“Smart home system is like a mother”: The potential and risks of using product metaphors to influence consumers’ comprehension of really new products
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 DesignVolume
13Issue
3Pages
1 - 19Publisher
Chinese Institute of DesignVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher 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
2019-10-13Publication date
2019-12-31Copyright date
2019ISSN
1991-3761eISSN
1994-036XPublisher version
Language
- en