Assessing the performance of styling activities: An interview study with industry professionals in style-sensitive companies

Published Date

January 2016, Vol.42:33–55, doi:10.1016/j.destud.2015.10.001

Title 

Assessing the performance of styling activities: An interview study with industry professionals in style-sensitive companies

• Author 

• Oscar Person ^,

• Department of Design, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland

• Dirk Snelders
• Jan Schoormans

• Department of Product Innovation Management, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CE, Delft, The Netherlands

Available online 10 November 2015.

Highlights

• •
  Interview study on the performance assessment of styling activities.
• •
  Assessing styling by profitability, visibility and professional acknowledgment.
• •
  How product sales, press coverage and awards function as measures for styling.

In this paper, we study the design activity of styling and its performance assessment within style-sensitive manufacturing companies. Based on interviews with industry professionals at such companies, we analyze how the contribution of styling and expressive products is perceived and assessed. We delineate how these companies stimulate sales and profits, enhance their brand visibility and promote the wider acknowledgment of their capabilities in the market through styling. We also describe how press coverage and design awards function as performance measures for styling activities alongside product sales. In addition, we describe how the perceived contribution of styling activities and its assessment are codependent on how the companies and their designers operate and make decisions on the expressiveness of products.

Keywords

• design performance
• new product development
• styling

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 Table 1

Table 1.

Figure 1.

• ∗ 
  Corresponding author. Oscar Person
  
  

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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X15000824