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RESEARCH PRODUCT

"Having a drink in a bar...!" : contextual effects on drink experience : promises of the immersive approach for studying contextual influences on food behaviour

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The overall aim of the present thesis is to study contextual influences on food behaviour (including variables coming from the environment and from the consumer). To this purpose, an immersive method using a space with physical elements was used, in order to evoke a realistic situation within a laboratory setting. Here, the method consisted in designing an immersive bar evoking the situation of “having a drink in a bar”. Two variants of the bar were created and five studies were implemented in these spaces to study how context influences food choices and evaluation. Our approach consisted in taking the product as central in the link between the consumer and the environment and not as a contextual variable itself.From a methodological point of view, the results show that immersive bars are a flexible tool evoking a realistic situation. They can be used to study the effects of an integrated set of contextual factors and to determine the relative weight of each of these factors. From a theoretical point of view, the results underscore that in a specific situation, contextual variables are interacting together to create what we called a “moment of consumption”. When a product is consumed in such a “moment of consumption”, consumers’ product experience is modulated by perceptive, affective and semantic contextual influences.This work concludes that the act of food consumption reflects consumers’ product experience in a “moment of consumption”. Understanding the link between consumer and product cannot be done by appealing only to these two terms but needs to be explained as part of a complex set of contextual interactions