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“Smart home system is like a mother”: The potential and risks of using product metaphors to influence consumers’ comprehension of really new products

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-10-22, 13:18 authored by Peiyao Cheng, Ruth Mugge, Cees De-BontCees De-Bont

Driven by innovative technology, really new products (RNPs) incorporate new functions that provide significant benefits for consumers. But consumers often experience difficulty understanding RNPs, which hinders consumers’ further adoption. To facilitate consumers’ comprehension, the use of product metaphors in RNPs is a promising strategy because it relates a target RNP to a source product/concept familiar to consumers. By using knowledge from the familiar source, consumers could gain better comprehension of the RNP. However, product metaphors can also carry risks that hinder consumers’ comprehension of RNPs, such as consumers’ misidentification of the source and consumer’ inability to use the relevant knowledge to comprehend RNPs. This research investigates the potential and risks of using product metaphors in RNPs through a mixed-methods approach. Specifically, an experiment and in-depth interviews were conducted to examine the effects of product metaphors on consumers’ comprehension. Results revealed that consumers encounter difficulty in detecting the similarities between source concepts/products and target RNPs due to which product metaphors may not necessarily enhance consumers’ comprehension. Accompanying a product metaphor with a textual clue can help consumers to detect the similarities between source concepts/products and target RNPs, leading to enhanced consumers’ comprehension. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.


History

School

  • Design and Creative Arts

Department

  • Design

Published in

International Journal of Design

Volume

13

Issue

3

Pages

1 - 19

Publisher

Chinese Institute of Design

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-10-13

Publication date

2019-12-31

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

1991-3761

eISSN

1994-036X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Cees de Bont Deposit date: 21 October 2019

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