Where does the taste of a brand fit? You guessed it, in the mouth. However, if your brand can’t fit into your customer’s mouth, this article may still provide you with wisdom about this unique portal to human consumption. That is to say, the taste of any brand is more about what you think a brand is than what you believe you experience. Hold that thought as we explain the best way for a brand to taste great isn’t necessarily orally.
The Tongue
Let’s start with the tongue which does all the heavy lifting. If it’s not busy articulating a verb or noun, it’s busy moving food and liquid around in our mouth. The tongue has over 10,000 taste buds (the little bumps on your tongue). In essence, these bumps help distinguish between sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savoury (also known as umami). But on its own, it can only decipher essential elements of taste. But to realize its full potential, it requires other senses like smell, texture and temperature. Taste is the summation of the tongue and nose (if not influenced by our eyes). Our brain connects these sensations into a single emotional experience. This is the sweet spot where we know, in branding, is ripe for manipulation and trickery. Of course, all done in great taste.
Howard Moskowitz once said, “the mind knows not what the tongue wants.” And Moskowitz should know, as a well-known market researcher and psychophysicist. He was made famous by author Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker article titled “The Ketchup Conundrum” and his TedTalk called “Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce.” A perfect video to watch on a Friday night with buttery popcorn. Gladwell recounts Moskowitz reinventing spaghetti sauce through his research, where he discovered there were three main sauces: plain, spicy and extra chunky. The market place only offered plain and spicy spaghetti sauce at the time. Moskowitz’s customer, Campbell Soup Kitchen, used this information and introduced Prego extra chunky spaghetti sauce that made over $600 million in the first ten years. Moskowitz certainly understood the secret to that sauce. It wasn’t the taste that made the difference it was the extra chunky texture.
Taste Test
The most memorable and successful taste test was the legendary Pepsi Challenge, which started in 1975. This simple demonstration put Pepsi on the map and kicked Coca Cola off their game with their introduction of the New Coke blunder. Years after, scientists continued to ponder what role does taste have in building a brand.
We believe the ultimate criteria for liking a drink or food is its taste. But we are positively influenced throughout the experience by extrinsic cues like packaging, labels, the brand story, the environmental situation, as well as the intrinsic product attributes, like texture, smell, appearance and perceived quality (price).
A 2013 blind taste test research study between Coke and Pepsi conducted by Dr. N. Ramanjaneyalu, C. Asangi and V. Kadabi at Karnatak University in India found that only 37% of respondents could successfully identify Coca Cola through taste or a lucky guess. They concluded that building the right brand image and positioning is just as important as the taste.
The Brain
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, echoes a similar conclusion where he explains that people prefer a sweeter drink (characteristics of Pepsi) in a sip test but generally not necessary in glass size. He also goes on to talk about the importance of “sensation transference,” a phrase coined by scientific researcher Louis Cheskin, who said people’s perceptions and emotional attachments to the aesthetics of the product goes beyond just the taste of the product.
Neuroscientists Lauren Atlas and Tor Wager’s research on cognitive neuroscience concluded that expectations and beliefs play a pervasive role in the workings of the brain. What this means is expectations can influence those things we are knowingly aware of, like our loyalty and familiarity with a brand. Consciously and unconsciously, we are collecting information and analyzing our surroundings and assessing what we think we like and don’t like.
Tasteless
Gil Morrot, a wine researcher at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier, found that the simple act of adding an odourless, red dye to a glass of white wine had a profound effect. By adding the red colour, the panel of tasters began to think the wine was real red wine. They starting tasting red wine characteristics like cherry, dark fruit and cedar.
It’s no surprise that the top five beer manufactures in the US spent approximately $1.6 billion in advertising in 2016, primarily if beer preference is not driven entirely by taste. Another excellent example is bottled water with the brand-first and tasteless-water second. (Check out my article The Power of a Brand).
In a study conducted at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, their researchers tested the effect of branding on taste preferences in young children. The 95 children aged 3-5 were given identical food, except one choice came in McDonald’s packaging, and the other was in plain-white packaging. All of the food came from McDonald’s, except for the carrots. Which one do you think the kids liked best? No brainer. Hands-down McDonald was selected, including the carrots that they don’t sell. The preferences for McDonald’s branded food increased with both the frequency of McDonald’s consumption and the number of TV sets in the home of each kid.
Taste Matters
I remember the day McDonald’s coffee tasted like merde! (pardon my French). In 2006, McDonald’s upgraded is coffee from a generic, non-descript coffee, to a darker-roast, Arabica, premium coffee. They called it the “Full Bean Coffee.” I recall seeing office colleagues with their extra-large McDonald’s to-go-cup and commenting the coffee tasted excellent, even better than Tim Hortons. Within a year, McDonald’s coffee sales climbed 20% in a market where coffee sales are over $30 billion. During that time, they gave away a lot of free coffee. Why? To demonstrate that their coffee did taste great because the taste does matter.
Taste is one of the most important factors influencing consumers’ preference for choosing one food and beverage brand over another. But we should not be so naïve to think that taste is the only discerning factor. Unless its Heinz’s ketchup—the perfectly balanced condiment with the right amount of tangy-sweet tomato and salty goodness, with pleasant sour notes and a buttery umami finish. Even with a 62% market share lead in the US (84% in Canada), this brand doesn’t rely only on taste. Heinz spent approximately $530 million on advertising in 2013, including securing an ad in the 2016 Super Bowl (which isn’t cheap). Most recently, Heinz‘s ketchup launched a brilliant advertising campaign inspired (actually a complete rip-off) from a Mad Men episode.
Final Tasting Notes
We understand the mouth’s role within our complex sensory system. It’s integral in how we interpret taste, and also how we define our likes and dislikes. We also know it has its limitations. In the end, its overruled by our brain’s desire to bring it all together. So when positioning a brand that has a substantial oral opportunity, we can’t put all the pressure on the tongue to carry us through. By ensuring multiple sensory stimulations, only then will the tongue feel affirmation in what it’s experiencing. Now how you choose to influence this experience will leave your brand tasting bitter or sweet.
