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Characterizing products
with human senses!

Descriptive
Approaches

Characterizing products
with human senses!

All descriptive methods aim to identify, describe and quantify all sensory product properties; objective sensory profiles and sensory mappings are valuable output and crucial basics to understand a product category and monitor strategic product positioning in your market.

SAM Pre-Mapping

SAM Pre-Mapping is an approach allowing you to experience and to map the differences and similarities of a large number of products in a very systematic way.

Simple to understand, easy to execute and suitable for any kind of respondents, familiar or not with sensory science.

QDA Quantitative Descriptive Analysis

QDA according to Tragon delivers precise information in consumer-based language for product development, competitive assessment, establishing sensory specifications for quality control, and advertising claim substantiation.

QDA is developed by consumers to describe products in their own words. It enables communication with consumers about products on packaging and in advertising.

Spectrum

The SpectrumTM-Method was developed by Sensory Spectrum Inc. (Gail Civille) and is a protected procedure (used only in collaboration with the institute).

The three principal tools of this method are a reference list (from the given product category), scaling procedures (use of absolute intensities) and methods of panel training.

Napping

Napping and partial Napping use a panel of trained or untrained consumers. Samples are positioned on a two dimensional surface according to similarities and differences to produce individual maps and descriptive terms are applied to each sample.

The combination of all individual maps leads to a global sensory mapping of the measured products.

Flash Profiling

Flash profiling is an alternative sensory analysis technique adapted from Free Choice Profiling to understand the sensory positioning of products.

Untrained consumers select their own terms to describe and evaluate a set of products simultaneously and then rank the products for each attribute that they individually create. They are asked to focus on the descriptive terms, not on the hedonic terms. This technique is particularly cost effective and does not need any training session.

Free Sorting

This method is especially suited for clarifying how consumers perceive multi-dimensional product categories.

They are asked to sort the products according to their similarities and then to describe the formed groups with their own words. Analysis and mapping are obtained through a matrix of similarities.