A matter of perspective: Design newness and its performance effects

Katrin Talke, Sebastian Mueller*, Jaap E. Wieringa

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)
94 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Several studies suggest that products with a distinctive exterior design outperform products without differentiating aesthetics. So far, a product's design newness has been assessed by a comparison to the design of competing products. Drawing on categorization theory, we argue that two additional perspectives are important: design newness with respect to the product's brand portfolio and that with respect to the product's predecessor. Results of an empirical study in the domain of cars confirm that all three perspectives of design newness have different and significant sales effects. Consumers' tolerance for newness is found to be most conservative within the predecessor perspective, followed by moderate levels of newness in the brand portfolio perspective and high levels in the competitor perspective. To maximize performance, manufacturers should therefore develop designs that have high novelty compared to the competitive set and are moderately novel compared to the brand's product portfolio and to the preceding model generation. A second empirical application in the context of smart phones confirms these findings. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)399-413
Number of pages15
JournalInternational Journal of Research in Marketing
Volume34
Issue number2
Early online date6-Jan-2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun-2017

Keywords

  • Design newness
  • Product design
  • Design management
  • Car sales
  • PRODUCT DESIGN
  • BRAND CATEGORIZATION
  • MULTIPLE-REGRESSION
  • DOMINANCE ANALYSIS
  • CONSUMER RESPONSE
  • SALES PROMOTIONS
  • SOCIAL COGNITION
  • PREDICTORS
  • PRICE
  • EXTENSION

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