Above: Ted. A dog who prefers crisps to Spam
How hungry would you have to be before you tucked into a bowl of dog food? What about a tin of Spam? John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch carried out an experiment to see if people could tell the difference between dog food and pâté based purely on taste. In a double blind taste test, volunteers were presented with five dishes all prepared in a food mixer to have the same consistency, chilled and then served with a parsley garnish and a side of crackers. The five dishes were organic dog food, duck liver mousse, supermarket liverwurst, pork liver pâté and good old Spam.
Despite the participants consistently rating the dog food as having the worst taste, Bohannon et al found that they were no better at identifying the dog food than someone simply guessing. They suggested that people were so poor at predicting which dish was the dog food because they had been primed to expect dog food to taste better than it does. In other words, the worst tasting dish wouldn’t be the dog food. This is a good example of the power of suggestion, a corner stone of successful advertising.
Perhaps even more surprising though was that the aggregate ranking of dog food and Spam showed no statistical significance. So how does a product for which people show no significant preference for over dog food sell over 7 billion units across 41 countries? That’s the power of a strong brand.
Link to Bohannon et al's experiment
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