Contributions of consumer-perceived creativity and beauty to willingness-to-pay for design products

Abstract

Creativity, beauty, and willingness-to-pay 2 Contributions of perceived creativity and beauty to willingness-to-pay for design products. ABSTRACTConsumer perception of creativity in design products equivalent in function was measured using global single-item ratings of creativity. The measure was found to have a high level of agreement between raters and have discriminant validity to another aesthetic construct, that of beauty. In two experiments using designer lamps and wrist watches as stimuli, the present study shows how creativity and beauty both positively influence consumer willingness-to-pay for the designed product, but each explains different parts of the variance. The results show that it is essential to develop separate models of creativity and beauty evaluations in consumer psychology, in that they seem to be distinct factors, explaining different parts of the variance in their consequences on willingness to pay.

An exploration of how creativity, functionality, and aesthetics are related in design

“…They are often employed in design research, such as by Hung and Chen (2012) and Cropley and Kaufman Chairs and lamps are frequently used in design creativity research, of which chairs are used more extensively. For example, Besemer (1998) has employed three chairs to demonstrate the empirical use of Creative Product Semantic Scale, Yu and Nickerson (2011) have used chairs to investigate crowd creativity, Christensen et al (2015) have used lamps to investigate how creativity and beauty affect consumer willingness-to-pay for a product, and Horn and Salvendy (2009) have employed both chairs and lamps to measure consumers' perceptions of product creativity. In comparison, vases are used less frequently in design creativity studies, as they may have a relatively simple functionality in general.…”

“…indicate that creativity involves aesthetic properties but also includes novelty and effectiveness. However, Christensen et al (2015) indicate that aesthetics and creativity are distinct factors in product evaluation, but they both positively affect consumer willingness-to-pay. Acar et al (2017) suggests aesthetics have little influence in creative product evaluation.…”

Can the choice of eco-design principles affect products’ success?

“…The selection of significant variables can be performed with stepwise regressions, which are capable of identifying the factors that actually affect the response variable (success in this case). The literature reports examples of using stepwise regression methods to extract relevant variables in different fields including product design (Christensen, Kristensen & Reber 2015; Zhao & Freiheit 2017; Altavilla & Montagna 2018) and environmental studies (da Cunha Rodovalho, Lima & De Tomi 2016; Zhang, Li & Feng 2018).…”

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

“…A similar prediction would hold if people interpret fluency as a -12 -signal for the usefulness aspect of creativity such that high perceptual fluency might indicate usefulness and therefore lead to higher judgments of creativity. However, given that previous research has shown that beauty and creativity explain different parts of the variance of willingness-to-pay judgments (Christensen et al, 2015), it seems unlikely that creativity judgments will be correlated with beauty judgments and therefore positively related to perceptual fluency.…”

“…Assessing creativity is an important part of assessing design qualities in consumer products (Christensen, Kristensen, & Reber, 2015) and in judging the novelty of an artwork in its temporal and historical context (Bullot & Reber, 2013). Although perceived creativity and beauty are two central and important forms of aesthetic appreciation, they are nevertheless theoretically and empirically distinct constructs.…”