- Aesthetic
- Symbolic
- Functional
- Ergonomic
Influencing Consumers’ Perception of your Big-Ticket Item: How your product can visually communicate quality
When people shop for equipment like washing machines, refrigerators, lawn mowers, and other major purchases, quality is one of their main priorities. Who wants to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on something that is going to stop working in a couple of years?
Manufacturers of these big-ticket items do everything they can to convey the quality of their products. From structural design to packaging and showcasing, experts do everything possible to convey durability, reliability, and, of course, quality to the consumer.
This is important because the manufacturer can’t be at the store to physically talk to the consumer about the product. In fact, often times a sales person can’t be there, either. The image of quality falls mostly on the appearance and presentation of your product on the sales floor.
While much of a product’s appearance relies on design choices made before the product is built, there are also ways to communicate quality once the product is on display.
How the Product Communicates with the Consumer
According to a number of studies (including, “How Consumers Perceive Product Appearance:
The Identification of Three Product Appearance Attributes” by Janneke Blijlevens, Marielle E. H. Creusen, and Jan P. L. Schoormans in International Journal of Design), four types of information are communicated through appearance: