Ricerc@Sapienza

Neuromarketing predicts that multiple factors contribute to the choice of a product, among them, the perceived value, pleasantness, and emotion related to the use of it. In this framework, a particular field is constituted by luxury items, such as wine. Wine is particularly suitable to marketing effects, both extrinsic (label) and intrinsic features (volatile composition and color) lead to the constitution of the experienced value, and the analysis of the contribution of olfaction to the process of tasting is fundamental in order to study flavor perception.

The unmyelinated C-tactile afferents system holds a hedonic function in touch experiences, shaping social functioning in the so-called affective touch hypothesis. Despite the fact that females are recognized as more sensitive to discriminative aspects of touch and respond more positively to touch than men, sex differences in the perception of affective touch have not been extensively investigated. We aimed to fill this gap by meta-analyzing existing studies on this topic. Thirteen studies were eligible and pooled effect sizes (Hedges’ g) were compared. Random effect models were used.

Neuro-marketing (neuroscience applied to marketing aims) has been already used for evaluating consumers’ preferences within the food and agricultural sector (Cherubino et al., 2017), in food tasting and olfaction experiments (Di Flumeri et al., 2016, 2017), as well as in the wine tasting (Horska E., et al, 2016). Aim of this pilot study is to investigate whether or not the sense of olfaction represents a statistically significant variable in the experience of wine tasting.