This paper investigates whether including authentic information on the back labels of wine bottles enhances consumers’ confidence and purchase intentions about wine; it also assesses the moderating role of involvement and knowledge about wine. We conducted two experimental studies. Study 1 generated three findings. First, when the back label had authentic information, subjects showed higher confidence levels. Second, this effect was hold for subjects with low levels of involvement. Finally, we did not observe this effect for subjects with high levels of involvement. Study 2 extended study 1’s findings and identified the moderated mediation effect of confidence. The findings highlight the important impact on wine choice of authentic information. However, the findings also suggest that authentic information may not be sufficient to attract people with high levels of involvement and knowledge. This study’s findings provide wine producers with practical marketing insights.
In the past, researchers focusing on environmentally friendly consumption have devoted attention to the intention–action gap, suggesting that consumers have positive attitudes toward an environmentally friendly product even though they are not willing to buy it. In the present study, we borrow insights from the behavioral decision making literature on preference reversal to introduce an opposite phenomenon—that is, consumers buying an environmentally friendly product even though they do not evaluate it highly. We further rely on the research on goals to hypothesize that choice–evaluation discrepancies disappear when consumers pursue an environmentally friendly goal. A two (Mode: Choice vs. Evaluation) by three (Goal: Control vs. Quality vs. Environmentally friendly) between-subjects experimental design was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Our findings obtained from 165 undergraduate students in Korea showed that, first, 76% of the participants chose an environmentally friendly cosmetic product whereas only 49% of the participants ranked it higher than a competing product, and, second, when participants read the sentence “You are now buying one of the two compact foundations in order to minimize the waste of buying new foundations,” the discrepancy disappeared (64% vs. 55%). Our experimental findings advance academic discussions of green consumption and the choice–evaluation discrepancy and have practical implications for eco-friendly marketing.
Another solution is to apply design. While I visited Curitiba in Brazil, I was always attracted by fire extinguishers. This is because they are located inside red-yellow squares painted on the ground.
Interestingly, the same rule applies when fire extinguishers are above the ground. Red-yellow squares are painted on the ground even when fire extinguishers are hung on the wall.
From beverages to consumer electronics, marketers are using color in innovative ways. Despite this, little academic research has investigated the role that color plays in marketing. This paper examines how color affects consumer perceptions through a series of four studies. The authors provide a framework and empirical evidence that draws on research in aesthetics, color psychology, and associative learning to map hues onto brand personality dimensions (Study 1), as well as examine the roles of saturation and value for amplifying brand personality traits (Study 2). The authors also demonstrate how marketers can strategically use color to alter brand personality and purchase intent (Study 3), and how color influences the likability and familiarity of a brand (Study 4). The results underscore the importance of recognizing the impact of color in forming consumer brand perceptions.
When I visited the design department at the University of Sao Paulo, one of the best universities in Brazil, I found a clever and clear, visual information in a classroom. The wide classroom has four lines of bulbs on the ceiling from the front row to the back end. Although there are four bulb buttons on the wall, the way buttons are placed does not align with the way bulbs are on the ceiling. Instead of writing down “the first row, … the last row,” they match buttons and bulbs through color.
A large number of visualization tools have been created to help decision makers understand increasingly rich databases of product, customer, sales force, and other types of marketing information. This article presents a framework for thinking about how visual representations are likely to affect the decision processes or tasks that marketing managers and consumers commonly face, particularly those that involve the analysis or synthesis of substantial amounts of data. From this framework, the authors derive a set of testable propositions that serve as an agenda for further research. Although visual representations are likely to improve marketing manager efficiency, offer new insights, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, they may also bias decisions by focusing attention on a limited set of alternatives, increasing the salience and evaluability of less diagnostic information, and encouraging inaccurate comparisons. Given this, marketing managers are advised to subject insights from visual representations to more formal analysis.
I went on a business trip to Brazil and Argentina with a group of colleagues. We gave lectures, led workshops, joined guided tours, and made new friends along the way.
One thing that stood out to me was the airport in Curitiba, Brazil. At the airport, I noticed a fire extinguisher and two public phones mounted on a gray wall. At first glance, they resembled desktop icons. Upon closer look, I found that a red-and-yellow square box was painted beneath the fire extinguisher, and one phone was positioned lower than the other.
I also observed how Curitiba uses color to promote recycling. Public trash bins were divided into sections, each marked with a distinct color to encourage proper sorting. It became clear that someone in the city thoughtfully used color, shape, height, and arrangement—not as mere decoration but as a tool for communication.
This paper discusses consumer response to product visual form within the context of an integrated conceptual framework. Emphasis is placed on the aesthetic, semantic and symbolic aspects of cognitive response to design. The accompanying affective and behavioural responses are also discussed and the interaction between cognitive and affective response is considered. All aspects of response are presented as the final stage in a process of communication between the design team and the consumer. The role of external visual references is examined and the effects of moderating influences at each stage in the process of communication are discussed. In particular, the personal, situational and cultural factors that moderate response are considered. In concluding the paper, implications for design practice and design research are presented.
According to Wikipedia, doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be composed of random and abstract lines. However, all doodles are not same. Some doodles are hedonic and others are utilitarian.
Hedonic doodles are personal. They are drawings about interpretation of subjective experience, mostly for fun. For instance, I doodled below to remember what I enjoyed while I stayed in Shenzhen, China. I used Mobike, drank HeyTea and wine, took a BYD electronic taxi, visited Macau by ferry, and ate beef, crab, sea food, and noodle each in different places. Its road was wide and its hot water dispenser attracted my attention.
Different from hedonic doodles, utilitarian doodles have practical purposes. They are drawings about objective information, mostly for effective communications with others. For instance, I drew the facet, the shower head, the top bowl, and the shower booth in my bathroom with their sizes and heights when I wanted to replace them with new ones (below).
I like doodling, but I am often intimidated when doodling because of the pressure that I should doodle perfectly. However, I recently learned that if I clarified the purpose of doodling and choose either hedonic or utilitarian, I was not intimidated. Probably, I am not the only one who has a mixed feeling about doodling. Who knows if I keep doodling now and draw a professional graffiti like the one I met in Sao Paulo, Brazil? 🙂
Consumer researchers’ growing interest in consumer experiences has revealed that many consumption activities produce both hedonic and utilitarian outcomes. Thus, there is an increasing need for scales to assess consumer perceptions of both hedonic and utilitarian values. This article describes the development of a scale measuring both values obtained from the pervasive consumption experience of shopping. The authors develop and validate the scale using a multistep process. The results demonstrate that distinct hedonic and utilitarian shopping value dimensions exist and are related to a number of important consumption variables. Implications for further applications of the scale are discussed
We now see a wide variety of floor signage. In Singapore, there is a yellow-painted footstep on the right side of the paved road at the Marina Bay. Since this road is crowded by runners, this signage probably helps them run on the right side of the road.
In Shenzhen, China, there are orange-colored lines at the subway stations. Since many people are in a hurry, these lines help them not to rush forward when the train is coming, and wait for the next train if they cannot get on.
Although floor signage is visually salient, I wonder whether this is needed to change our behavior, because we learn rules naturally. We learn how to avoid bumping into other runners when running on a narrow road and we also learn how to navigate a huge crowd to get on a train. Although I am a strong supporter of behavior economics and nudge, I believe some nudges interfere with learning. Not surprisingly, some people argue that behavioral economics are not always as effective as thought (Why nudges hardly help)(The dark side of nudging). We need to study more about which specific nudges are ineffective and how we can modify these nudges.
About 36 million people live in Tokyo and its neighboring cities. Most restaurants well known to foreigners are heavily crowded. Therefore, when I dine out in Tokyo, I have to wait for a table for a decent amount of time. The fact that many local people are waiting for their tables relieves my concern that I might have chosen a wrong restaurant. Although crowdedness plays a role as social proof when I “choose” a restaurant, I think I may enjoy dish more if I have a breathing room or enough empty space inside when I “experience” a restaurant.
My thought was supported when I had a lunch at a restaurant run by D&Department in Tokyo. D&Department project is a store-style activist proposed by Nagaoka Kenmei, a Japanese designer, in 2000, with a theme of a “long-life design.” It introduces design products for our daily lives such as eating, drinking, publishing and traveling. It aims to spread all over the country the products excavated in local regions. Therefore, the design products introduced by D&Department are the durable items that should be used for a long time and regional items that each specific region of Japan uniquely identifies. Therefore, serving local, authentic dish at a restaurant made sense to me.
Going beyond design items and local dish, this restaurant provided sufficient empty space to each guest, which was rare in Tokyo. This restaurant limited the number of guests entering the space. Therefore, people focused on their own dish inside while a huge crowd of people waited for their tables outside. This space was quiet and well organized and guests were not visually distracted.
Do we like crowdedness or emptiness at restaurants? Marketing scientists have studied this issue. Some argue that crowdedness plays a role as a social proof while others argue that emptiness signals social class. We may like crowdedness when buying mass products or visiting casual restaurants, whereas we pursue emptiness when searching for luxury goods or dining out at Michelin starred restaurants.
This article is about social space and material objects for sale within that space. We draw primarily on Goffman’s (1971) concepts of use space and possession territories to predict that as the social density of a given space increases, inferences of the subjective social class and income of people in that space fall. Eight studies confirm that this is indeed the case, with the result holding even for stick figures, thus controlling for typical visual indicators of social class such as clothing or jewelry. Furthermore, these social class inferences mediate a relationship between social density and product valuation, with individuals assessing both higher prices and a greater willingness to pay for products presented in less crowded contexts. This effect of inferred class on product valuation is explained by status-motivated individuals’ desire to associate with higher-status people. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first to reveal the link between social density, status inferences, and object valuations. As such, it makes a novel contribution to what has come to be known in sociology as the topological turn: a renewed focus on social space.
About 6,700 cheese boards and cutting boards sell on the Amazon.com. Their prices vary between $5 and $370. Majority of them are rectanglular. However, not a few boards interesting shapes. At one of my favorite Canadian stores, West elm, I found a cow-shaped mini cheese board and cutting board. Its price was $22.
I bought this board mainly because it looked interesting to me. However, a board designer cut a significant portion of it to make it look like a cow, it was not useful to cut vegetables and fruits but ok for serving cheese. This is a typical situation that marketing researchers often study: a trade-off relationship between aesthetic appeal and practical utility. Does this trade-off work? Unfortunately, I do not know whether adding design flavor attracts other consumers or helps makers charge more. However, it successfully attracted at least one person who had virtually no interest in boards before. Probably, this funny-looking board will remind me of a Canadian store and bring much to share with my guests.
Background Designers often consider consumer design evaluations. However, whether consumer design evaluations are trustworthy has been rarely discussed. We propose that consumers equate the concept of design with the concept of uniqueness, which suggests that their design valuations are context dependent and unstable.
Methods We test our proposition by conducting one pilot study and three main studies. The pilot study examines which criteria consumers consider when evaluating a design. The three main studies test whether consumer design evaluations depend on the situation and unique products.
Results The results of the pilot study and three main studies demonstrate that subjects evaluated design using aesthetic and functional attributes and their design evaluations were based on the attributes that are not popular in a specific situation.
Conclusions This study contributes to the academic discussion of whether consumer design evaluations are stable. Our findings demonstrate that consumers construct design evaluations on the spot. Therefore, designers who have accumulated professional experience and knowledge, are recommended to follow their own design evaluations rather than the voice of customers.
Yido is a widely-known premium pottery brands in Korea. It was found by Yi, Yoonshin, a ceramic artist. She successfully established herself in the business world not only because her work reinterprets traditional Korean ceramics in refined contemporary design but also because she paid attention to the two marketing lessons.
First, she listens to market. Recently, Yido launches a new collection called Cera/Mano. Differently from other collections which has four pieces of bowls for a family of four, this newly launched collection consists in only one piece designed for single family buyers.
Creative entrepreneurial ventures are characterized by uniquely personal branded offerings with enormous potential for profit, combined with huge market and execution risk. What differentiate creative entrepreneurial ventures from that of technology ventures are their dependency on a few individuals’ intangible breakthrough ideas. The absence of process control and metrics for evaluating cost, risk and required time commitment makes Return On Investment (ROI) impossible to assess.
Consequently, private investments are virtually unattainable. The subsequent extreme financial pressure combined with ineffective processes leads to destructive behaviors. Traditionally, three independent and mutually supportive approaches exist to mitigate risk and increase profit in creative ventures. These are: (1) Education: Providing market and executions knowledge and experiences through schooling, internships and apprenticeships, (2) Funding: Government and/or trade association backed with coaching and financing, and (3) Collaboration: Pooling of resources and creative talent to leverage individual talents and mitigating risk.
We propose using Design Research, Design Thinking and technology venture insights to develop methods and tools for sustainably running creative entrepreneurial ventures. First, we will identify best practices, by qualitative research within the creative fields of design, music, game, movie and art in the cultural settings of Los Angeles, Copenhagen and Seoul. Secondly, we identify knowledge transfer opportunities and conduct brainstorming sessions to synthesize new methods and tools. The outcome will be a creative portfolio management matrix, outlining how to best take ideas from concept to commercialization as a function of market and execution risk for the examined creative disciplines.
