What Makes A Food Product A Hit? Emotion!

Nathaniel Davis heads up the research arm at Insight on Foods, a consultancy that specializes in the emotional tie to foods and beverages which he then provides to CPG companies for taste guidance.

According to Nathaniel, “Certain tastes can trigger certain feeling,”. “It can often take people back to a very comforting time. Ice cream it’s a famously emotive food for example within nurturing breast milk kind of appeal to it it triggers relaxation.  A longer tangerine flavor might suddenly whisk in adults back to happy memories of childhood he says strong emotions went to food are not necessarily always formed in childhood however. A certain flavor Mike spark memories of falling in love. Exotic note will evoke far-flung places once visit.

He specializes in regression techniques to gain a better understanding how flavors can trigger emotions it works by getting a person to talk about food and their relationship with it; with the hope of discovering information that other techniques may fail to uncover.  It involves talking with consumers to take them back to their childhood memories to their first encounters with food and get them to relive it Davis says, “new products typically have an 80 to 90% failure rate. Trying to reduce that figure is important especially for new brands. And for people to get an emotional attachment to a brand, it’s got to be as quick as possible. So if you can remove any hindrance, so much better.”