Linguistic False Friends and Expected Food Markets: What can Make Consumers Not Choose Your Product?

Many researches have been done concerning the study of parameters which make people choose or not such product on the market. Concerning food industry, scientists have been involved in the analysis of technical parameters (nutrition, health characteristics) and their perception by the consumer, and in the analysis of psycho-sociological parameters linked with the perception of the product, or emotion associated with food or its environment. Other parameters investigated are suspicion of novelties, adherence to technology or to natural food, enjoyment, necessity. But what about the effect of words from the socio-psycholinguistic standpoint? It seems to be poorly investigated. Some claims: “It doesn’t matter how important the brand name is to the company, it’s what it means to the public that counts”. Concerning the foreign migration of brands (the use of a brand from one country to another), some psychological functions associated with language are weakened in the communication process. If an undesirable link is built between the concept of the brand and another one in the target foreign market, this can come from some communication channels detailed in this study. The weakened psychological functions can be some of the causes, and the undesirable link built through the communication channels is the consequence. It is shown why unexpected links between the brand (or the product name) and an undesirable concept must be looked for in six dimensions (academic, common, popular, rude language, slang, and “no meaning” language), and how an adapted advertisement campaign can enforced the psychological functions associated with language.agronomy, product, market, marketing, food industry perception, psycholinguistic linguistic communication, language, foreign migration, brands, homonym, paronym, neograph, Consumer/Household Economics,

Clothing-based discrimination at work: the case of the Goth subculture

Clothing-based discrimination at work induced by belonging to a subculture is not studied in the literature. This paper aims at contributing to fill this gap through analysis of working conditions of the French Goth subculture. Subjects were contacted individually at random for interviews (1-3h each) examined afterwards through statistical, qualitative, and inductive analyses. Nc=18 cases were considered, confirming a clothing-based discrimination mainly favored by two conditions: working with colleagues whose culture is that of the “majority” and being employed in a company of dual type where domination-submission relationships prevail and where professional identities marked by withdrawal are expected by the management. Results suggested that discrimination could proceed of the combination of several socio-psychological mechanisms: a belief that appearances do matter at work, a negative appearance-based judgment biased by “horn effect” and a consecutive task congruent selection moving towards a negative competencies assessment, a resulting confrontational context developed from an opinion task conflict but expressed in terms of aptitude task, making thus vain Goth subjects’ efforts to resolve the conflict

Innovative subjective evidence-based ethnography applied to food consumer’s behavior: the case of wine

Consumers’ behavior in food industry is a key point of investigation for marketing. Widely studied in different manners including the use of videos, the recent technological progresses allow now the use of miniaturized video facilities. This pilot study showed, for consumers shopping wines, how subjective video analysis of consumers’ activity could greatly contribute to refine investigations whereas consecutive interviews of consumers lied on explicitation technique and goal-oriented verbalization. This was illustrated by comparative data analyses of Russian, Belarussian and French consumers shopping wines in Belarus and Russia. This paper highlighted the effective behavior put in light through subjects’ motives analysis. Fundamental differences appeared through subjective analysis whereas this could not be seen through external observations. The findings may be of interest for food producers looking for criteria in order to have the adapted packaging when exporting their products. These results may be of great implication for food marketing in order to adapt the offer in stores

Risk assessment for subjective evidence-based ethnography applied in high risk environment

Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE) is a family of methods developed for investigation in social science based on subjective audio-video recordings with a miniature video-camera usually worn at eye-level (eye-tracking techniques are included). Despite its application to the analysis of high risk professions (e.g. anesthetists, aircraft pilots, nuclear reactor pilots) and the potential additional risks it induces, no suggestions regarding these concerns and no solutions helping researchers to anticipate this kind of risks are available in the literature. Aiming at filling this gap, we undertook a study of SEBE equipment applied to the analysis of workers’ activities on a nuclear power plant. The method was divided in three phases: i) observations and discussions on full scale simulators of activities undertaken by one or two workers (N=42) to characterize the consequences of the SEBE equipment, ii) bibliographic research combined with results of first phase to elaborate a risk assessment protocol, iii) analysis of its application in real operating situations (N=17). The elaborated protocol gave satisfactory results in terms of risk prevention and time application: No incident or accident occurred and the risk assessment took less than five minutes. The observations highlighted however a risk of side-effect (using SEBE equipment to justify subjects’ mistake or failure) giving greater importance to the necessity of this sort of risk assessment protocol. To date, the protocol needs to be tested in other industrial contexts in order to be improved and/or to confirm its robustness

Subjective ethnographic protocol for work activity analysis and occupational training improvement

The renewal of the staff in companies, with no possibilities sometimes for the newcomers to meet experienced workers already retired, is considered by some analysts as a “skills drain”. In such a context, improving the occupational training program is a crucial challenge for any company concerned by this social phenomenon. The method presented here aims at providing an in-depth analysis of what makes the competencies of experience workers in order to provide more exhaustive input data for training. This might contribute to lessen the aforementioned problem. It uses subjective video recordings of work activities and applies co-analysis (researcher-worker) based on the Square of Perceived Action model developed for the purpose in the frame of Activity Theory. The Square of Perceived Action-based method showed a better efficiency when compared with three other methods for four different activities. It also showed a good acceptance by the professionals who felt an improvement of their vocational practices after having being involved in such an analysis of their work activity

Structuring effect of tools conceptualized through initial goal fixedness for work activity

Analysis of work activities in nuclear industry has highlighted a new psycho-cognitive phenomenon: the structuring effect of tools (SET) sometimes leading to unexpected operating deviations; the subject is unable to perform a task concerning object A using or adapting a tool designed and presented to perform the same task concerning object B when object A is expected by the subject. Conditions to isolate and identify the SET were determined and reproduced in experiments for further analysis. Students and seven professional categories of adults (N = 77) were involved in three experimental conditions (control group, group with prior warning, group with final control) while individually performing a task with similar characteristics compared to real operating conditions and under moderate time-pressure. The results were: (1) highest performance with prior warning and (2) demonstration that academic and professional training favor the SET. After discussing different cognitive processes potentially related to the SET, we described (3) the psycho-cognitive process underlying the SET: Initial Goal Fixedness (IGF), a combination of the anchoring of the initial goal of the activity with a focus on the features of the initial goal favored by an Einstellung effect. This suggested coping with the negative effect of the SET by impeding the IGF rather than trying to increase the subjects’ awareness at the expense of their health. Extensions to other high-risk industries were discussed

Decontextualization effect in simulation training for transverse professional practices

Whereas full scale simulators operated for contextualized simulated training sessions are widely used for occupational training, studies undertaken regarding virtual applications have shown that decontextualized simulated situations could be used as a relevant lever to help trainees improving professional skills. This was here quantified and analyzed through three different experimental conditions (two included virtual training, contextualized and decontextualized) summoning N=33 experienced workers. A pre-analysis for experiment design helped us to define necessary features for decontextualized design with the objective of successful occupational training. Analysis of the benefits induced by each experimental condition was undertaken through comparative assessment of trainees’ performance after training. Results showed that, when respecting aforementioned specified features for experienced workers, decontextualized simulation training could significantly increase performance compared to contextualized training. This phenomenon was discussed both from the psychological and neurophysiologic standpoints

Detection and characterization of tacit occupational knowledge through speech and behavior analysis

The industrial society facing a “skills drain” with a massive renewal of staffs these years, improving the training of newcomers in the companies has become a key point. More specifically, being able to integrate tacit knowledge as input data of occupational training programs is a significant issue. On the basis of recent work, we developed a protocol helping us, through replay interview of subjective video recordings of activities and additional experiments, to detect and characterize tacit occupational knowledge through speech and behavior analysis. The application case used to illustrate the benefit of the method is the profession of nuclear reactor pilot. Identification and characterization of a tacit knowledge was done and questions raised for further discussion and integration in the training process

Innovative debriefing protocol for simulation training improvement

Previous multidisciplinary study of vocational simulation training helped us to elaborate an innovative debriefing protocol for simulation training sessions in seven steps applying two key principles (called “debriefing 7S2P”). This study aimed at testing its efficacy and assessing its potential performance. This was undertaken experimentally for simulation training sessions in industrial context gathering novice and experienced workers (N=68) to perform individually a simple technical task. The results obtained showed that this debriefing protocol could provide a gain of performance up to 30%. Analysis and explanation were provide

Performance in collaborative activity: contribution of intersubjectivity theory

Collaboration at work is a key component for activities in complex socio-technical systems. Reviewing the scientific literature showed that collaborative work activity has been well characterized, showing that perspective-taking is a crucial feature, but no study quantifies what makes the performance of collaborative activity. Analyzing performance during work activity inevitably refers to Cognitive Task Analysis paradigm (CTA). Based on digital ethnography and Intersubjectivity Theory, the study was undertaken in a nuclear power plant where cooperative activities were analyzed using a CTA process tracing method: whilst performing their activity, workers wore a miniature camera at the eye-level to record their activity from the first-person perspective and were then involved in a reflexive analysis of the activity. Results led to introduce the concept of “coherent perspective-taking” and demonstrated that it was the main variable explaining collaborative performance for cooperative activities. The related theoretical process is discussed and organizational factors favoring coherent perspective-taking are identified