shopping green product quality supervision. On the other hand, compared with existing literature, it extends the main body of the evolutionary game to four paries and broadens the application scope of the game model. In addition, it has put forward feasible suggestions for the government supervision department to strengthen the quality supervision, and provided decision-making support for the third-party e-commerce platform to assume the responsibility of quality inspection.

This research examines the effects of extension mode (online to online vs. online to offline), web-brand concept (function oriented vs. experience oriented) and extension similarity (high vs. low) on consumer web-brand extension evaluations, attitude, perceived quality, and purchase intention of the extension brands. The analysis reveals two significant interaction effects: (1) the positive effect of brand extension similarity on consumer evaluations is stronger when the parent brand is function oriented compared to the experience-orientated ones; (2) the positive effect of brand extension similarity on consumer evaluations is more pronounced when the web-brands extend to offline markets rather than to online markets. Implications for marketing theory and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“İlginlik” ya da diğer adıyla “İlgilenim” kavramı köken olarak sosyal psikolojiye dayanmakla beraber ikna edici iletişim, pazarlama ve reklamcılık disiplinlerinin de temelinde yer alan bir kavram olmuştur. 1960’lı yıllarda konu ile ilgili araştırmalar yapılmaya başlanmış ve günümüzde de sürerek devam etmektedir. Bu araştırmada da ilginlik kavramından bahsedilecek ve 1960’lı yıllardan günümüz tüketicisinde ürün ilginliğini anlamında bir fark olup olmadığı kuram bağlamında değerlendirilecektir. Bu değerlendirmede Eskişehir Anadolu Üniversitesi çalışanlarına satın alma kararı ölçeği ile belirlenen ürün gruplarına yönelik olarak ürün satın almalarıyla ilişkili sorular sorulmuştur. Kaller Fay Grup ürün kategorisine göre yapılan araştırmada ürün ilginliğinin hangi üründe yüksek hangi üründe düşük olduğu ürün kategorisi bağlamında değerlendirilmiştir. Değerlendirme sonucunda; tüketicilerin en yüksek ürün ilginliği Telekomünikasyon kategorisinde, Cep Telefonu (Smartphone), en düşük ürün ilginliği ise, Alışveriş yeri kategorisinde, AVM tercihi olarak çıkmıştır.

The objective of this study is to clarify the consumer evaluation of attributes of apples including the inner quality that can guarantee sugar content and watercore rating by non-destructive analysis using an optical sensor. We conducted a counting analysis based on Best-Worst Scaling to calculate BW scores, and the conditional logit model to clarify the relative evaluation between attributes. The following are the main findings of this study. We found that the consumer evaluation of apple attributes is different for each attribute by age, and experience of harvesting apples enhances evaluation of sugar content and watercore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous expansion of the global dairy trade market, the quality and safety of the Chinese dairy market have a wide and far-reaching impact on the world. Based on the development of the dairy scandal in the past few years in China, this study illustrates the serious damage of melamine on human health and the negative impact on the dairy industry in China. This study shows that the lack of effective government regulations is a key reason for dairy market failure. Consumers are lacking confidence in the quality of Chinese dairy products and the government's market regulations. The Chinese dairy market will continue to rely on imported dairy products. By analyzing the typical cases of the dairy market in China, this study aims to provide a guide for dairy industries in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays fruits, berries and processed products are an indispensable component of the human diet throughout the year. Frozen fruits and berries are widely distributed on the Russian market and are part of the food industry worldwide. Frozen products become popular among consumers for home use due to the minimal cooking time. Consumer evaluation is the most relevant and significant for identifying preferences and evaluating quality products in Russian markets. In this regard, a qualitative analysis of marketing research has been carried out and preferences have been identified according to which criteria consumers buy quick-frozen products. Some methods of sensory analysis have been used (consumer evaluation, the profile method, and pairwise comparison method). The dominant factor in choosing a brand of quick-frozen products is the combination of an acceptable price and quality, and to a lesser extent, the recommendation of acquaintances, the type of packaging and advertising of products. The research is aimed at identifying organoleptic properties that affect the consumer evaluation of the quality of frozen, thawed grapes in comparison with the reference product. Fruits and berries freeze for hours and even minutes, but are stored for a long time. The problem arises in rehydration – the return of the product to its original state, close to fresh natural raw material. The main goal of the research is aimed at identifying some rational method of defrosting, corresponding to organoleptic and consumer properties. With the help of organoleptic evaluation the best ways of defrosting have been identified – the microwave oven and the freezer. These methods allow obtaining thawed foods with the finest quality and identical to natural raw materials. The storage time after defrosting has been revealed: in the microwave oven – 60 min; at the room temperature – 80 min; in the coldstore – 100 min. The obtained information can be useful for consumers, food industry and confectionery manufacturers.