British Food Journal

Purpose – The aims of this paper is to determine, via an empirical study of beer consumers in Croatia, the influence of tasting on the validity of conjoint analysis (CA) under presence of familiar or unfamiliar brands.

Design/methodology/approach – The research comprised a face-to-face survey with 403 beer consumers. The respondents were divided into four groups regarding CA experiment (familiar/unfamiliar beer brand in combination with presence or absence of beer tasting). CA validity was measured with five criteria: face validity, convergent validity, internal validity, predictive validity and subjective evaluation of conjoint task. In addition to the CA experiment, a structured questionnaire was used consisting of a few questions regarding respondents' socio-economic characteristics, beer purchasing, and consuming behaviour.

Findings – The research results confirmed that tasting as an additional presentation method has significant influence on validity of CA. However, the results of the study indicate that tasting should be used as a stimulus presentation method for CA with food and beverage products/brands, which are unfamiliar to the consumers. When testing familiar brands and brands with established perceptions, simpler and less expensive verbal stimulus presentation can be used.

Practical implications – According to the research results, it could be concluded that when performing CA with strong familiar brands, it is not necessary to use CA with tasting since tasting increases research complexity and costs and it does not achieve better results. However, tasting as a stimuli presentation method gives better results than pure verbal CA in the case of unfamiliar brands.

Originality/value – The paper is one of the first to deal with tasting as a presentation method in conjoint analysis and its results have direct implications for the future use of CA with food and beverages.