Perceived modernity and product preferences: What matters? Culture or (and) market development

Perceived modernity and product preferences: What matters? Culture or (and) market development

Ye, P.

Schoormans, J. (mentor)
Blijvenens, J. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

PIM

2011-08-30

This research looks into the evaluation of product aesthetics in different cultural contexts and it aims to disentangle the prominent influential factor on products’ aesthetic appraisal. The product meaning: modernity is used to evaluate the relationship between consumers’ perception of product appearance and the aesthetic appraisal. For the culture value: uncertainty avoidance (UA) and market position are introduced to examine the influence on product preferences. Different from other cross-cultural research that often uses socioeconomics as covariate of culture value, the use of market position in this research is argued more specific, especially for product evaluation research. Further, the market position is also argued has more prominent influence on product preferences than culture value. Two studies, a pretest and a main study, are executed. The key reason for conducting the pretest is to select product stimuli that with different level of perceived modernity for the main test. The stimuli are products of IKEA. The main study employs a 2x2x2 between-subject design with two levels of perceived modernity (low modern vs. high modern), two levels of UA (low vs. high), and two levels of market position (low vs. high). Both of the consumer’ market position and value of UA are assessed by measures. The first hand data of culture value and market position gives the research an advantage rather than adopting second data that used in some other cross-cultural research. Chinese and Dutch, who are considered distinctive in their culture value and market position, are invited to participate in this research. The samples (N=158, Chinese=74, Dutch=84) of the main study are local consumers of China and of the Netherlands. For the analysis, the method of linear regression is used to test the hypotheses. The outcome of the research suggests that for designing a preferred product appearance, companies can take the consumers’ market position of a cross-cultural market as a referent in addition to culture value. The knowledge of the influence of market position on the product evaluation provides companies an approach to look for the most appropriate for their products. Looking at market position, especially for retailing companies, can also make distribution strategies. And for designing a new product, the market position of the target group can provides an additional guideline for designers.

product meaning
modernity
aesthetic appraisal
culture
market development

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:52e745af-2b78-40d2-bef7-2cc6b8ea0a8b

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Ye, P.