Consumer behaviour and product characteristics: current research and future stakes

The quantitative saturation of food demand in developed countries compels firms to adopt qualitative differentiation policies and to multiply variants of food products supplied on markets. It is therefore important to understand how choices are made between products with very close characteristics, the difficulty being to predict consumers’ reactions (to a modification in price or characteristic, to the introduction of a new product etc.). Consumers are rarely able to know and identify all the characteristics of a product, and their perception is influenced by the available information. This text presents modelling approaches used to take into account product characteristics in individual choice analysis by granting particular attention to the stakes underlying recent developments in this field