Choosing right color is difficult for car buyers. Tesla store in Toronto helps visitors make decisions by allowing them to see and touch a few samples. In the store, two working vehicles stand in the middle and they are surrounded by a wide variety of color samples. Many visitors carefully view them.
Designers don’t just put cosmetics on the skin of a product!” During my interview with a graduate student at Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009, he argued that designers play a key role in developing a new product….
… The primary reason that marketing researchers often limit the role of designers is that they pay far too much attention to the “outcome” of designers’ activities. Many designers who research users, develop and evaluate concepts, and work with business strategists find it difficult to communicate with marketers, since marketers shed little light on the “process” of designers’ activities. …
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In actual practice, designers often set the marketing input aside and start a project by looking at advertisements and websites for their client’s and their competitors’ products. They collect images and stories concerning the uniqueness of each product and make fleeting trips to the products’ point of purchase, taking pictures and playing with the products. If the budget allows, they purchase a sample of products for later disassembly and destruction in the studio. Ideas for new features often stem from the designer’s personal experience — including his cultural and social background — and their project research into nature, art, fashion, architecture, entertainment, and other products. …
… At the end of the day, marketing is often presented with three to five realistic finished rendered concepts from which they have to select one for detailing. Often flash will out compete content, since no objective metrics have been presented, so it is little wonder that design is still seen as art rather than as being business driven.
We often meet a product with a unique form and find it difficult to guess how it works. Examples include a donut-looking tape by 3M, a burger/fries/coke-looking USB key by Burger King, or a chocolate-looking mirror by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate manufacturer. One of my Japanese friends even pointed me a website in which a designer keeps posting his/her design prototypes (Prototype 1000).
I wonder whether consumers like a product more when its form and function are inconsistent than when they are consistent.
Marketers struggle with how best to position innovative products that are incongruent with consumer expectations. Compounding the issue, many incongruent products are the result of innovative changes in product form intended to increase hedonic appeal. Crossing various product categories with various positioning tactics in a single meta-analytic framework, the authors find that positioning plays an important role in how consumers evaluate incongruent form. The results demonstrate that when a product is positioned on functional dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for moderately incongruent form than for congruent form. However, when a product is positioned on experiential dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for congruent form than for moderately incongruent form. Importantly, an increase in perceived hedonic benefits mediates the former, whereas a decrease in perceived utilitarian benefits mediates the latter. The mediation effects are consistent with the view that consumers must first understand a product’s functionality before engaging in hedonic consumption.
