You must have noticed: as long as you order a meal at Starbucks, the service staff will ask your honorary name. When the drinks are delivered, someone on the outside of the cup wall will write your name in scribbled characters. You may think this is done to avoid spikes, and when the long rows in front of the counter are all waiting for their cappuccino or low-calorie pickup, there is an embarrassing thing about confusing the drinks. However, this is not just a convenience for service personnel, it is Starbucks' "personalization" strategy. Some people even believe that doing this can allow customers to gain better consumer experience. After seeing that the drink cup has its own name, it is difficult to think it is a special drink. At this time, the question that food psychophysicists want to answer is: Can personalized techniques really make the diet more delicious?
Everyone loves personalizationIn 2013 and 2014, Coca-Cola launched the "Share a Coke", which allows consumers to buy black liquid with their name printed on the bottle's label. The event was extremely successful and was enough to prove the charm of personalized products (see the picture below). However, the ingredients of Kele have not been changed, and this approach can only be regarded as a superficial personalized method. The cokes around the world are very different, but it is different to see the bottle body with its own name printed on it. Such a light and simple approach has surprisingly good results, resulting in the sales volume of Coca-Cola reaching a new high in more than a decade.
There are many food and beverage companies that compete to copy the successful model of delicacies and coke and launch personalized products. As an article in Forbes Magazine pointed out: "Personalization is not a trend, but a sea of marketing." Another example is that in 2015, Moehn (Moët & Chandon has set up a photo booth at the Selfridges department store in the UK. After taking photos at the photo booth, customers can print photos on the bottle stickers of mini scented bottles, making it a perfect Christmas gift; Vedett beer also encourages the public to use photos to make personalized beer bottles; Leshi Potato Chips also uses a similar method, providing 10,000 potato chip packaging bags, allowing citizens to print photos that they believe best represents "summer time". In 2016, consumers who buy Jiale's grains to a certain amount can get a personal soup spoon.
Have you heard of "self-advantage effect"?Why do we develop different responses once a product is associated with itself?
is likely to be caused by "self-prioritization effect". Recently, Oxford psychologists have discovered that random visual symbols (such as circles, squares and triangles), that is, visual stimulation without essential meaning, can still produce special importance once it is related to us. In a typical experiment, the researcher associates the subject with a random visual symbol (assuming it is a blue triangle) and then uses other random visual symbols to represent the subject's friend or others. Then, the researcher asked the subject sitting in the experiment room to see the visual symbol related to him, immediately press a button in front of him, see the visual symbol related to others (maybe a yellow square or a red round), and then press another button.
The results of many similar experiments point out that objects related to the subject quickly gained priority: compared with random visual stimuli related to others, the subject not only sees visual stimuli related to themselves faster, but also responds faster. In other words, these visual stimuli become apparent because they are "your things" to some extent. I think the same is true for Starbucks' approach and the name bottles launched by Coca-Cola. Also, the same thing should be true for Mai Xing to think that the birthday cake is particularly delicious.
Author: Charles. Charles Spence
Publisher: Shang and Zhou Publishing
●Author Introduction
Charles. Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, UK, Director of the Intersensory Research Laboratory.
Over the past twenty years, we have studied how people perceive the world and won the reputation of multiple sensory cognition and physical experience designers.