Summary
This presentation was born out of the belief that flavours could be considered differently in product development. As such, it is tasked with exploring unconventional and peripheral paths for established practices; in this case flavour creation. Specifically, it looks at how consumer insight was used to change the context for flavour creation and led to fresh thinking about sensory possibilities for canned coffee in Japan.

Summary
This presentation reviews the first marketing application of the use of coffee mavens, trusted expert coffee consumers willing to share knowledge and the first to pick up new trends. A worldwide online usage and attitudes study on coffee helped define the parameters of quality according to the consumer. A maven's definition of quality is independent of geographic or demographic variables. Able to articulate answers with more richness compared to other coffee drinkers, mavens are a preferred target for the exploration of the ultimate coffee quality.

Summary
This paper briefly reviews the standard practices of benefit measurement and benefit segmentation and, along the way, points out their deficiencies, and then introduces the reader to Maximum Difference Scaling, a method that the authors believe is a much more powerful method for measuring benefit importance – a method that is scale-free and thus very applicable to international segmentation research. The next section describes how Maximum Difference Scaling can be combined with Latent Class Analysis to obtain international benefit segments. The authors then describe an example of how both the traditional and the newer methods were used in a cross-national consumer study of coffee drinkers and we compare the results. The paper concludes with some final thoughts and suggestions for use.