Evoked Consumption Context Matters in Food-Related Consumer Affective Research

In this chapter we provide a brief overview of the research using scenarios to evoke context in affective (specifically emotion) research within the field of Sensory and Consumer Science. We then present two case studies that extend previously used scenarios and their application to other affective variables, such as consumption enjoyment. We demonstrate that consumers are capable of using scenarios to evoke complex situations, which involve not only environmental or temporal factors but also behaviors. The potential that these strategies have are then discussed and their advantages and limitations to other approaches such as virtual reality compared. We conclude that the underlying success factor of means of context evocation lies in the familiarity and appropriateness of the imagined situation, which becomes most relevant when collecting affective data in laboratory settings.