The Influence Of The Matching Of Food Taste And Plate Shape On Consumer Food Evaluation

With the rapid development of the catering industry,consumers pay more and more attention to the dining environment when they consume food.The dining environment includes the surrounding environment’s color,sound,smell,temperature,atmosphere,decoration,tableware and other factors,among which the visual factors play a very important role.Visual perception has an important influence on the taste perception and consumption evaluation of food,especially when the consumer’s perception of food taste is in a fuzzy state,visual and other sensory factors are easy to affect the taste cognition.However,after the analysis of existing literature,it is found that most scholars mainly focus on the influence of the most obvious color factor in visual perception on consumer evaluation,while the research on shape and shape conceptual metaphor in the field of consumer behavior is relat ively limited.How does shape,as a visual factor,affect consumer evaluations? What’s the underlying mechanism?On the basis of summarizing previous studies,this paper divides food tastes into common spicy spicy taste and mild taste,and divides food plates into common rounded plates and polygonal plates.It also discusses that when consumers are faced with food with different tastes(spicy vs.mild),they should adopt plates with different shapes(polygonal vs.polygonal).And explore the mediating mechanism of the influence of fruity on individual attitude and evaluation.This paper selects the theory of cross-sensory marketing and conceptual metaphor to determine the research model and hypothesis of this paper.This paper uses the implicit association test and group experiment to collect data and verify the hypothesis of this paper through statistical analysis.The empirical findings are as follows:(1)There is an implicit connection between taste and shape.Compared with the polygonal plate,the rounded plate is more matched with the mild taste;compared with the rounded plate,the polygonal plate is more matched with the spicy taste.(2)The interaction between food taste and plate shape affects consumer evaluation.Compared with the polygonal shaped plate,the mild food uses the rounded plate,which is more highly evaluated by consumers.Compared with the rounded shaped plate,the spicy food uses the polygonal plate,which is more highly evaluated by consumers.(3)In the interaction between food taste and plate shape affects consumers’ food evaluation,perceptual fluency plays a mediating role.The above research conclusions not only supplement the research fields of cross-sensory marketing and conceptual metaphor to a certain extent,but also provide some environmental design ideas and management enlightenment for marketers.Marketers should recognize the relationship between food taste and plate shape,not only to have a deeper understanding of how consumers perceive shape and taste information,but also to provide some references for catering industry practitioners and designers on how to use shape elements.When further improving the dining environment experience,they should be noted that different shape plates should be designed or adopted for food with different taste types,so as to promote the consistency of shape information with food taste information,improve consumers’ dining experience,and thus improve the overall evaluation of food.