Llanos, Katherine

As competition among brands escalates, marketers seek emerging opportunities to differentiate and position brands and grow a customer base by offering lifestyle brands. Lifestyle branding adds value to consumers by integrating superior functional performance, enabling fuller engagement in lifestyle activities with emotional appeals satisfying psychological desires, such as adventure, excitement, camaraderie, and self-expression. While the importance of both functional performance and emotional brand meaning have been justified in the marketing literature, an advertising maxim claimed successful communication required emphasis on one dominant message to create the most persuasive initial impression. Knowing that initial impressions impact consumer judgments of product design form, this study investigated whether functional or symbolic signals created more persuasive initial impressions when used to create the look of a website homepage for an outdoorsy lifestyle brand. The right look of a homepage creates a mood facilitating persuasion. Consent forms and APA Style complied with ethical research standards.

The outward appearance of a product and product
design form underlies successful innovation. Design
form creates initial impressions impacting buyer
judgments. Prototypical designs provide assurance
and familiarity. High-designs signal superior quality,
exclusiveness, and prestige. Continued high
performance gives authentic designs the real deal
reputation. Results contributed to product design
literature by revealing buyer’s initial impressions of
prototypical, authentic, and high-design forms, the independent
variables. The dependent variables were
functionality, ergonomics, hedonism, self-expression,
authenticity, and information search. Plan of
action included a convince sample of 60 millennials,
personal distribution/ collection, manipulation check,
and questionnaire pretest. Methods included secondary,
survey, and experimental research. Ethical
practice conformed to APA style, and consent forms.
Reliability/validity was heightened by items borrowed
from scholarly journals. Key findings: 1) high-design
scored highest on self-expression, hedonism, and
information search but lowest on ease of use; 2) prototypical
design posed the greatest injury hazard; 3)
Authentic design signaled highest functionality.

Product design, a product’s outward appearance, associates
with successful innovation when the design
triggers buyers to develop positive impressions. The
project assessed impressions of forty respondents
to four distinctive hoverboard designs: 1) a prototypical
design, 2) an ornate design, 3) an atypical design,
and 4) a radical design. The original research
extended extant research into design impressions of
functionality, aesthetics, and symbolism to add an assessment
of ergonomic impressions. The systematic
research method entailed a literature review, qualitative
research, manipulation check, questionnaire
pretest, convenience sample, and Chi-Square method
enabling inferences with 90% confidence. A consent
form and adherence to FAU’s academic integrity
provided an ethical foundation. Results suggest that designers of hoverboards conform to the prototypical
design to increase positive functional impressions,
avoid ornate designs, and consider buyers’ skill level
and self-expression when developing atypical designs
due to respondents’ negative impressions of
safety risks and ability to control a hoverboard.

The development of innovations is a company’s lifeline to a successful future. However, the rate of new product failures is alarming. Companies are faced with important decisions regarding which new products should be launched. The purpose of this study is determine if a stripped down concept formulation generated different reactions from respondents that did a lifestyle embellished visual concept formulation in a concept test for an innovative lifestyle brand. Fifty participants answered questions regarding a set of t-shirts with catchy sayings, designed specifically to fit college lifestyles. The embellished version produced higher scores in how participants thought the new t-shirts reflected who they are and how the t-shirts can fit in situations similar to respondents. Our recommendation to companies is to use an embellished concept test when marketing lifestyle products. Adding more detail to the concept test can help consumers visualize how the new product will fit with their lifestyles.