| Product design and aesthetics are important business concerns that remain largely ignored in academic research. This thesis combines recent research in marketing, psychology and the visual arts to study product aesthetics (shape, color, texture etc.) within a consumer behavior context. Extending the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), the proposed dual-process theoretical framework explains how product aesthetics affect the evaluation of products and the processes leading to attitude formation and purchase intention. The framework proposes that consumers can either process the aesthetic properties of a product as central arguments (high in cognitive demand and elaboration) or as peripheral cues (low in cognitive demand and elaboration). The selection of central or peripheral route processing largely depends on situational conditions and on consumers' individual differences. This research identifies several relevant moderating differences: self-monitoring, need for cognition, style of processing (visual and verbal processing), aesthetic sensitivity, and gender. It is shown in two experiments that these individual traits moderate consumers' aesthetic evaluations, attitude changes, purchase intentions and price expectations. For instance, when compared to low-self-monitors, subjects high in self-monitoring are shown to be more sensitive to product aesthetics as indicated by their product evaluations, attitudes, or purchases intentions. Likewise, subjects low in self-monitoring are shown to evidence greater attentiveness to the functional attributes of the products. Similar moderating relationships are demonstrated for the other personality traits. Using two different measures of aesthetic evaluation, this research further establishes that aesthetic evaluation mediates the impact of product aesthetics on product attitudes in both experiments. Likewise, as part of a proposed dual mediation model, it is argued that the mediating role of aesthetic evaluation can also influence product beliefs, which in turn affect product attitude's cognitive component. In addition, this dissertation shows that consumers use product aesthetics to make inferences about product functional attributes. Finally, a discussion of the findings, their limitations, and implications for future research are presented. |
