ANÁLISIS DE LA INFLUENCIA DEL FACTOR ESTÉTICO SOBRE LA PREFERENCIA DEL USUARIO EN PRODUCTOS DE CONSUMO

Abstract

Aesthetics becomes an essential factor in consumer goods. Given a set of several products of similar performance, their appearance can make a big difference on the purchase decision. Sometimes, product aesthetics perceived value can exceed these of other significant attributes. Several studies point out the importance of product aesthetics in some industries. This case study investigates the influence of aesthetics on the users’ judgments about functional attributes for a particular product. The objective is to analyze the variation of the importance that users give to functional attributes when an aesthetic factor is added to the global assessment of the product. Two studies using Conjoint Analysis are conducted. The first one describes the product only in terms of functional attributes and the second one adds the product appearance, in order to examine possible differences in the stated importance for each functional level between the two situations. MP3 player devices are used as stimuli. Keywords: User preference analysis, aesthetic factor, Conjoint Analysis, Product Design.