PRODUCT WITH BIONIC FEATURES FOR CONVEYING CONSUMER PLEASURE USING KITCHEN APPLIANCES AS AN EXAMPLE

Abstract

In the development of an emotional kitchen appliance, bionic features, the feature mimicking from the nature, are often used as a catalyst to enhance pleasurable value of a product in current consumer markets. The aim of this paper is to investigate consumer's perceptions of pleasure evoked by kitchen appliances with different abstractive levels of bionic features. A literature review and an experiment were conducted to examine the effect of consumer's perception of pleasure. For the experiment, two main variables are manipulated: life-like features and line elements. The findings demonstrated that participants have a greater pleasurable response towards kitchen appliances with least abstractive features than those with more, because the product form composed with more details features can describe semantic stronger than those without. Moreover, it was found that product forms that mimic human features, particularly using eyes and mouth as part of a product's feature, may have a greater effect on consumers' feelings of pleasure than those without. The result also found that female participants were more willing to give higher scores to products that were enhanced with bionic features than male participants were, specifically in terms of personal gratification factor.