Reliability of polarized projective mapping with consumers

TLDR: Results showed that PPM can be regarded as a repeatable and reproducible methodology, and provided evidence of the reliability of the methodology for the evaluation of simple products with moderate differences among them.

Abstract: Polarized projective mapping (PPM) combines the main features of projective mapping and polarized sensory positioning. The main advantage of this methodology is that it allows comparing results obtained in different sessions. The aim of this study was to evaluate the reliability of PPM, focusing on individual and global repeatability, global reproducibility and data aggregation from different sessions. A consumer study with two sample sets of powdered drinks was carried out. Consumers were randomly divided into four groups: two of the groups evaluated the same sample set in two different sessions, while the other two evaluated the samples in three sessions (in one of the sessions, they evaluated the whole sample set, whereas in the other two sessions they evaluated the sample set split into two sets). Results showed that PPM can be regarded as a repeatable and reproducible methodology. Preliminary evidence of the validity of aggregating data from different sessions was gathered. Practical Applications Projective mapping is a holistic methodology for sensory characterization with both trained assessors and consumers. It requires all samples to be simultaneously evaluated in the same session, which restricts the number of products that can be evaluated and makes it difficult to compare results from samples evaluated at different moments in time. In this context, PPM relies on the use of fixed references to enable data aggregation. Results from this work provided evidence of the reliability of the methodology for the evaluation of simple products with moderate differences among them.