The present study aimed to identify the main aspects involved in consumers' perception of four types of antiperspirants/deodorants (APDs); cream, aerosol, roll‐on and stick; and compared the findings by using projective techniques; word association (WA) and product personality profiling (PPP) tasks. To apply the PPP task, participants had to imagine that each type of APDs was a person and describe it by gender, age, marital status, children, physical complexion, personality, work/profession/occupation, transport used, physical activity performed, and diet type. The different terms obtained were grouped into 16 categories in the WA task and in 36 subcategories in the PPP task. Both techniques provided data on different and complementary aspects of the products studied. While WA provided information on the characteristics of the different forms of APDs, the PPP gave information about the image that consumers have of each product. Both techniques could be used independently or in a complementary way.
Practical applications
This work provides information about consumers' perceptions of different types of antiperspirants/deodorants. It is shown that each applied task provides information which can be used for different purposes. The word association task provided information which could be applied in the optimization and/or development of one of these cosmetic forms, while the product personality profiling task gave information that could be used in marketing, either to reaffirm it, to revert it or to introduce a new product into the market.