Conceptual profiling in practice

The practical considerations involved in conceptual profiling and the associated analysis tools developed by the author and his colleagues at MMR Research Worldwide are described in detail in a suite of recent, peer-reviewed scientific publications (Thomson, et al, 2010 Crocker and Thomson, 2014 Thomson and Crocker, 2014). 

For practical purposes, there are two aspects to conceptual profiling fhat need to be considered separately concept description and quantification of degree of conceptual association. 

1 Concept description - use of words and the issue of counter-intuitiveness 

The object of conceptual profiling is to access, identify and quantify the conceptualisations that we associate with products, branding and packaging, including those less-than-obvious concepts that are held deep within the conceptual architecture of the mind (sometimes below the level of conscious awareness), and also those concepts that might seem somewhat counter-intuitive if we were to stop and think about them too much  

This issue of apparent counter-intuitiveness is important and should be addressed. Consider, for example, that in many cultures milk chocolate is a comfort food. One of the key conceptualisations associated with milk chocolate is trustworthiness (Thomson et al, 2010), in much the same way that an old friend would be trustworthy. Trustworthiness delivers the feeling of being comforted (emotion), which can be rewarding in certain circumstances. In spite of this clear association, it would be inappropriate to provide a research participant with a piece of milk chocolate and ask them to rate it for trustworthiness on a scale of 1-100, because the question would seem to be counter-intuitive However, the problem does not lie with word association but with the form of questioning and the use of classical forms of direct scaling. This issue is revisited in Subsection 5.6.3. 

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