Sugar & Pain
Understanding why and how people differ in their likes and dislikes, personal tastes and preferences, is key to driving market share in FMCG companies, and is becoming increasingly important in medical care, where personalised medicine aims to prescribe drugs and treatment procedures that are best suited for the individual. The area of ‘population segmentation’ requires knowledge of genetic and epigenetic factors, environmental influences, learning mechanisms, neural plasticity, cultural biases, belief systems, gender and age effects, developmental experiences and social demographics.
Predicting preference for a product requires acquiring and assimilating facts about a person’s individuality (olives and art), as well as generic or shared likes and dislikes (sugar and pain). Traditional means of acquiring such data, using focus groups, consumer sensory panels, and standard questionnaires, do not probe the implicit (sub-conscious) processes that often drive choice behaviour. NeuroSci can advice on the use of neuro-derived approaches to segment populations that support and extend the traditional metrics.