A study that asked participants to identify their preferred beer in a taste test, has yielded results well beyond the fun factor – it has provided new insights on how people learn their preferences.

The question is an important one in the consumer products field because people’s preferences change over time. The primary influence is experience but while there has been research on the factors that affect experience, such as biology, repeated exposure, informational goals, and social learning, the nature of the experience itself has not been well studied.

Steve Hoeffler, Dan Ariely, Pat West and Rod Duclos conjecture that breadth and depth of experience can each have different outcomes on how people learn their preferences.

“Understanding that preferences change is very different from understanding how and why the changes occur,” they said. “There is a dearth of research on the role of experience so we attempted to remedy this shortcoming by refining and partitioning ‘experience’ into two new sub-constructs: intensiveness and extensiveness of experience,” they said.

Intensiveness (depth) refers to the amount and frequency of experience with a product in a particular category, while extensiveness is the variety of such products experienced. The authors expected extensiveness to matter most because broader exposure would facilitate consumers’ ability to discriminate the finer distinctions within a product category.

This idea was tested out in four studies. The first two studies involved beer. Participants were asked to indicate the number of years they had been drinking beer, the number of beers they consumed in a week, the number of brands they regularly consumed, and the number of beer types (such as lager or ale) they had experienced.

Then they were asked to rank beers and beer-producing countries on quality before concluding the experiment with a blind taste test. The participants’ responses on the latter were matched with their other responses to show how well they identified and appreciated high-quality products.

The result provided strong support for the authors’ main hypothesis: participants with greater extensiveness of experience were better able to identify and appreciate high-quality products, and better able to predict/identify their preferences than those with lower extensiveness of experience.

A similar test was done using orange juice, only this time the exercise was tilted in favor of intensiveness of experience by asking participants to recognize their favorite brand in a taste test. Surprisingly, yet as predicted, those who had more extensiveness of experience did better at recognizing their own favorite juice.

The final test involved perfume and it manipulated the intensiveness and extensiveness of participants’ experience. They were exposed to different scents and provided with information including name and scent category (citrus, woody oriental or soft floral). Some participants were given a variety of products in one category, others to products in all three categories. Some were told to smell the scents four times, others only one time.

Once again, extensiveness of experience proved to be a better predictor of preference learning.

The findings have implications for managers, especially given other research that shows people tend to pursue narrow product searches when the initial exposure to a product category is favorable, which reduces the range of alternatives explored.

“How can we encourage consumers to expand their experiences and thus further develop their preferences within a particular category? One good example of how this might be done is Groupon and other limited promotional companies that encourage consumers to try new experiences at a reduced rate. Our research would imply that not only are you introducing your product or service to a new group of customers, but also, you are potentially altering or accelerating preference learning,” the authors concluded.