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Trust in a company's brand is essential for businesses that rely on repeat business from customers. In light of this, this study aims to investigate the key factors that drive customer trust in airline brands within the Latin American context. In order to accomplish this goal, an augmented version of AIRQUAL was utilized to evaluate Colombian native customers' perceptions of the customer experience (CX) provided by Avianca, a well-known and highly regarded airline active in Latin America. AIRQUAL is a model used to evaluate the quality of airline service proposed by Nadiri et al. (2008). It consists of five dimensions: airline tangibles, terminal tangibles, personnel services, empathy, and image. These dimensions were expanded to capture additional touchpoints identified in the literature. They represent internal and external touchpoints that make up the airline customer experience, resulting in a more robust research model. The additional dimensions, namely the impact of perceptions associated with other customers and the process of the purchase experience, were incorporated to account for a more holistic assessment of the experience provided. They also help capture the three stages of the experience provided by the airline as proposed by Namukasa (2013) before, during, and after the flight. The examined drivers of brand trust in the proposed model were the dimensions of the augmented AIRQUAL model and a measure of CX. Results indicate that while most dimensions impact brand trust, CX was identified as the key driver of brand trust and acted as a mediator of the dimensions of the augmented AIRQUAL and brand trust. According to the findings of this research, all three aspects of service quality—pre-flight service quality, in-flight service quality, and post-flight service quality—are of comparable significance and have a significant bearing on how customers evaluate their experiences.

The purpose of this study is to determine how consumer perceptions of brand ethical behavior can affect their commitment to brands during turbulent times. A study of the effects of perceived ethical behavior of brands in Colombia during the initial months of the COVID-19 outbreak was conducted in May 2020 in Bogota, Colombia, to ascertain customer perception of brand ethical actions during the first 2 months of the COVID-19 outbreak. A Bayesian model was developed to assess the impact of brands' ethical behavior on brand recognition benefits, brand image, and brand commitment. The selection of the initial months of the outbreak for this project was important because the COVID-19 pandemic had the potential to augment consumer perception of brands' ethical actions at a pivotal moment in consumers' lives. Our findings demonstrate that customers expressed a positive perception of brands' ethical actions during the early months of the pandemic, which resulted in high commitment intention to these brands in the model examined. The findings highlight the critical nature of the perception of ethical behavior in the eyes of customers during a major global health crisis. More than ever, organizations must commit their brands to fully live out their publicly expressed ethical principles and continuously monitor consumer perceptions of brand attributes and behaviors associated with ethical actions regardless of market conditions. Commitment to living the brand's stated ethical principles can be demonstrated via branding activities in ways that can be especially welcomed by customers during turbulent times. The insights mentioned in this article are crucial for brands already present in South America or exploring expansion into these regions. The findings provide compelling evidence of the impact of ethical actions on consumer commitment to brands, suggesting that brands must now, more than ever, stay in touch with their customers and truthfully live the ethical values they transmit to customers.

We report a study designed to determine the most efficient means of pursuing sonic seasoning in international marketing. For the first time, music chosen to trigger specific emotional responses was directly and cross-culturally compared with music chosen as crossmodally congruent with specific taste/flavors (the latter usually referred to as ‘sonic seasoning’). The effects triggered by ‘emotional’ music were more prominent than those triggered by ‘crossmodally-corresponding’ music. Specifically, chocolate was liked more, rated as sweeter, and the purchase intent was higher, when tasted while listening to music that conveyed positive, as compared to negative, emotion. By contrast, the same chocolate was mostly rated as tasting more bitter with the negative music, as compared to the positive music. Companies looking to use sonic seasoning in marketing strategies, should therefore principally aim at intelligently classifying music based on the likely emotions that they can trigger in their customers (at least when thinking globally).

Important institutions, such as the World Health Organization, recommend reducing alcohol consumption by encouraging healthier drinking habits. This could be achieved, for example, by employing more effective promotion of non-alcoholic beverages. For such purposes, in this study, we assessed the role of experiential beer packaging sounds during the e-commerce experience of a non-alcoholic beer (NAB). Here, we designed two experiments. Experiment 1 evaluated the influence of different experiential beer packaging sounds on consumers’ general emotions and sensory expectations. Experiment 2 assessed how the sounds that evoked more positive results in Experiment 1 would influence emotions and sensory expectations related to a NAB digital image. The obtained results revealed that a beer bottle pouring sound helped suppress some of the negativity that is commonly associated with the experience of a NAB. Based on such findings, brands and organizations interested in more effectively promoting NAB may feel encouraged to involve beer packaging sounds as part of their virtual shopping environments.

The term “sonic seasoning” refers to the deliberate pairing of sound/music with taste/flavour in order to enhance, or modify, the multisensory tasting experience. Although the recognition that people experience a multitude of crossmodal correspondences between stimuli in the auditory and chemical senses originally emerged from the psychophysics laboratory, the last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the use and application of sonic seasoning research findings, in a range of multisensory experiential events and online offerings. These marketing-led activations have included a variety of different approaches, from curating pre-composed music selections that have the appropriate sonic qualities (such as pitch or timbre), to the composition of bespoke music/soundscapes that match the specific taste/flavour of particular food or beverage products. Moreover, given that our experience of flavour often changes over time and frequently contains multiple distinct elements, there is also scope to more closely match the sonic seasoning to the temporal evolution of the various components (or notes) of the flavour experience. We review a number of case studies of the use of sonic seasoning, highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities associated with the various approaches, and consider the intriguing interplay between physical and digital (online) experiences. Taken together, the various examples reviewed here help to illustrate the growing commercial relevance of sonic seasoning research.

The existing multisensory literature suggests that the combination of the different human senses in a controlled fashion during food/drink experiences can provide more enjoyment to consumers. The present research reviews recent literature relating multisensory perception with wine experiences, focusing on the interaction of the five basic senses (taste, smell, vision, touch, and sound). This is mostly being assessed from a perceptual and behavioral consumer perspective. Here, the authors report different ways in which such interactions across these senses can affect the way a wine is experienced, prior to, during, and even after tasting. The authors finish this literature review by providing some insights in the context of wine and food pairing, while also generally reflecting on potential future work. These insights may be inspirational for a diverse group of organizations working with wine. Based on such multisensory approaches, it may be possible to bring unforeseen sensations to the different wine experiences, while at the same time stressing particular sensory and/or emotional attributes.

Sonic seasoning refers to the way in which music can influence multisensory tasting experiences. To date, the majority of the research on sonic seasoning has been conducted in Europe or the USA, typically in a within-participants experimental context. In the present study, we assessed the applicability of sonic seasoning in a large-scale between-participants setting in Asia. A sample of 1611 participants tasted one sample of chocolate while listening to a song that evoked a specific combination of cross-modal and emotional consequences. The results revealed that the music&rsquo, s emotional character had a more prominent effect than its cross-modally corresponding attributes on the multisensory tasting experience. Participants expressed a higher buying intention for the chocolate and rated it as having a softer texture when listening to mainly positive (as compared to mainly negative) music. The chocolates were rated as having a more intense flavor amongst those participants listening to &lsquo, softer&rsquo, as compared to &lsquo, harder&rsquo, music. Therefore, the present study demonstrates that music is capable of triggering a combination of specific cross-modal and emotional effects in the multisensory tasting experience of a chocolate.

The present research investigates the general effect of auditory noise control in individual’s eating and drinking experiences. In particular, the study applied passive vs active commercial headphone noise control techniques to an urban drinking situation. Here, each participant drank twice the same coffee while exposed to a louder (~85 dBA) vs less loud (−20 dBs) version of the same background noise of a food court in busy hours. Note that by loud, louder, and less loud, we are referring to differences in the sound level of the noise. Results suggest that most consumers tend to be less sensitive to specific sensory and hedonic attributes of the coffee under louder noise (sweetness, bitterness, acidity, flavor/aroma intensity, flavor-liking, sound-liking, flavor-sound-matching), and less willing to pay and purchase the coffee, relative to less loud sounds. This was more evident concerning the perceived bitterness and aroma intensity of the coffee. The effects reported are mainly attributed to the differences in noise level during taste, and discussed based on theory on crossmodal correspondences, and attention (e.g., louder noise may diminish the ability to attend to specific elements of the experience). When thinking of public health, for example, these results suggest that differences in urban noise level may moderate behavior during food/drink situations (e.g., potentially modulating sugar intake).

We introduce a novel methodology to assess the influence of the emotion induced by listening to music on the consumer’s multisensory tasting experience. These crossmodal effects were analyzed when two contrasting music tracks (positive vs negative emotion) were presented to consumers while tasting beer. The results suggest that the emotional reactions triggered by the music influenced specific aspects of the multisensory tasting experience. Participants liked the beer more, and rated it as tasting sweeter, when listening to music associated with positive emotion. The same beer was rated as more bitter, with higher alcohol content, and as having more body, when the participants listened to music associated with negative emotion. Moreover, participants were willing to pay 7–8% more for the beer that was tasted while they listened to positive music. This novel methodology was subsequently replicated with two different styles of beer. These results are discussed along with practical implications concerning the way in which music can add significant value to how a consumer responds to a brand.

We report evidence concerning how the visual appearance of a drink (dark vs. light pale/amber beer) can influence the consumer’s tasting experience. Two experiments were designed to study the effect of visual appearance on people’s hedonic and sensory judgments of beer. Importantly, the beers were indistinguishable in terms of their flavor when tasted in the absence of visual cues.Participants rated the same beer (pale or dark, depending in which group they were assigned) under blind conditions as having more body than when tasted under sighted condition (regardless of whether it was pale or dark; see Experiment 1).When the participants evaluated the expectations and tasting experience of the two different beers under sighted conditions (pale vs. dark), after tasting, those who preferred pale beers, rated the darker beer as tasting sweeter than those who usually prefer other types of beers, such as dark ones (see Experiment 2). Prior tasting, when asked which beer they thought was the most expensive, the majority of the participants chose the darker beer. Furthermore, after tasting both beers, participants reported being willing to pay up to 6% more on average for the darker beer as compared to the pale one. ispartof: FOOD QUALITY AND PREFERENCE vol:74 pages:21-29 status: published

Food product-extrinsic sounds (i.e., those auditory stimuli that are not linked directly to a food or beverage product, or its packaging) have been shown to exert a significant influence over various aspects of food perception and consumer behaviour, often operating outside of conscious awareness. In this review, we summarise the latest evidence concerning the various ways in which what we hear can influence what we taste. According to one line of empirical research, background noise interferes with tasting, due to attentional distraction. A separate body of marketing-relevant research demonstrates that music can be used to bias consumers’ food perception, judgments, and purchasing/consumption behaviour in various ways. Some of these effects appear to be driven by the arousal elicited by loud music as well as the entrainment of people’s behaviour to the musical beat. However, semantic priming effects linked to the type and style of music are also relevant. Another route by which music influences food perception comes from the observation that our liking/preference for the music that we happen to be listening to carries over to influence our hedonic judgments of what we are tasting. A final route by which hearing influences tasting relates to the emerging field of ‘sonic seasoning’. A developing body of research now demonstrates that people often rate tasting experiences differently when listening to soundtracks that have been designed to be (or are chosen because they are) congruent with specific flavour experiences (e.g., when compared to when listening to other soundtracks, or else when tasting in silence). Taken together, such results lead to the growing realization that the crossmodal influences of music and noise on food perception and consumer behaviour may have some important if, as yet, unrecognized implications for public health.

The effect of soundscapes on the taste evaluation of beers was analyzed in the research reported here. Three experiments were conducted in which participants tasted a beer twice, and rated the experience, each time under the influence of a different sound stimulus. The participants were not informed that they were, in fact, tasting the same beer. The objective was to determine whether soundtracks that have previously been shown to correspond to the different basic tastes would significantly modulate the perceived sweetness, bitterness, sourness, and alcohol content of the beers. Overall, the soundtracks influenced the participants’ rating of the beers’ taste and strength. Furthermore, a control study involving tasting the same beers without sonic stimuli, confirmed that these results could not simply be explained in terms of order (or adaptation) effects. These results therefore point to sensation transference as the potential mechanism underlying the observed crossmodal modulations of taste by sound. The present study underlines the potential of sound to enhance eating/drinking experiences. In this way, those working in the food industry may feel progressively more confident in adopting new multisensory techniques while designing eating/drinking experiences. publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The influence of soundscapes on the perception and evaluation of beers journaltitle: Food Quality and Preference articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2016.03.009 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. ispartof: Food Quality and Preference vol:52 pages:32-41 status: published

All of the senses can potentially contribute to the perception and experience of food and drink. Sensory influences come both from the food or drink itself, and from the environment in which that food or drink is tasted and consumed. In this study, participants initially had to pair each of three soundtracks with one of three chocolates (varying on the bitter-sweet dimension). In a second part of the study, the impact of the various music samples on these participants’ ratings of the taste of various chocolates was assessed. The results demonstrate that what people hear exerts a significant influence over their rating of the taste of the chocolate. Interestingly, when the results were analysed based on the participants’ individual music-chocolate matches (rather than the average response of the whole group), more robust crossmodal effects were revealed. These results therefore provide support for the claim that ambient sound influences taste judgments, and potentially provide useful insights concerning the future design of multisensory tasting experiences. Practical Applications The approach outlined here follows the increasing demand from the field of gastronomy for greater influence over the general multisensory atmosphere surrounding eating/drinking experiences. One of the novel contributions of the present research is to show how, by considering a participant's individual response, further insight for user-studies in gastrophysics may be provided. Increasing the personalization of such experiments in the years to come may help researchers to design individualized “sonic seasoning” experiences that are even more effective. In the future, then, the approach outlined here may help researchers and experience designers to obtain more profound effects of the auditory or multisensory atmosphere.

We present an overview of the recent research conducted by the first author of this article, in which the influence of sound on the perception of taste/flavor in beer is evaluated. Three studies in total are presented and discussed. These studies assessed how people match different beers with music and the influence that the latter can have on the perception and enjoyment of the beers. In general, the results revealed that in certain contexts sound can modulate the perceived strength and taste attributes of the beer as well as its associated hedonic experience. We conclude by discussing the potential mechanisms behind these taste-flavor/sound interactions, and the implications of these studies in the context of multisensory food and drink experience design. We suggest that future work may also build on cognitive neuroscience. In particular, such an approach may complement our understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms of auditory/gustatory interactions.

We report two experiments designed to assess the key sensory drivers underlying people’s association of a specific auditory pitch with Belgian beer. In particular, we assessed if people would rely mostly on the differences between beers in terms of their relative alcohol strength, or on the contrast between the most salient taste attributes of the different beers. In Experiment 1, the participants rated three bitter beers (differing in alcohol content), using a narrow range of pitch choices (50–500 Hz). The results revealed that the beers were all rated around the same pitch (Mean = 232 Hz, SD = 136 Hz). In Experiment 2, a wider range of pitch choices (50–1500 Hz), along with the addition of a much sweeter beer, revealed that people mostly tend to match beers with bitter-range profiles at significantly lower pitch ranges when compared to the average pitch of a much sweeter beer. These results therefore demonstrate that clear differences in taste attributes lead to distinctly different matches in terms of pitch. Having demonstrated the robustness of the basic crossmodal matching, future research should aim to uncover the basis for such matches and better understand the perceptual effects of matching/non-matching tones on the multisensory drinking experience.

This article presents opportunities of using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) equipped with acoustic sensors as tools for sound design. We introduce the technology, examples considered as State of the Art and several potential applications involving different profiles of sound design. The importance of adding real-time audio-messages into sound design is considered a main issue in this proposal. Actual technological situation and challenges are here discussed. The usage of WSNs for sound design is plausible, although technological challenges demand strong interaction between sound designers and WSN developers.

The soundscapes of those places where we eat and drink can influence our perception of taste. Here, we investigated whether contextual sound would enhance the subjective value of a tasting experience. The customers in a chocolate shop were invited to take part in an experiment in which they had to evaluate a chocolate’s taste while listening to an auditory stimulus. Four different conditions were presented in a between-participants design. Envisioning a more ecological approach, a pre-recorded piece of popular music and the shop’s own soundscape were used as the sonic stimuli. The results revealed that not only did the customers report having a significantly better tasting experience when the sounds were presented as part of the food’s identity, but they were also willing to pay significantly more for the experience. The method outlined here paves a new approach to dealing with the design of multisensory tasting experiences, and gastronomic situations.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) equipped with microphones are low-cost solutions for real-time audio data acquisition, offering numerous applications such as environmental monitoring, surveillance and bio-acoustics. These networks consist of small nodes capturing sound data and transmitting it via a wireless link to a collection point. Usually software and hardware implementations, followed by in situ tests, are used to validate the performance of the network. This study proposes a new validation step using small anechoic boxes, called ABoxes. These boxes allow emulation of the complete acoustic sensor network in a laboratory environment to obtain first impressions, reducing costs and labor. The new validation-step we are proposing simulates an open-field environment by setting up an electro-acoustic chain in individual small anechoic boxes, isolating every node from one another. Two different designs are being presented: the first ABox has modular pieces making it easier to build; the second and improved ABox design is more complex due to the application of advanced room acoustics theory. Both boxes were built using materials and components that can easily be obtained in a standard hardware store. With this method, basic testing of an acoustic wireless sensor network is possible and future work could expand the field of application of this validation step. For example, ABox could be further developed to allow testing of microphone array sensor networks. ABox also provides opportunities for the development of methods to characterize anechoic environments.

There is a common agreement among researchers about the involvement of multiple senses while taste is being perceived. Also, for restaurants, pubs and similar places there is growing awareness of the significance of the quality of the soundscape and its influence on taste. This project proposes to study the perceptual interaction of taste and audition in the context of the primal activity of feeding. Our aim is also to improve ambient auditory stimulation in psychophysical experiments on tasting experiences using state-of-the-art techniques in engineering acoustics. ispartof: pages:795-805 ispartof: 10th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research vol:1 issue:1 pages:795-805 ispartof: International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR) 2013 location:Marseille, France date:15 Oct - 18 Oct 2013 status: published

There has been a recent growth of interest in determining whether sound (specifically music and soundscapes) can enhance not only the basic taste attributes associated with food and beverage items (such as sweetness, bitterness, sourness, etc.), but also other important components of the tasting experience, such as, for instance, crunchiness, creaminess, and/or carbonation. In the present study, participants evaluated the perceived creaminess of chocolate. Two contrasting soundtracks were produced with such texture-correspondences in mind, and validated by means of a pre-test. The participants tasted the same chocolate twice (without knowing that the chocolates were identical), each time listening to one of the soundtracks. The ‘creamy’ soundtrack enhanced the perceived creaminess and sweetness of the chocolates, as compared to the ratings given while listening to the ‘rough’ soundtrack. Moreover, while the participants preferred the creamy soundtrack, this difference did not appear to affect their overall enjoyment of the chocolates. Interestingly, and in contrast with previous similar studies, these results demonstrate that in certain cases, sounds can have a perceptual effect on gustatory food attributes without necessarily altering the hedonic experience. publisher: Elsevier articletitle: “Smooth operator”: Music modulates the perceived creaminess, sweetness, and bitterness of chocolate journaltitle: Appetite articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2016.10.026 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ispartof: Appetite vol:108 pages:383-390 ispartof: location:England status: published