By analyzing indicators of brain activity, Russian scientists found out the attitude of consumers to chocolate of different price categories. This was reported by the press service of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Chocolate is the most popular dessert product among Russians, preferred by one out of every three people. In total, the average resident of Russia consumes 39 kilograms of sugar per year. Daria Semenova and her colleagues from the School of Economics used the metric “willingness to pay”, which reflects the maximum amount a consumer is willing to pay for a product, to assess attitudes towards chocolate and supplemented this data with an analysis. electroencephalogram of the brain.
For the experiments, 24 volunteers took part, among them 11 women and 13 men. Five brands of dark chocolate were tested: unknown inexpensive chocolate, well-known mid-range chocolate, expensive premium chocolate, “healthy” chocolate with fructose instead of sucrose, and organic carob-based chocolate (without cocoa products). The experiment was carried out in two stages. In the first stage, participants blindly tasted 5 types of chocolate in random order. After tasting, they were asked to rate the taste on a 5-point scale, as well as to estimate how much they were willing to pay for the chocolate and how much this type of chocolate would cost in the store. In the second informed stage, before tasting the same chocolate, the participants were shown the packaging, which gave information about the brand and composition.
It turns out that when contemplating willingness to pay, as with any higher-order thought process, activity manifests in the frontal and frontal lobes of the brain. It turned out that men were willing to pay 8.8 currencies more for chocolate than women, and with each year of life their willingness to pay decreased by 0.3 currencies. At the same time, the results of blinded and informed studies differed. When blind choice was made, the desire to buy according to the taste of the product increased, when informed, people were willing to pay 10% more for expensive chocolate and 3% more for known chocolate (at the same time, the taste of chocolate in blind tests and the real price are correlated). In addition, when it comes to hypoallergenic chocolate without cocoa, the willingness to pay fell very sharply – by 16%.
In the end, the authors confirm that the willingness to pay for a product is largely related to the product’s packaging, and they hope to replicate this study by controlling more brain parameters.
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