At the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, I stopped by a souvenir shop featuring local designers. One product package caught my eye: a candle sealed inside a sardine can. It was one of the most unexpected and playful mismatches between form and function I have seen.
Designs like this stand out. But are they effective? Research suggests that consumer responses to such mismatches depend on the type of product. For functional products, incongruent designs can enhance preference. For experiential products, however, congruent designs are better. In other words, mismatch works best when the product is seen as utilitarian.
Yet this sardine-can candle, clearly a hedonic product, seems to challenge the logic. Despite its experiential nature, the mismatch in form adds charm.
The real question is whether the surprise created by the product package fade after the first glance or continues through the purchase experience. This souvenir suggests it endures. I bought two candles partly to appreciate the creativity the designers put into it. The unexpected packaging not only captures attention but also transforms the ordinary into something curiously extraordinary.
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.
At Heavenly ski resort and Kirkwood ski resort, a full set of colorful condiments stood quietly near the dining area. They include ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, ranch, barbecue sauce, and even Bull’s Eye sauce. All were arranged in a neat row of colorful pumps, like Lego.
I noticed that every container, no matter the flavor, was marked with the same brand, Heinz. I always thought Heinz was only about ketchup, its hero product. But here, it offered more than that.
Usually, consumers determine the success of brand extension. But in this case, the producer takes the lead. By offering a well-designed and complete set, Heinz makes it easy for lodge managers to decide. Once the managers accept the set, skiers follow. They cannot select a different kind of mustard like Dijon, or switch to another brand. Brand extension may not be shaped only by end users like us, but rather co-created by those in the middle who make the decisions behind the scenes.
The same rule applies to the student cafe in Stanford. There is a set of container of mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard with Heinz and then there are a few Tabasco pumps.
Two studies were conducted to obtain insights on how consumers form attitudes toward brand extensions, (i.e., use of an established brand name to enter a new product category). In one study, reactions to 20 brand extension concepts involving six well-known brand names were examined. Attitude toward the extension was higher when (1) there was both a perception of “fit” between the two product classes along one of three dimensions and a perception of high quality for the original brand or (2) the extension was not regarded as too easy to make. A second study examined the effectiveness of different positioning strategies for extensions. The experimental findings show that potentially negative associations can be neutralized more effectively by elaborating on the attributes of the brand extension than by reminding consumers of the positive associations with the original brand.
At the recent O’Malley School of Business (OMSB) Seminar at Manhattan University, I shared our research on minimalist design. This collaborative work with Yooncheol Shin, then a graduate student at the Techno Design Graduate School at Kookmin University and now a UX researcher at the Customer Experience Center at Woori Bank, explores when simplicity enhances consumer preference, and when it backfires.
We conducted one lab experiment and one field experiment to test a key idea: not all design elements contribute equally to how consumers form their preferences.
We found that removing LESS diagnostic design elements (e.g., buttons for play, forward, or backward songs) from an MP3 player increased participants’ preference. However, removing HIGHLY diagnostic design elements (e.g., buttons for equalizer, foreign song translation, or T-base) did not produce the same effect.
Our findings challenge the widely accepted “less is more” mantra. By connecting design practice and marketing theory, we offer practical insights for UX designers and brand managers who want to simplify without losing impact.
Advertising needs to capture consumers’ attention in likable ways, and the visual complexity of advertising plays a central role in this regard. Yet ideas about visual complexity effects conflict, and objective measures of complexity are rare. The authors distinguish two types of visual complexity, differentiate them from the difficulty of comprehending advertising, and propose objective measures for each. Advertisements are visually complex when they contain dense perceptual features (“feature complexity”) and/or when they have an elaborate creative design (“design complexity”). An analysis of 249 advertisements that were tested with eye-tracking shows that, as the authors hypothesize, feature complexity hurts attention to the brand and attitude toward the ad, whereas design complexity helps attention to both the pictorial and the advertisement as a whole, its comprehensibility, and attitude toward the ad. This is important because design complexity is under direct control of the advertiser. The proposed measures can be readily adopted to assess the visual complexity of advertising, and the findings can be used to improve the stopping power of advertisements.
Many people are now buying water in bottles rather than drink straight from the tap because bottled water has been perceived to be safer and of higher quality than tap water, and it was viewed as a healthful alternative beverage to soft drinks or alcohol. Although purity marketing successfully increases sales of bottled water, it failed to address that plastic water bottles waste our environment.
One company takes a bold and interesting step forward. Water is in paper boxes and its brand name is “Boxed Water Is Better.” The package says boxes are better than plastic bottles for several reasons.
76% of our box is composed of a renewable resource.
Our boxes are made of trees from well-managed, FSC certified forests.
We efficiently ship our boxes flat to our filler to lower our carbon foot print.
Our boxes are recyclable at participating facilities.
