Customer Engagement and User Design

摘要

This study would like to address two research qurstions. First, would customers' attitude be influenced by the way how customers participate in the product design process? Would it be better for users to involve in the design of functional aspect of the product or the aesthetics? These two aspects are fundamental to almost every product while utilitarian products tend to emphasize more on functional attributes and hedonic products highlight more on aesthetic values. As such, it is unclear how a user's involvement in aesthetic or functional design will affect the customer's evaluation on a utilitarian or hedonic product. Second, it also remains unclear regarding how consumers react to the marketing communications embedded with user-design messages. Would customers favor a congruent message in terms of the match between perceived product type and user-design focus or an incongruent message?