Baci Perugina with TSW: how experience affects product evaluation

We carried out a research activity on how the experience of tasting a Bacio Perugina affects the perception of the brand

Every product or service experience can change the perceived brand, influencing choice and brand loyalty.

Experiences are not all the same. There are experiences – such as tasting a chocolate – which by their nature have more impact than others and which lend themselves better to being elaborated and processed.

This awareness has guided us in giving order to a series of complex interactions that take place in a real experience between consumer and product.

What concepts do we associate with Perugina chocolate?

In this article we present the results deriving from a research activity with the customers of “Baci Perugina” which allowed us to map on which value assets the experience of the product itself can bring benefits and significantly affect the perception of the brand.

This type of evaluation is carried out with the BARTT (Brand Association Reaction Time Task), which consists of three macro-phases:

• Listening to customers. We performed a semantic analysis to define the main values.
• Pair before trying the product. We asked people whether or not they associate any value with the product and monitored response time.
• Association after trying the product. We carried out the same test after having people try the product, to understand which levers the product actually affected.

What concepts is Baci Perugina strongly associated with?

From our analyzes it emerged that the concepts of “tasty” and “good” are strongly associated with Baci Perugina and are statistically more relevant than all the other variables investigated.

Other values, such as “emotion” and “delicious” are associated with the product, but not immediately. As can be seen from the graph shown here, in fact, to the question «Do you associate the word “gustoso” with Baci Perugina?» people on average respond within 900 milliseconds. The same answer, for the word “delicious”, takes longer.

All the other values investigated fail to be particularly associated with the product. This analysis provides insight into the strength of associations between product and value.

And what changes after tasting the chocolate?

If we analyze the experience of people immediately after eating a Bacio Perugina we see that only two values change significantly.

These values are precisely “emotion” and “delicious”.

Knowing that the product experience can only impact on these two dimensions allows you to understand which levers communication will have to use to bridge or optimize the product experience.

While on the one hand we have well-positioned values such as “tasty” and “good”, which can become important communication focuses, on the other we have a series of values that could be exploited to grow and constellate the perception of Baci Perugina.