Assess the market share potential for the new product. To put it more simply, it stereotypes user groups based on these variables and learns the preferences of particular groups' eating habits. Of course this is not done because of prejudicial motivation, but simply because consumer preferences tend to be very grouped based on such factors listed above. This type of testing is a very accurate tool in understanding consumer preferences. There are two types of affective tests, quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative testing tends to be more popular for a number of different reasons.
Quantitative testing allows the researcher to gain much more data and information in a much shorter amount of time than qualitative testing allows. It is also far less expensive to test quantitatively. But most important is the fact that this style of testing allows the researcher to ask the very specific questions, and in most cases only allow the consumer choose their response from a given list of answers. This is much more accurate than wading through written responses from quantitative tests and relying the researchers own judgment as to what the consumer really meant in their answer. A well written quantitative test can produce deadly accurate data with little or no variables to allow the results to be tainted.