Taste it, you’ll like it: Assaying the impact of in-store product sampling

Noted: In “An Assessment of When, Where and Under What Conditions In-Store Sampling is Most Effective,” the three authors – Sandeep R. Chandakula of Singapore Management University, Jeffrey P. Dotson of Brigham Young University, and Qing Liu of University of Wisconsin-Madison – find that sampling has both an immediate, if short-term, effect and a sustained impact on sales, but that the impact varies according to the size of the store conducting the event. They also found that repeated sampling for a single product produces increased returns and that sampling tends to expand a category rather than purely substitute for another product.