Understanding consumer’s perception has paramount importance for product development process. Especially for product features that has features that directly affect human sensors, such as food, packaging, and branding. Human perception is heavily relied on its sensors to produce decision for product preference and consumption. For example, Durian fruit is widely known for its bad smell for Western consumers, thus they have no desired to consume the fruit. On the other hand, Asia peoples likes durian smell and acknowledge Durian is one of the most delicious fruit in the world. Therefore, business need an approach to asses and analyse consumer’s perception through understanding how stimuli to the sensors are understood.
Sensory analysis is relatively emerging approach in the last decade. It has been developed into its own discipline which have its own research methodology. Manahan Siallagan, as Laboratory director stated that as business and management education entity, SBM ITB must constantly introduced and updated about latest method for market analysis. Thus, Big Data Analysis and Social Simulation SBM ITB organized “Translating Consumer Voice into Marketing Insight: Introduction to Sensory Analysis” to introduce this method in SBM ITB. This workshop was held in Friday, 6 July 2019 in Labtek XIX which invited Muhammad Aswan Syahputra as CEO of Sensolution.ID, a company that develop sensory analysis application
In this workshop, participants not only discussed about sensory analysis approach but also doing hands-on approach to create experiment, collect data, and analyse data. Several participants were asked to be panellist, server, and data entry. Panellists are tasked to try served food before rated the food for each attribute in questionnaires. Server were tasked to gives one-blind experiment test to the panellists. Later Mr. Aswan demonstrated how data analysis conducted, what is the meaning of given result.
In the end, participants were exposed to full cycle of sensory analysis step and motivated to learn more about this approach. Big Data Analysis and Social Simulation Laboratory SBM ITB also planned to continue this workshop for more quantitative analysis from sensory data.