Hypothesis on Chocolate Spread Consumption

We came up with certain hypothesis that are based on our predictions: “Users experience an “illusory correlation” when they are asked to rank the generic brands.” Users tend to think that the generic brand would be less tasty even though in reality that’s often not the case. However because it is a generic brand they have prejudices against it. We expect participants to create an illusory correlation between the brand, its quality and the price. In our case, the generic brand is expected to be the worst and the one with the lowest price. The opposite correlation is observed with Nutella: expected to be the best one, with the best quality and the highest price. This effect was shown by Chapman in 1967. He made his experiment about how people would remember more some words than others given the context and aspects they linked to an object. “Due to the ‘mere exposure effect’, Nutella is the most preferred brand and is also considered as a ‘status mark’.” Mere exposure effect is a physiological phenomenon where people develop a preference for a stimulus due to the high frequency of exposure. G. Fechner first described this effect in 1876 but the most known scientist is R. Zajonc. In the 1960s, he conducted a series of experiment on the liking of Chinese characters by people who didn’t speak Chinese. Results show that participants tend to prefer characters they were exposed to earlier in the research. Other experiments have been conducted and this effect spreads to many other things like paintings, objects, sounds etc. In our case, we are expecting people to chose Nutella as their favourite one because it is the one we are mostly exposed to, the prototype for hazelnut chocolate spreads (the representative of the category). Although this effect seems to