Cathy Barnes
Affective Engineering Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Tom Childs
Affective Engineering Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Brian Henson
Affective Engineering Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Stephen Lillford
Affective Engineering Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
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Published in: 10th QMOD Conference. Quality Management and Organiqatinal Development. Our Dreams of Excellence; 18-20 June; 2007 in Helsingborg; Sweden
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 26:68, p.
Published: 2008-02-15
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
Engineering appealing products has always been the goal of consumer goods companies where competitive markets and crowded supermarket shelves has lead to greater consumer power. Brands are very powerful in this arena and influence both packaging attributes and consumer perceptions. Packaging must now communicate; attract and intrigue the consumer to positively influence the purchase decision.
We have developed a packaging design toolkit based upon Kansei Engineering (Nagamachi; 02) to translate consumer perceptions into design attributes. However the original Kansei Engineering offered little support for the consideration of brand requirements. Thus; we have developed new methods using additional contributions from research in the fields of Psychology and Marketing to extend the scope of the toolkit to include consideration of the brand. We have also supplemented the technique with linguistic expertise to improve the selection process for the adjectives used in the consumer survey which has improved the robustness and repeatability of the results.
This paper presents an overview of the toolkit using illustrative case studies to describe the application of the toolkit to “live” projects. The case studies demonstrate how this Kansei Engineering variant has real value within the packaging development process to inform concept selection decisions based upon actual consumer insights.
