Psychological positioning of bottled tea products: A comparison between two Kansei profiling techniques

Appropriate psychological positioning of products is important for marketing of foods and beverages. For better product positioning, understanding of how products' extrinsic and intrinsic properties are perceived by consumers is required. In this study, it was explored a refined one-to-one interview technique, check-all-that-apply (CATA) linked with a repertory grid method (RGM) (CATA/RGM) designed to measure consumer-relevant Kansei - psychological feelings and impressions for products - as applied to 12 commercial bottled tea products. For statistical analyses, 2 multivariate statistical methods for Kansei profiling were compared: CATA/RGM based-structured free choice profiling (FCP) and cued elicitation. Results showed that the CATA/RGM efficiently differentiated between products, and the product differentiation obtained from the 2 Kansei profiling techniques corresponded. These results indicated that the consumers in this study have similar Kansei towards bottled teas, and the cued elicitation method, which employed correspondence analysis (CA), was useful for studying the interactions between consumer-relevant Kansei and product properties for a specific target group of consumers.