THE BALANCING ACT OF PRODUCT DISCOURSE

In research concerning the new product development process, Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1995) found product superiority as the number one success factor. One vital challenge for companies, however, is to define “what makes a product desirable”.

The objective of this present research is to examine “What is to be designed into the product” to make it highly desirable. It aims to identify key attraction points, varying from a product’s innovativeness, environmental aspects, brand identity, to symbolic or aesthetic value. In this study reasons for “desiring” a product and reasons for “detesting” a product are examined. The study is based on interviews with students, following a higher education in business studies, in the age group 20 to 28 years. The article describes the structures for the interview analysis and gives the results from the first 30 questionnaires.

In the study, “domestic symbols and the self”, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) interviewed families in Chicago about items in their households having special meaning to them. They found 41 categories of objects and 37 reasons why objects were special. The present analysis is built on the structure of the Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) study, but is adapted to different product categories and user groups. Since this 1981 study, new products have emerged, for example electronic nomad products, such as portable phones, computers, videogames and MP3 players that have a high affective value. The interviewees in the present study are also rarely living in their original town and quite often living in a country that isn’t their native one. Finally, this research not only concerns products that are loved, but also products that are hated.

REFERENCES:
Cooper, R.G. and Kleinschmidt E., (1995), Benchmarking the Firm’s Critical Success Factors in new Product Development, Journal of Product Innovation Management, n°12, pp374-391.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981). The Meaning of Things: Domestic Objects and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press