How do consumers express their appreciation of wood surfaces? Norway spruce floors in Germany as an example

Published Date
September 2016, Volume 73, Issue 3, pp 703–712

Title 

How do consumers express their appreciation of wood surfaces? Norway spruce floors in Germany as an example

• Author 

• Andreas Manuel, 
• Rainer Leonhart, 
• Olof Broman, 
• Gero Becker

Original Paper

First Online: 

07 June 2016

DOI: 10.1007/s13595-016-0558-1

Cite this article as: 

Manuel, A., Leonhart, R., Broman, O. et al. Annals of Forest Science (2016) 73: 703. doi:10.1007/s13595-016-0558-1

Abstract

Key Message

A variety of visually different floor samples are presented online to consumers. Based on their individual verbal judgements of appreciation for visual surface characteristics, four distinct groups of floor surfaces were identified. This allows directing design and marketing efforts more precisely towards consumers’ expectations.

Context

For high-end wood products, appearance is a key factor. Traditionally, manufacturers grade wood considering technical parameters and industrial customers’ requirements. In contrast, knowing the consumers’ verbal items would be of advantage for both producers and buyers.

Aims

Three research questions are identified exploring possibilities to utilize consumers’ appreciations. (1) Is it possible to establish a consistent characterization with verbal items? (2) Can appreciation be linked to visual wood properties? (3) Can the great natural variety of wood surfaces be assigned to desirable product groups?

Methods

Out of 57 spruce logs, 810 floor boards were produced and sorted into 15 ‘visual classes’ (VC). Images were retrieved and virtual floors composed from each VC. Consumers evaluated selected floor samples in an online survey using a set of 7 items. Hierarchical cluster analysis and discriminant analysis are applied to analyze the answers.

Results

Only 4 out of the 7 items (‘vividness’, ‘evenness’, ‘contrast’ and ‘stripes’) were sufficient to allocate the VCs to four groups which represent different consumer appreciations. Inverse assessments of different product groups support a more differentiated marketing.

Conclusion

The results indicate that verbal judgements of high-end wood surfaces can hold advantages directing production and marketing efforts more towards consumers’ preferences and thus increasing satisfaction and added value.

Keywords

Consumer preferencesWood surfaceFloor productionTimber qualityPicea abies

Handling Editor: Jean-Michel Leban

Contribution of the co-authors

Andreas Manuel: writing the paper, data acquisition and designing the online questionnaire, running the data analysis and processing digital image data

Rainer Leonhart: supervising the research design (survey studies) and supervising the statistical data analysis

Olof Broman: supervising the online surveys and image processing, revising the manuscript and designing the experiment

Gero Becker: overall concept of the project, supervising the work and revising the manuscript

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