Current Business Research Study

Current Business Research Study

RES 341

Research Purpose

The American Marketing Association conducted research on consumers liking of a product due to its product design. The research study determined whether the anthropomorphizing of product increases its sales. Companies attempt to use emotionally appealing shapes when designing product. This study focuses on the way consumers decode human facial expressions from the shapes of the product. The study examines the liking of a product design in the market of cars.

Business Marketing

The implications of this study on marketing managers are important. Marketing managers must consider what image they want the product to imply. Marketing managers can transform the product’s attributes into design features geared towards a specific image. Consumers judge a product’s meaning of expression in the same way they do a human face, which points to the notion that anthropomorphic design may tap deeply anchored perceptual principles of human face perception (Windhager et al. 2010). Typically, friendliness in a human face is judged by the mouth and eyes so when designing cars, marketing managers should pay close attention to he grille and headlights.

Data Collection

The data was collected using surveys and questionnaires. Participants were presented a set of car “faces” with emotional expressions and asked to indicate perceived aggressiveness and friendliness in regards to the grille shape. To ensure that the effects obtained are due to mouth shape and eye shape and not to some other inherent aspect of the stimulus material, multiple operationalizations (16) of each of the four (mouth shape by eye shape) experimental cells were employed. An additional fifth cell contained the corresponding 16 neutral facial expressions as a control condition. A market research company assembled a sample of 263 participants to test the mediating mechanism between headlight and grille shape on the one hand and liking on...