Food plating preferences and academic peer review

I recently wrote a letter to the editor of Acta Paediatrica, commenting on an earlier published article. That original article investigated an interesting intervention parents can easily do at home to increase their children's liking of food platings, as such potentially increasing their appetite. That original article, by Zampollo, Griffin, Wansink and Shimizu, can be read here.

There are, however, a few issues with the statistics and the interpretation of these statistics, as I explained in the commentary, which can be found here.

Brand personality vs image

Brand personality is often assessed in a way that does not match the way psychologists deal with the personality concept. In psychology, it is the person himself/herself that fills in a lengthy questionnaire which is then coded and results in a typology on the big five personality dimensions. In market research, brand personality is measured more often from a perceived point-of-view. Customers, or potential customers, are asked to fill in questionnaires about a brand. It is clear that the latter approach is more likely to result in an assessment of perceived brand personality or brand image, even if measures have been developed to try to focus on personality. 

In a recent presentation I elaborated on this issue. Included is a case study on how it has been applied to the study of Belgian financial banks. This case study was the subject of Jules De Bruycker's master thesis at Lessius University college, jointly supervised by me and Wim Lagae.

Link to slideshare

We are currently developing the proposed toolkit to easily assess the tension between brand personality (what the corporation thinks of its own personality) and brand image (what others think of it).

Green is for NO! Snickers' nutrition labels

Nutrition information on packaged foods indicating, for instance, caloric content is legally enforced in the United States and also in Europe there are only a few exceptions (I don't know about regulations in other parts of the world, so please leave a comment if you do so). What has been an issue, however, and one that has been debated for a long time, is the exact form these labels should have. What information should be present? In which format should it be presented? Where should the information be? There are still a number of degrees of freedom pertaining to these choices. In the USA, food manufacturers decided themselves to put the labels on the front of the packages. Being in the States at the moment, one of these front-of-pack labels caught my attention. It is the attention-grabbing green label on the Snickers bars. And I have ambivalent thoughts about it...

Example of a US Snickers calories label (originally featured on John B. Mahaffie's Blog)

Where's the revenue in Google Glasses?

The Google Glasses preview seems great. It seems feasible, releases are expected pretty soon and there is some intuitive appeal to the idea (and some intuitive questions as well). If you have not seen the preview, you should.

A number of parodies, of course, already exist and one is remarkably interesting and touches upon important marketing and revenue issues.