3. Results
3.1. Influence of shape and colour on consumer expected liking and willingness to purchase
Consumer scores for expected liking of the desserts ranged from 4.8 to 6.7, whereas scores for willingness to purchase ranged from 4.5 to 6.6. According to ANOVA consumers showed highly significant different degrees of expected liking and willingness to purchase of the desserts, suggesting that consumers perceived packages differently. Furthermore, ANOVA revealed that the main effect of the conjoint variables package shape and colour had a highly significant effect on consumer expected liking, as shown in Table 1. However, for willingness to purchase only package colour had a significant effect. The interaction between the conjoint variables package shape * colour was not significant for consumer expected liking and willingness to purchase scores; which indicates that consumers independently evaluated the shape and colour of the packages. The interactions between package variables and consumer were also not significant for both expected liking and willingness to purchase scores.
Table 1.
ANOVA results for expected liking and willingness to purchase scores.
Effect Expected liking Willingness to purchase
Shape 3.8⁎ 1.6ns
Colour 21.9⁎⁎⁎ 22.0⁎⁎⁎
Shape * colour 0.5ns 0.9ns
Consumer * shape 0.9ns 0.5ns
Consumer * colour 1.3ns 0.8ns
⁎
Significant effect at p < 0.05.
⁎⁎⁎
Significant effect at p < 0.001.
ns
No significant effect (p > 0.05).
Table options
Mean effects part-worth utilities for expected liking and willingness to purchase were calculated and are shown in Table 2. Colour had higher part-worth utilities than shape, indicating that the former package feature was more important for consumers. For expected liking the relative importance of colour was 82.5%, whereas for willingness to purchase it was 88.4%.
Table 2.
Conjoint analysis results (part-worth utilities and relative importance of each attribute) for expected liking and willingness to purchase scores.
Attributes and levels Expected liking Willingness to purchase
Shape
Round 0.205a 0.145a
Square −0.205b −0.145a
Relative importance 17.5% 11.6%
Colour
Black −0.73c −0.60b
White −0.23b −0.50b
Yellow 0.97a 1.10a
Relative importance 82.5% 88.4%
Values with different letters within the same column for the same attribute are significantly different (p < 0.05) according to Tukey’s test.
Table options
Differences were found in the utilities of colour for expected liking and willingness to purchase. As shown in Table 2, expected liking scores were able to discriminate between all levels of the evaluated variables. Round shape showed a highly significant higher utility than square for expected liking, but no significant differences were found between these features for willingness to purchase. Regarding package colour, yellow showed the highest utility for expected liking, followed by white and finally black packages; whereas no significant differences (p > 0.05) were found between the willingness to purchase of black and white packages.
3.2. Word association
3.2.1. Consumer elicited terms in the word association task
The elicited words were merged into 28 categories, corresponding to those mentioned by more than 10% of the participants, as explained in Section 2.4.2. Table 3 shows the frequencies in which each category was mentioned for each package. Consumer associations were related to sensory characteristics of the desserts, mainly flavour and texture attributes. As shown in Table 3, the most mentioned associations were vanilla, chocolate, creamy, and delicious; indicating the importance of packaging in generating sensory and hedonic expectations of milk desserts.