Measuring effects of packaging on willingness-to-pay for chocolate: Evidence from an EEG experiment

Willingness to pay (WTP) for food may be influenced by multiple custom and product characteristics, including food packaging. Thus, evaluating WTP for food and the contributions of individual factors, affecting it, remains a puzzling question for many fields, such as food science, economics and marketing. In fast-growing and high -volume markets, such as the market of chocolate and chocolate confectionery products, this issue becomes of special practical importance. However, reliable evaluation of WTP, using traditional approaches, such as surveys, requires large samples to be tested, making such investigations rather costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, such approaches assume that all participants can clearly express their preferences, detect subtle differences in product characteristics, and they are not biased, providing socially desirable responses. These circumstances prompt the development of new, more elaborated and less subjective approaches for WTP estimation, including those based on participants' neurophysiological reactions. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a relatively cheap and efficient method to evaluate neurophysiological reactions. Thus, the goal of the present work is to test whether using EEG neurometrics may improve evaluation of the WTP for food, compared to models based only on the stated perceived taste quality. Indeed, the obtained results suggested that both perceived taste and EEG beta power at frontal electrode F4 strongly but independently correlate with the WTP for chocolate, making it reasonable to combine both factors for better WTP modeling. The suggested model for WTP was applied to investigate the impact of chocolate packaging. This was achieved by comparing the WTP stated by respondents, when they were exposed to chocolate packaging, with WTP estimates based on the model that was created using data from "blind" experiments, when the respondents were not aware of the product properties. The revealed difference is likely to reflect packaging effects on chocolate WTP and confirms strong packaging effects for well-known brands.