The most famous version of these is the four Ps — product, place, price, promotion [6] — and psychological theories of consumer behaviour provided a way in which one could analyse how such parameters, together with a host of other factors, influence consumer choice. There was a strong focus on perception and mental processing, drawing heavily on the cognitive revolution

that was going on in psychology at the time [7]. Since then, the field has developed into the largest subfield of scientific inquiry within marketing. The focus on consumer choice is still there, but the field has broadened considerably, including questions of need formation [8] and consumption

culture 9 and 10••. While consumer research had a strong focus on fast moving consumer goods, there www.selleckchem.com/products/BIBF1120.html was originally not a lot of interest in food. When food and drink was studied, it was usually very simple products like soft drinks or potato chips. Recently, there has been considerably more interest in food, as evidenced by a series of food-related publications in the field’s top journals. We should note, though, that participants in consumer science studies, even when they deal with food, rarely actually taste them — most studies are concerned with perception of informational stimuli and/or the effect of prior experiences with the product. As consumer science was driven by marketing, sensory science was driven by food science, and as consumer science turned to psychology, sensory science turned to psychophysics Selleck FDA approved Drug Library when the first textbook on sensory science appeared [11]. Psychophysics deals with the relationship between physical stimuli and human perception, and while this originally

was related filipin to ‘pure’ stimuli, the basic idea could easily be transferred to a complex stimulus like a food product. Sensory science filled a missing link in food science, which covered most of the process from harvesting to the final food product, but not including its actual ingestion by human beings [12]. In stark contrast to consumer science, sensory science had originally focused on the physical product and on the way in which characteristics of the physical product related to sensory impression and also to consumer liking. Also this field, however, has broadened considerably, looking also at how informational stimuli and other context factors affect the sensory experience [e.g., 13• and 14]. However, in contrast to consumer science, the focus is on consumption, not on the choice preceding the consumption, and therefore actual tasting is still the core element of sensory studies. While sensory and consumer science hence had some interfaces and indeed some overlap, the degree of cooperation has been limited.