Emotional Effects Induced by Lip Balms Containing Different Emollients: Neuroscientific Approach to Studying the Tactual Experience

Abstract:  Companies rely on traditional market research, e.g. consumer tests and focus groups, for predicting consumer compliance. Since they investigate the conscious perception of a product, their results can be one of the causes of the high failure rate (40%) of products after the launch.  In recent years, experts in neurology, psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated that emotions, and the unconscious interactions between consumers and products, strongly influence the buying process and the purchase decision. The integration of emotional and neuroscientific profiling to the classical consumer research methodologies can provide additional useful information to build better products. For cosmetic products, the texture is strongly involved in customer loyalty, so the emotional effects of tactual stimulation could be one key to create successful products. By means of neuroscientific instruments and methodologies, we have demonstrated that lip balms containing the same ingredients but diverging for only one emollient are able to trigger different emotional responses during their application on the lips.