生活者視点によるわが国家電メーカーの新たな展開

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to discuss for Japanese household electric appliance makers' new measure, under severe situation, which is trying to development products meeting “Seikatsu-sha”, one aspect of usability or “ease to use” of products.
The domestic production of household electric appliance (comprised of “white goods” and “AV”, audio-visual equipment) declined gradually from about 7.2 trillion-yen in 1991, the peak, to about 4 trillion-yen in 1998. And as for exports and imports, decrease in export values and a little increase in imports values were generally remarkable in 1990's. Globalization of the Japanese household electric appliance industry is progressing steadily, but the overseas production of Japanese household electric appliance makers is not increasing so much.
In particular, for the domestic production in Japan, the household electric appliances makers have hosts of problems and are suffering from these such phenomenon, various changes of management environment, the maturing of goods and saturation of the market, a decline in demand, and the absences of any hit goods and so on.
Therefore, Japanese household electric appliance makers have been struggling with the restructuring of domestic business management and coping with the development of product strategies. For one aspect of this is the makers are trying to develop products meeting to “Seikatsu-sha”, people who have high consciousness of their life (including consumers, customers, users, and so on), by coping with the change of life-style and needs of “Seikatsu-sha”, and that of the structure of economical society.
And at the same time the household electric appliances demonstrate the pursuit of work efficiency and convenience, “ease to use” items with goods operability or “barrier free design” or “universal design”, what is called “Hitoni-Yasashii-Monozukuri”, are highly valued, and such a product development is carried out in the makers.