Perceived Value Is No Longer Just Perceived – The Case Of The Beautiful Toaster
With the ever expanding capability to inject an aesthetic vocabulary into designed products, it is no longer a confusion that consumer’s level of “quality” can be a function of beauty for one simple reason. Language takes time to perfect and the flourishes of any language take time and effort – the mark of quality.
Interestingly, this all translates to a function of time and more specifically as detailed in “Consumer-Perceived Creativity and Beauty to Willingness-To-Pay For Design Products” we see the exact quotation of a rather large sample size statistical effort where the exact realization is that “consumers revealed that they were willing to pay about 55% more for a beautiful toaster with Similar results have been obtained with mobile phones” which intuitively we all know. However to see the exact details of how this can be created in exacting details we only need to look towards how “Logitech Quadrupled Its Profits With One Big Design Idea” went from a company at the edge of a cliff to $2 billion a year firm when design became the key aspect of the firms capabilities when the CEO focused on making Logitech’s R&D budget more than $100M or almost 20% of the firm’s total revenue: 7-9% more than the standard 11-13% of firm revenue normally used in very intensive R&D based firms such as Pfizer, Microsoft, Apple etc. and beautifully it paid off exactly as predicted.