Aesthetics as a differentiating factor

The weight of the IT industry has shifted over the last fifty years from emphasizing organizational number crunching to supporting organizational and personal decision making and productivity to being fully integrated in consumer and entertainment products. The list of successive companies that dominated the IT industry during this time frame � IBM, Microsoft and Apple � tells the story succinctly.�� The accelerated process of consumer-centeredness and commoditization of interactive technologies, partially described already byNorman (1998), increases the importance of aesthetics as a differentiating factor between competing products increases. The digital watch industry served as a classic example of such a process during the 1970’s and 1980’s, as functionality and performance met very high standards of accuracy and reliability. In that industry, much of the differentiation between brands and models is now based on aesthetic creativity or imitations of aesthetic exemplars. Today we are surrounded by similarly high-performance interactive consumer products � such as smart phones and tablet computers. These products are more oriented towards enhancing the user experience, and much of the battle involves attempts to catch the consumer’s eye and heart with appearance and design-based symbolic value. Thus, aesthetic design is gaining acceptance as a differentiating strategy or tactic (Simonson & Schmitt, 1997; Luchs & Swan, 2011; Reimann et al., 2011) in various markets.�

Figure 19.7: The first version of the iPhone, released in 2007 (left) compared to its contemporaries. The iPhone is a good example of how a phone manufacturer uses visual aesthetics as a differentiating factor – in everything from the actual phone to its packaging.

Courtesy of Marco Arment. Copyright: CC-Att-SA-3 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0). No higher resolution available

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Figure 19.8.A: The hugely popular Western Electric Model 2500 (12 button Touch-Tone) telephone, manufactured in 1980.

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Figure 19.8.B: The BeoCom 1000 corded analogue telephone used visual aesthetics to differentiate itself from and compete against popular telephones like the Western Electric Model 2500.

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