‘Fijn dat lekker zo gezond kan zijn’ A roughly translation of ‘It’s good to know something so tasty can be so healthy’. This was once a memorable slogan of, believe it or not, a chocolate-sprinkles brand. I can believe that chocolate tastes good. But healthy? Surely no one believes that. Yet, with hindsight, it may have been a remarkably clever positioning.
A recent fMRI study shows that people do not simply taste what is actually in a product. To a large extent, they taste what they expect to be in it.
In the study, participants tasted a sweet drink after being told that it contained either real sugar or an artificial sweetener. In half of the cases, this information was correct; in the other half, it was not. The overall outcome was more or less as expected, but the neural mechanism behind it surprised the researchers. The artificially sweetened drink was rated as more enjoyable when people believed it contained real sugar. Conversely, the drink containing real sugar was rated less positively when people expected an artificial sweetener.
The MRI scans helped explain why. When participants believed they were receiving sugar but actually tasted an artificial sweetener, the researchers observed increased activity in the dopaminergic midbrain. This region is involved in reward, motivation and learning about the nutritional value of food. In other words, the expectation of sugar increased the neural reward value of the sweetener. The brain responded as if the sweet taste represented more nutritional value and calories than it actually did.
The recipe did not change. The brain’s valuation of it did. And with that, the entire product experience changed. This means that the seemingly simple question in product development — which recipe do people like best? — is not so simple after all.
When analysing the scans, the researchers followed an approach that is still common in neuroscience: examining individual brain regions, known as Regions of Interest, or ROIs. They assessed which areas became more or less active under different conditions. In this case, they looked at areas such as the insula and thalamus in relation to taste processing, and ventral regions associated with reward. But the brain does not work like a collection of individual lights switching on one by one.
Imagine moving beyond dopaminergic regions and instead identifying complete neural networks associated with Desire, Expectation and Value. The tens of thousands of brain scans we have conducted at Neurensics allow us to distinguish precisely these kinds of networks.
As a result, we do not merely look at where activity occurs in the brain. We identify validated neural patterns associated with Desire, Expectation and Value, as well as Aversion and Danger.
For product development, that distinction is crucial. A product can taste good without creating Desire. It can taste familiar while representing little Value. And it can meet expectations without being genuinely rewarding. Without activation of the brain’s reward networks, there is little reason to buy. So, if you want to understand what a product experience truly means to consumers, you should not only examine which brain regions are activated. You need to understand the complete neural networks involved.
In our own research, we regularly see how large the difference can be between blind and branded tasting. When people taste something without seeing the brand, we measure what the product itself evokes in the brain. We then offer them exactly the same product again, but this time accompanied by the brand, packaging or other relevant product information.
The chemistry of the product does not change. Its valuation in the brain certainly does.
A strong brand can increase Desire, shape Expectation and enhance perceived Value. But the reverse can also happen. The wrong claim, packaging or brand association can make an otherwise excellent product less appealing.
The brand is therefore more than the emotional wrapping around a product. Through expectation, it becomes a physical part of the consumption experience itself.
Much of product development still follows a more or less linear process:
The study above shows why this sequence is risky. If the brand context can strengthen or weaken the product experience, there is no such thing as a single, objectively ‘best-tasting’ recipe. There is only a product that, within a particular context, for a particular consumer and with a particular expectation, has the greatest chance of success. Product and brand should therefore not be developed sequentially, but together.
From the best-tasting recipe to the greatest market opportunity. Successful product development requires us to distinguish between at least three different effects.
What does the product itself do? Blind testing reveals the neural response created by the recipe, aroma, texture or formulation, without the influence of the brand.
What does expectation add? Claims, ingredient information, packaging and positioning create expectations before consumption. These can strengthen or weaken the experience. Even price creates an expectation. A higher price can increase the perceived value of a product — ‘reassuringly expensive’, as the British describe it with such wonderful understatement.
What does the brand add? Comparing blind and branded experiences reveals whether the brand genuinely creates more Desire and Value, or merely adds familiarity and recognition.
This distinction does not make product development more complicated. It makes it more predictable. It prevents months of investment in optimising a recipe that ultimately lacks sufficient appeal in its real market context.
By developing the product, brand and expectation as one integrated whole from the very beginning, we stop searching merely for the best-tasting recipe. Instead, we create the most desirable product-brand combination: a proposition that not only tastes good, but also generates Desire, represents Value and drives purchase.
That is how we can reduce the risk of product development by more than half.
‘It’s good to know something so tasty can be so healthy.’ In hindsight, it may have been more than just a clever slogan. It may be a surprisingly accurate summary of how the brain creates taste.
This opens up an entirely new field of questions:
Scent may be the purest form of neuromarketing and, at the same time, one of the most underestimated variables in marketing effectiveness.
And perhaps that is no coincidence. Scent cannot easily be captured in questionnaires, dashboards or post-rationalisations. It operates where much of marketing is still blind: beneath the surface.
So come and experiment with us. Because the brands that first understand how scent influences behaviour can build an advantage that is not easily copied.
Want to know more?
Discover how we use neuroscience to predict the impact of your content, helping you go beyond simply capturing visual attention: neuromarketing research at Neurensics.