Sensory-informed experimental design and modelling time-intensity

在过去的50年里，面向消费者市场的新产品设计经历了重大变革。传统上，发明者会创造一种他们认为可能满足消费者感知需求的新产品。这样的产品往往被开发以满足发明人自己的感知，而不一定是消费者的感知。自上而下的产品开发方法的社会后果是新产品引入的失败率很高。通过调查潜在客户，创建了一个精确的目标，指导开发人员并降低失败率。然而，今天，产品的扩散和消费者选择的出现导致了市场内细分的确定。消费者最初是根据人口统计数据划分的，但发达国家的消费者可支配收入的比例已经大幅增加，现在的选择是基于喜好而不是财务状况。因此，了解您的目标市场对于构建成功的产品至关重要。了解你的目标市场通常涉及进行产品类别评估，其中12到30个商业产品与消费者进行测试，以创建一个偏好地图。每个消费者都可以在完整的模块设计中测试每个产品;然而，有几类产品不适合这种方法。这些产品往往是“高疲劳”产品，如饮料酒精产品，强烈调味的产品，如咖啡或巧克力，以及高度调味的产品，如莎莎酱或咖喱。本文概述的工作将看到方法的发展，将允许不完整的块设计，以适应高疲劳数据，使“类似”的产品不会连续品尝。还将开展工作，开发统计方法，模拟消费者在品尝过程中对产品的反应;例如，当一个人品尝草莓酱时，味觉的甜味如何随时间变化。这些新的统计方法将允许从时间强度数据中提取隐藏的信息。

The design of new products for consumer markets has undergone a major transformation over the last 50 years. Traditionally, inventors would create a new product that they thought might address a perceived need of consumers. Such products tended to be developed to meet the inventors own perception and not necessarily that of consumers. The social consequence of a top-down approach to product development has been a large failure rate in new product introduction. By surveying potential customers, a refined target is created that guides developers and reduces the failure rate. Today, however, the proliferation of products and the emergence of consumer choice has resulted in the identification of segments within the market. Consumers were originally segmented on demographics but the proportion of disposable income has increased so much for people in the developed world that choice is now based upon liking rather than financial means. Therefore, understanding your target market is essential for building successful products. Understanding your target market typically involves conducting a product category assessment, where 12 to 30 commercial products are tested with consumers to create a preference map. Every consumer gets to test every product in a complete-block design; however, several classes of products do not lend themselves to such approaches. These tend to be "high-fatigue" products, such as beverage alcohol products, intensely flavoured products, such as coffee or chocolate, and highly seasoned products, such as salsa or curry. The work outlined herein will see the development of methodologies that will allow incomplete-block designs to be tailored for high-fatigue data such that 'similar' products are not tasted consecutively. Work will also be carried out on the development of statistical methods for modelling consumer reaction to a product over the time course of a tasting; e.g., as one tastes strawberry jam, how does the sweetness of the flavour sensation change over time. These novel statistical approaches will allow the extraction of otherwise hidden information from time-intensity data.