This dissertation seeks to advance our understanding of how marketing principles can be used
to improve the process of new product design. Specifically, it examines the potential of a specific
cognitive process, visual mental imagery, as a tool to help designers maximize the appeal of new
products in the eyes of their customers. A conceptual framework is presented that describes a process
through which visual mental imagery might influence the customer appeal of a design output. This is
followed by two experiments which test the hypotheses that flow from this model. The experiments
manipulate both the type of visual imagery utilized, and the incorporation of the customer in the
imagery invoked (content of the imagery), in order to examine their effects on the usefulness,
originality, and customer appeal of the resulting design.
Consistent with the proposed framework and its hypotheses, visualization of the customer, as
part of the imagery process, proved to enhance design usefulness when this imagery was imagination-based,
but not when it was memory-based. Furthermore, use of imagination-based imagery resulted in
more original designs than pure memory-based imagery. Finally, and most importantly, the use of
customer visualization in combination with imagination-based imagery led to designs that were significantly more appealing to the customer. An analysis of covariance subsequently revealed that this
improvement in customer appeal was mediated both by the perceived usefulness of the design, and by
its degree of originality. The dissertation concludes with the integration of the experimental findings,
and a discussion of the potential of visual imagery as a tool in the new product design process.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9478 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Dahl, Darren W. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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