THE IDEAL PAIR METHOD, AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE IDEAL PROFILE METHOD BASED ON PAIRWISE COMPARISONS: APPLICATION TO A PANEL OF CHILDREN

Studying consumers' ideals is an efficient way to improve or develop products. The Ideal Profile Method is a method able to answer that issue by providing a sensory definition of both the ideal and the real products. This definition is based on the Quantitative Descriptive Analysis method that can represent a problem, as it may not be practicable with all kinds of panel. How to proceed if the use of the Ideal Profile Method is inappropriate? We propose a new methodology: the Ideal Pair Method, the notion of pair being used as the second item of two, in relation to the first one. This methodology can be considered as an alternative to the Ideal Profile Method based on pairwise comparisons. We will present the protocol and the statistical analysis of the data. The methodology will be demonstrated through an experiment realized with a panel of children.