Persuasive Form How do Ordinary Objects Communicate about Users and Themselves?

Reconciling artistic approaches to industrial design and consumption studies present paper aims to give a proposition to assess the impact of industrial design, product form in the case of ordinary objects from two perspectives: in the context of making choices and its influence on the usage experience. Propositions are given to study relating consumer responses with respect to characteristics of product form: unity and prototypicality; and individual differences: materialism and processing preferences. Underlying research is being executed in an attentive and responsive environment Hungary, in the case of a product category that has become widely available recently, and holds strong practical, but also symbolic and communicative implications: mobile phones. Key findings of a preliminary qualitative study are presented. * Contact address: Budapest University of Economic Sciences, Department of Marketing, H-1093 Budapest, Fővám tér 8., Tel.: (36-1)-2171-853, e-mail: [email protected]