When consumers test products for companies during marketing research, are they always honest in their responses? That is one question Sinuk Kang, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Westfield State Department of Communication, has been exploring through his research on the role of emotion in consumer preference.
The basis of Dr. Kang’s research stems from when Dr. Kang was a doctoral student at the State University of New York at Buffalo
in 2009, and from his work as a research assistant at Procter & Gamble, studying facial expressions related to consumer preferences.
As part of the research, Dr. Kang watched videos of consumers to observe their facial expressions when smelling five different
body shower gels. He is studying how individuals emotionally and cognitively experience their preference in response to certain smells and how individuals’ facial expressions in response to those fragrances predict their choice and ratings of products.
One of the main goals in marketing research is to gain insight into consumer preference, Dr. Kang says. While some consumers responded verbally that they liked a certain shower gel, their facial expressions told a different story.
“The idea was to examine which facial emotional responsiveness to the fragrance would predict consumer preference and choice,” he says. “When we looked at their faces, some of them displayed negative emotion.”
Part of Dr. Kang’s research involves looking at how a person’s strong emotional feelings can emerge through a facial expression, despite the person’s efforts to control those emotions. Dr. Kang doesn’t believe those consumers were intentionally being dishonest. Instead, he posits that they probably did not want to hurt the feelings of the developers of the product.
“We try to measure what the real feeling is when they try the products. It makes it interesting to study marketing research related to facial expressions,” he says.
Having an understanding that consumers in marketing research might not be fully forthcoming in their responses to certain
products should prompt the companies conducting the tests to ask more probing or follow-up questions, Dr. Kang says.
Dr. Kang presented his findings at the April 19 Campus Scholarship Showcase event. His abstract is titled, “Feeling on the Face: Measuring Facial Expressions of Emotion and Predicting Consumer Preference.”
