Wine label and consumer evaluation. Findings from an eye-tracking study

In food labels evaluation, visual attention is a crucial way to acquire information due to its close relation to higher-order cognitive processes (Plassmann et al., 2011) For this reason, eye-tracking techniques have a great potential for assessing consumers’ perception of food labels. The aim of this research is to evaluate the importance of different label attributes of wine and the effects. Forty consumers, 20 expert sommeliers and 20 consumers without wine expertise, were exposed to 8 different wine labels. During the labels' exposure, participants’ eye movements were recorded using an eye tracker. After each label’s exposure, participants expressed their evaluation filling in self-reports. Relying on gaze behaviour quantitative data, we analyzed the importance of label attributes, such as brand or ingredients. Secondly we verified if there is a difference in visual attention behaviour between the two groups. We expected that the expertise affects the attention on specific information from labels. Thirdly, relying on recent evidences on the relation of visual attention with appreciation and saliency (Milosavljevic et al., 2012), we hypothesized that more fixations on a label’s element are related with a better evaluation. We tested this relation in the whole sample and for each group separately. Results showed that wine labels were explored in terms of visual attention in different ways between experts and inexperts as some areas were significantly more watched by sommeliers, while some others by inexperts.