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2014, International Journal of Advances in Psychology
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8 pages
1 file
Product aesthetics give people a sense of beauty and impression and encourages them to consume and collect. Companies employ shapes that are both emotionally appealing and compatible with the brand's image of aesthetics in generating favorable consumer responses. Existing research on branding and product design has demonstrated the importance of emotions. Consumers can base their evaluations of a brand extension on their subjective-affective reactions toward products. Many products are designed to attract consumers, and considerable literature exists on product-design methods. However, few studies have offered specific guidance on how to design products with emotional appeal to link brands and to initiate consumer emotions. Using a recognized brand and products as an example, we argue that emotional product design strengthens brand emotion and is appealing to consumers. We explored brand and product emotion by conducting a consumer-emotion survey and determined that (a) emotional-brand products have emotional product design characteristics, particularly the beauty characteristic; (b) emotional product design characteristics influence the brand emotion (repurchase, willingness to recommend, attachment, positive emotion, and passion) of consumers; (c) emotional-brand products have simple shapes, pure colors, and natural textures that exude a sense of design, fashion, and a pleasing appearance of emotional product design. The findings of this study support the future development and growth of emotional product design.
2014
Companies try to employ shapes that are both emotionally appealing and compatible with the brand's image of aesthetics in generating favorable consumer responses. Existing research on branding and product design have demonstrated the importance of emotions. Consumers may base their evaluations of a brand extension on their subjective affective reactions toward the products. In this research, the authors choose products from the emotional branding survey to be the stimulus samples for investigating the product design features. The purpose of this study is to discover the relationship between the brand and the product, and to generate specific guidelines for a product's emotional design characteristics (Attractiveness, Beauty and Creativity) in the future. There were three steps in this study. They are listed as follows: The first step involves the selection of sixteen brands from fifty public brands by the experts to survey brand awareness. The second step was finding the fiv...
Background Today consumers expect more from a product than mere fulfillment of the intended function for which the product is designed. Modern-day consumers demand products that match and satisfy their preferences. Contemporary trends in design show consumer inclination towards objects which motivate them, improve their quality of life and spark emotions. Consequently, along with the functionality requirements, a product needs to serve consumers' emotional needs, and for that, the product must relate with them at their emotional level. The product's visual appearance is responsible for engendering first impressions and initiating a connection at the emotional level before product purchase. Previous research suggests that the emotional element of design could be more crucial in deciding the success of the product than the functional aspect as it affects consumer's decision-making in choosing a product. Therefore, design directed by emotional content is gaining more and more importance in current design practices, research, and education. Thus, designers must possess the necessary knowledge and skills to deal with this design paradigm of product emotions, analyzing the relationship between emotion, consumer behavior, and product design. This paper investigates associations between fundamental product design elements, product judgment attributes, consumer emotional response, and consumer behavior in the context of before product purchase scenario through an integrative review of literature in the domain of product design and emotions. Methods The study is an integrative review of papers from major journals in design, consumer research, management, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and marketing on the topic of Emotional Design from January 2000 to August 2020. 133 relevant articles were shortlisted and analyzed considering the purpose, methods, and main findings of the studies. Results The four major categories that emerged through the analysis of the shortlisted articles were 1. The Terminology used in Emotion Research, 2. Consumer Emotions and their relation with the other factors such as fundamental product design elements, product judgment criteria, consumer behavior, and environmental factors in the 'before product purchase' scenario, 3. Theories of Product Emotion, and 4. Assessment of Emotion. Conclusions A multi-faceted evaluation of articles of the first two categories resulted in proposing a new theoretical framework investigating consumer emotional response before product purchase context. The framework has been described illustrating key terms and associations between them with future directions on Emotional Design. It is expected that design practitioners, cognitive scientists, and ergonomists would find the developed framework helpful while designing products that elicit desired emotional responses.
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In the design process, aspects of form and aesthetics are always thought of carefully, along with technical functionality. If only functionality were the requisite aspect of the design, there would be only one design of each product. People demand variation in product design to satisfy their emotional needs. Moreover, market research has shown that consumers who decide only based on pure facts are extremely small, and mostly they decide with their emotions. As consumers are becoming more and more aware, functionality and usability are more and more taken for granted in products, and consumers are eyeing for the attainment of higher-level needs, i.e., emotional needs. Therefore, the emotional aspect of design has gained significance in design education, practice, and research in the recent past. In this regard, it is essential to understand what emotions are and how design affects consumer emotional responses. This paper explores the fundamental terminologies in emotion research to understand and develop a perspective exploring relationships between design, emotion, and consumer responses. It involves reviewing and critically analyzing seminal studies, theories, and models previously proposed in this domain (viz. Emotional Design, Appraisal Theory, Pleasure Model, Technology as Experience Framework, and Product Personality Assignment). Based on the review insights, we enlist the advantages and limitations of each of the reviewed theories. It is expected that design practitioners, cognitive scientists, and ergonomists would find the insights drawn in the current study helpful while designing products that elicit the intended emotional response.
Gumbad Business Review Vol. 2 Issue 1., 2006
Abstract: Consumers acquire information selectively. Their data set is reduced to their individual personality construct. Then they construct a set of mental categories. It becomes easier to sort competing brands quickly. They allocate competing brands to mental categories. It enables them to give more meaning to the brands. Consumers may interpret brands differently from the marketers. Emotional purchases differ in terms of the extent of emotions involved. Emotional ads are deliberately designed to touch the emotional chords of the consumers and are used to have a favourable affective response rather than to provide information about the product. Marketers use emotional advertisements as stimulant in forming or changing the attitude of consumers. The emotions of the consumers always work as a strong tool and can be used as a strategic initiative for making a successful brand. Keywords: Cognition, Innovation, Loyalty,Personality
2009
What is the relationship between attribute tradeoff decisions at the time of purchase and emotional content of the consumption experience? This article offers a comprehensive overview and an enhanced model of the possible forms of this relationship. It sets forth new insights into negative post-consumption emotions in an integrated manner with prior work on attribute tradeoffs and positive emotions. The primary insights this research provides are as follows: (1) a negative experience with the choice of a product with superior utilitarian and inferior hedonic benefits (e.g., a highly functional cell phone with poor attractiveness) over a product with superior hedonic and inferior utilitarian benefits evokes feelings of sadness, disappointment, and anger, (2) a negative experience with the choice of a product with superior hedonic and inferior utilitarian benefits (e.g., a highly attractive cell phone with poor functionality) over a product with superior utilitarian and inferior hedonic benefits evokes feelings of guilt and anxiety. Further, an enhanced model is presented that integrates the results for four new negative post-consumption emotions with the results from replication of prior work on positive emotions and consumer behavior. Finally, the research shows that positive and negative emotions impact customer loyalty. The article discusses the theoretical contribution and strategic insights the research provides for product designers and marketers.
Along with a growing interest in emotional design and pleasurable products, it is necessary to understand how designers are able to maintain emotional impacts of their design solutions throughout the design process, and how these solutions can find a way to evoke the intended emotional feeling of the users. The present study first examined emotional responses to early design sketches, and how these responses could be used to check if the emotional impacts of their early sketches were observed in a combinative way of cognitive-linguistic and physiological approaches. Based on the findings of the empirical study, we further discussed how the emotional differences of product images would be generated by product forms. We figured out that good form factors of early design sketches might elicit positive feelings and high arousal states, thereby incorporating semantically meaningful features in the product images.
Driving Customer Appeal Through the Use of Emotional Branding
This chapter aims to provide insights into the various facets of building brands with the use of emotions. Today, technology is playing an intrusive but imperative role in our lives and has made it fast paced. This leaves people with little time to decide on the products and services they want to buy. It is tending to a decision based more on learning about the attributes of the product from a utility perspective alone. The part where customers feel about products and services and then pay attention to attributes, irrespective of they being high-involvement or low-involvement products is slowly reducing. Purchase decisions are being taken more by the head than by the heart. The necessity to consider building strong brands as an essential strategy in order to succeed in an ever-growing highly competitive environment has taken significant proportions today. Customer experience management has been adopted as the process for establishing brands using emotions.
Brand Culture and Identity, 2019
In the past decade, emotional branding has been emerged as an extremely influential brand management paradigm and is widely heralded as a key dimension to marketing success. Branding of emotions focuses upon the consumer and not the product at the very forefront; it examines how brands can communicate with consumers in a more rational and humanitarian manner and affect people deeply at the varying degree of the feelings and senses. Due to the steadily growing competition in the international market, brands have become an important component. Therefore, the objective of marketers is to understand the people's emotional desires and increase the consonance of the brand personality for their brands with the self-image of their target customers. The purpose of the chapter is to recognize the potential nature of emotions in creating strong brand attachments between consumers and brands, and promote active participation as it leads to customer loyalty. It also articulates the effects o...
Most people choose one global brand over another because of brand awareness and global brand competition. The current trend and future challenges in the market are that consumers are influenced by product impressions. Pawle and Cooper (2006) observed that marketing research companies have recently begun offering studies on consumer attitudes toward brands. Roberts first proposed brand love in 2004, a topic that has attracted growing interest (Roberts, 2004). Martin (2005) asserted that although design is a small part of brand strategy, it can create a visible differentiation for products and shape customer perceptions. American design expert Norman (2004) stated that affective/emotional factors are the ultimate determiner of the success or failure of product design. Lin and Chang (2004) claimed that the product is the most direct medium connecting designers and consumers, and that product design influences consumers to recognize the designer's creativity. Wang, Chen, Hu, and Ye (2008) proposed that brand is abstract and spiritual, and is the sum of all consumer feelings toward products, reflecting their mood, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Therefore, emotional product design characteristics and brand emotion are crucial. Based on previous studies, we investigated consumer opinions about the interaction between emotional product design and brand emotion and explored the role emotion plays in brand and product design through emotion and subjective evaluation experiments. To explore this issue objectively, we employed a real case to achieve indepth understanding. Mi (2012) proposed that participants thought classical marketing and advertisements were an unimportant strategy to Muji ( 無印良品 Mujirushi Ryohin), in which the design philosophy of Muji is "no-brand." Therefore, we chose Muji and its products to examine the attributes of emotional product design that affect brand emotion, using a questionnaire. Muji is a recognized Japanese corporation that sells a wide array of daily life goods.
Muji's natural and simple design complements modern lifestyles perfectly. Faithful to this philosophy, all Muji products appear on store shelves in simple packaging, bearing only product-related information and a price tag (MUJI holding AG, 2014).
We explored brand and product emotion by analyzing consumer emotion survey responses and feedback provided by targeted consumers regarding Muji's emotional product design and brand emotion. This study was intended to answer three research questions:
1. What are the characteristics of Muji's emotional product design?
2. How do consumers perceive Muji as an emotional brand?
Muji was established in the early 1980's as a global brand. In this competitive market, Muji products have definite advantages for maintaining a long-term brand. We investigated how product emotional design affects brand emotion from the consumer viewpoint to clarify why consumers prefer Muji products.
When product safety and comfort have been satisfied, emphasis can shift toward the decorative, emotional, and symbolic attributes of design (Crilly, Moultrie, & Clarkson, 2004). Do attractive or beauty products use better than others? In his review of experimental studies, Tractinsky (1997) observed extremely strong correlations between perceived interface aesthetics and a priori perceived ease of system use. McLoone et al. (2012) proposed that successful product design meets or exceeds the emotional needs of users beyond utility and quality. Incorporating "feeling" into product design to present the emotional communication of user experiences has become a design trend of the twenty first century. Consequently, "design for feeling" has become a key factor for innovative products (Ko, Lin, & Lin, 2009). Landy and Sigall (1974) claimed that the relationship between product form and perceived functional performance exhibits an interesting parallel in the social psychology of personal appearance. Therefore, an optimal product is a craft that opens a discourse with people through its sensation-evoking image and inspires them. Norman (2004) proposed that what the product offers the user assists the user in understanding the product. Appearance attributes provide the consumer with an overall impression of the product and are more actionable and informative than are physical properties. Designers use appearance attributes in briefings or product-evaluation studies to assess whether consumers actually perceive the meanings the designer intended to convey.
"Qualia" is a Latin adjective that refers to quality and comprises five elements: attractiveness, beauty, creativity, delicacy, and engineering. Mandler (2005) proposed that qualia are features or representations of objects that are not intentional or intentionally determined, and that sensory experiences have certain similar characteristics. The sense of difference lies in quality, which includes attractiveness, beauty, and creativity, in which content renders the product surface. The Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan promotes qualia for small and medium enterprises, integrating both cultural and creative-product characteristics. The plan proposes that enterprises add value to products from qualia to enable the consumer to experience the product value (Lin, D.-G., 2012). Bermond (2008) stated that emotional qualia are the phenomenological representations of the end products of appraisal processes. The characteristics of qualia determined by integrating the product characteristics of Ashby and Johnson (2003) are shown in Figure 1. Attractiveness, beauty, and creativity belong to the emotional condition of the product "psychology"; delicacy and engineering belong to the rational condition of the product "physiology." Therefore, qualia products involve rational conditions for consumer use but do not neglect emotional appeal.
Figure 1
Based on a literature review and the motivation it provided, we explored the product design of emotionoriented products. Roberts (2004) indicated that emotional branding is a consumer-centric, relational, and story-driven approach to forging deep and enduring affective bonds between consumers and brands. Emotional branding involves senses and emotions that form a deep, lasting, intimate, emotional connection to the brand that transcends material satisfaction; thus people enjoy products with matching brand labels more than those with mismatching brand labels (Morrison & Crane, 2007;Rahinel & Redden, 2013). Lynch and De Chernatony (2004) proposed that the development and communication of emotional-brand values might enhance the potential for value creation and be a means of developing a sustainable differential advantage. Wang, Chen, Hu, and Ye (2008) suggested that brand strengthens the consumer relationship and deepens it into a friendship to maintain consumer brand loyalty. Kim, Park, and Jeong (2004) stated that customer loyalty combines customers' favorable attitudes and repurchase behavior. Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen (2010) proposed that brand loyalty and active engagement are outcomes of brand love. Brand love includes passion for the brand, attachment to the brand, positive evaluation of the brand, positive emotions in response to the brand, and declarations of love for the brand. Brand love is a positive brand emotion encompassing brand loyalty that creates functional, symbolic, and experiential value associated with consumer awareness (Park, Jaworski, & Maclnnis, 1986). Carroll and Ahuvia (2006) proposed that the brand love of consumers is an overwhelming emotion attributed to a particular brand, which includes attachment, positive emotion, and passion. We integrated the perspectives of Kim, Park, and Jeong (2004) and Carroll and Ahuvia (2006) to perform attribute assessments of the brandemotion questionnaire and identify consumer feelings toward a brand ( Figure 2). We drew conclusions based on a literature review, which provided the motivation for this study.
Figure 2
We conducted a case study focused on the recognized brand Muji. The product-emotion experiment and the brand form comprised two stages. Stage 1 consisted of a survey on the strength of emotion derived from product form. Stage 2 consisted of a survey on the strength of emotion derived from a brand.
Directly measuring the psychological response in a person's emotional interactions with product form is difficult. Therefore, in Stage 1, an experiment was conducted to determine how participants perceived emotion in product form.
We invited 109 undergraduates with a background in design to participate in this study.
The authors invited 109 undergraduates with a background in design to participate in this study.
The materials consisted of 5 hard copies of images of a wall mounted CD player, a Beechwood clock, an ultrasonic fragrance spray, a taxi watch, and a lightweight folding portable speaker, all of which are popular Muji products (Table 1). Questionnaire The emotional product design characteristics questionnaire was adapted from Lin (2012).
Table 1
Participants were asked to evaluate whether the product images conveyed a feeling. The questions are listed in Table 2.
Table 2
ATTRIBUTE ASSESSMENTS OF THE PRODUCT EMOTIONAL DESIGN
The material is the brand image from Muji.
This product can convey cultural meaning.
This product can impress people.
This product has a fashion sense.
This product looks perfect proportion.
This product has a sense of design.
This product has pleasing appearance.
This product is a creative product.
This product has a story.
This product has a clever use of materials.
(Adapted from Lin, D.-G., 2012)
Semantic scale A 7-point Likert scale was used in the experiment, in which 1 point indicated the sample did not have emotional appeal or did not feel good, 4 indicated the sample was moderate in emotional appeal or felt fairly comfortable, and 7 indicated the sample possessed strong emotional appeal or looked or felt extremely good.
Directly measuring the psychological response of a person's emotional interactions with a brand is difficult. Therefore, in Stage 2, an experiment was conducted to determine how participants perceived emotion in the brand.
The brand-emotion questionnaire was adapted from Kim, Park, and Jeong (2004) and Carroll and Ahuvia (2006). Participants were asked to evaluate whether the brand images conveyed a feeling. The questions are listed in Table 3. This brand is very appealing to me. (Kim, Park and Jeong, 2004;Carroll & Ahuvia, 2006)
Table 3
ATTRIBUTE ASSESSMENTS OF THE BRAND EMOTION
Semantic scale A 7-point Likert scale was used in the experiment, in which 1 point indicated the sample did not have emotional appeal or did not look or feel good, 4 indicated the sample was moderate in its emotional appeal or looked or felt fairly comfortable, and 7 indicated that the sample possessed strong emotional appeal or looked or felt extremely good.
The attribute assessments of the product emotionaldesign characteristics questionnaire are attractiveness (PQ1, 2, 3), beauty (PQ4, 5, 6), and creativity (PQ7,8,9). Each dimension and the overall scale achieved a substantial interrater reliability of .80 (p < .001), and the matrix of factor loadings was greater than .85 (Tables 4, 5, and 6). Each dimension and the overall scale of the brandemotion questionnaire achieved a substantial interrater reliability of .90 (p < .001), and the matrix of factor loadings was greater than .85 (Table 7).
Table 4
Table 7
RELIABILITY OF THE BRAND EMOTION QUESTIONNAIRE
The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed to assess the relationship between each of the network and emotion variables (N = 109 for all tests; Table 8).
Table 8
The regression analysis was computed to explore product design emotional impact on brand evaluation analysis. From the regression analysis, emotional design can be found on the brand products have a significant impact on the emotional nature. Although the R2 is only .113, but the result supported the study which design is a small part of the brand strategy, but it can create a differentiated product and shape the customer's perception of the brand.
(N = 109 for all tests; Table 9).
Table 9
In this study, because of the diverse product categories, we were unable to conduct a single-product comparison, so we overall look of their emotional design specifications. Based on a 7-point scale and the participants' evaluation of how the product samples felt, the average strengths of the emotional product design characteristics of the samples in the questionnaire survey are listed in Table 10. The averages in Table 9 indicate the strength of a product-emotion property. The criteria of total design emotion, attractiveness, beauty, and creativity dominated the evaluation of appreciation of emotional product design. Beauty is greater than the average of creativity and attractiveness, and the participants believed that Muji products possess great beauty characteristics.
Table 10
We examined the effect of emotional product design characteristics. All products with emotional design scores exceeding 4.0 were considered as examples of strong emotional design. The top four emotionaldesign characteristics of a product were "has a sense of design" (with an average score of 4.90), "has a pleasing appearance" (with an average score of 4.89), "has a fashion sense" (with an average score of 4.86), and "looks perfectly proportioned" (with an average score of 4.85; Figure 3).
Figure 3
The average results of the 7-point scale and the subjects' evaluation of feelings regarding the Muji brand are listed in Table 11. The averages in Table 10 and Figure 4 indicate the strength of brand emotion. The criteria of total brand emotion, repurchase, willingness to recommend, attachment, positive emotion, and passion dominated the evaluation of emotion appreciation of a product design. All Muji products with emotional-brand scores exceeding 4.5 were considered examples of strong brand emotion. The top three brand emotion characteristics of Muji products were "will recommend" (with an average score of 5.90), "repurchase" (with an average score of 5.82), and "passion" (with an average score of 5.39).
Table 11
BRAND (MUJI) OF DEGREES OF THE BRAND EMOTION
Figure 4
Analysis of the questionnaire demonstrated a correlation between emotional product design and brand emotion. The data analysis indicated the importance that consumers place on beautiful product design. Consumers hold positive perceptions toward an emotional brand and take action toward the brand by repurchasing it. Kim, Park, and Jeong (2004) confirmed this finding by indicating that customer loyalty combines customers' favorable attitude and repurchase behavior.
According to the analysis of emotional design and brand emotion, our findings are consistent with those of the aforementioned empirical studies. This study contains preliminary research on product emotional design and brand emotion. A major finding is that product emotional design significantly affects brand emotion. The results indicated that the product design of an emotional brand involves the emotional characteristics of attractiveness, beauty, and creativity. These characteristics influence the brand emotion (repurchase, willingness to recommend, attachment, positive emotion, and passion) of consumers. This result is confirmed by Mi (2012), who proposed that products that elicit consistent consumer perceptions enhance consumer loyalty to the brand, determine shopping behaviors, and reveal how the product is perceived regarding brand-driven design (Abbing & Gessel, 2008). The products examined in this study have simple shapes, pure colors, and natural textures, thus exuding a sense of design, fashion, and pleasing appearance of emotional product design. This result confirms the proposal by Hoegg and Alba (2011) that visual design communicates functional performance independent of attractiveness. Consumers infer functional performance based on product form, which was confirmed by Yen, Lin, and Lin (2013), who claimed that minimal style plays a crucial role in recent designs.
This study demonstrated the necessity of product emotional design, which should be stressed in an emotional brand to trigger brand emotion. In addition to recognized brands, future product design of new brands can implement these emotional design characteristics to highlight and enhance brand image and brand emotion. Although the emotional product design of an emotional brand has a high level of performance, it has certain limitations. Cause of story and convey cultural meaning of product emotional design characteristics on recognized emotional brand's products do not have a strong advantage, cultivating positive emotions and attachments in consumers toward the brand is difficult. Thus, further research on how to design new brands effectively is necessary.
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