CONSUMER TESTING AS A GUIDE FOR TECHNICAL RESEARCH 105 and about the requirements for successful products. Management fur- thermore is responsible for the commercial success of the product. This breeds a natural tendency to rely most heavily on one's own judgment. It is considered good practice, if not essential, to run some sort of a con- sumer test on the product after management feels that the development has progressed to a point where the product is nearly ready to be marketed. This permits a last minute check before going to the expense of setting up advertising and promotional campaigns. It provides a form of insur- ance which is relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of putting on the market a product which the consumer may not like. The above has summarized briefly a common procedure for utilizing and tying-in technical research with product improvement and product development. This is only one way of guiding technical' research in its effort to provide better consumer goods. A somewhat different procedure has been found useful in the field of processed foods. Much of this procedure is readily adaptable to the cosmetic field. Essentially, the four steps in this pro- cedure as applied to foods are as follows: 1. Bench-Top Testing for Obvious Defects--The research man and his co-workers taste samples and otherwise evaluate them for appearance, color, texture, feel, etc. This step is considered to be only a matter of screening out obvious defects. For example, certain tastes are generally recognized as undesirable, such as staleness in coffee, cooked flavor or ex- cessive peel oil in orange juice, musty flavor and many others which come readily to mind. The mere fact that a sample is believed to be different from some standard or control is not ordinarily considered a defect at this stage. 2. Panel Testing for Difference--Samples which have shown no glaring defects are then submitted to panels trained and screened to include only tasters of demonstrated sensitivity and ability to recognize small flavor and texture differences. This panel usually works with the familiar tri- angle test which consists of testing three samples, two of which are identi- cal. The judge is asked to identify which one of the three is different from the other two. Use of this test permits a statistical evaluation of the results to show whether the judges were actually able to recognize the presumed difference between samples or were merely guessing. Besides looking for a difference this trained panel is asked to describe in what way the samples differ and to give some measure of how different they may be. For rea- sons which will be apparent later they are never asked to express their preferences for the samples. These panels usually consist of about 10 to 15 people who may participate in two triangle tests at one time giving a total of 20 to 30 judgments. The results are analyzed by the chi-square procedure to determine the significance of the findings.

106 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS 3. Preliminary Consumer Test--If an experimental sample is found to be significantly different from some control or standard then there is a possibility that it also might be better liked than that control or standard. Of course, sometimes it may be desired to produce an experimental sample which is not different from a standard. This can occur in the case where some processing change is being considered to try to reduce production costs. If the experimental sample is equally as acceptable as the standard then the change in processing may be undertaken with no fear of loss of sales. In any event the samples are submitted to the consumer before any opin- ion is formed as to the relative acceptability of the experimental product. The consumer test may take the form of a conventional home use test such as is available from a large number of agencies who provide such services commercially. In our work we have developed a form of testing which is called a store test. The control sample and a variant are pre- pared in the laboratory ready for eating and are sent to one or another of several stores where facilities are maintained for this work. These facilities consist of counter space rented from a department store together with refrigerators, heating stoves, and all the utensils necessary for adequate serving of the samples. A staff of two to four trained interviewers invites customers of the store to participate in a "taste test." The respondents are asked to tell which of two samples they prefer and, if possible, the reason for their choice. The information thus obtained is used as a day-to-day or week-to-week source of guidance for the technologist attempting to improve old or de- velop new products. Principal advantages of this store test procedure lie in the relative speed with which results can be obtained and the com- paratively low cost. 4. Full-Scale Consumer Testing--If the new or improved product still shows promise after the above three steps of testing, it is ordinarily then subjected to this last step which is considered essential before chang- ing processing conditions or before putting a new product on the market. The full-scale consumer test is designed to determine, with as great a cer- tainty as possible, that the product really satisfies the needs and wants of the consumer. Decisions of this type require more assurance than can be given in any of the three previous steps. Therefore, the best avail- able type of consumer sampling is used, ordinarily on a nation-wide basis to determine the consumer acceptance of the new product. This type of test is ordinarily not carried out at the request of the tech- nologist but belongs more to the realm of the merchandising staff. The research man has done the best he can with the tools at his command after the third step above has been successfully completed. The preliminary consumer test phase of the program above is of primary