Psychological Considerations on Car Designs : An Investigation of Behavioral and Perceptual Aspects Using Eye Tracking and Cross-Cultural Studies

Product design is a key driver for market and sales success, a fact which can be straightforwardly observed when reviewing today's most successful consumer goods - be it goods from the rapidly developing electronics branch, more traditional industries like automobiles or goods from furniture industry, which are often considered as timeless. It may seem almost surprising that only in recent years has marketing research pursued greater efforts to investigate the role of product design. However, first publications in this area suggest the development of an exciting and important field of research.
The current work contains several articles that contribute in various ways to the knowledge base on consumers' perception of product design and related scientific areas. Literature on the perception of anthropomorphic, human-like product designs such as car fronts served as a starting point for the research.
A first endeavor was to show that affect-laden anthropomorphic product designs are not only perceived subjectively as human-like and evoke affective responses in consumers like the perception of emotional human faces, but can also lead to implicit behavioral reactions in the viewer. Those observed responses can be explained from the perspective of evolutionary theories, and results provide a valuable insight for product managers and designers in their quest to find appealing and outstanding product designs. The investigation was conducted relying on eye tracking experiments with anthropomorphic car fronts. While Article I provides a methodological extension of existing eye tracking analysis techniques, Article II focusses on the outlined perceptual topic.
Contemporary research on product design nowadays concentrates mainly on customers from Western cultural backgrounds, but in an era of globalized markets, this focus is probably too narrow. Article III addresses culture-specific differences concerning the perception of affective anthropomorphic car front designs, comparing participant samples from China, Germany and the United States. Finally, Article IV focuses on the general perception of globally manufactured, branded products and highlights the importance of participants' subjective brand awareness perceptions that even likely outweigh the highly variable importance of country of origin information when it comes to the prediction of the consumers' willingness to purchase.