Drivers of Consumers’ Emotional Engagement with Everyday Products: An Intensive Review of the Literature and an Attempt to Conceptualize the Consumer-Product Interactions Within the Emotional Design Process

Abstract

This research intensively reviews the literature on designing emotional-driven products and aims to identify the drivers of the consumers’ emotional engagement with everyday products. The research also aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the basic model of product emotions and the classical process control, by which the identified emotional drivers in consumer products, the basic concerns of consumers, the context of the consumer-product interactions, and the design approach(s) would be interrelated and modeled. Furthermore, this research will study the psychological and theoretical perspectives on the human phenomenon of emotion to understand what does an emotion means, and why and how a human experiences emotion when interacts with stimulus (e.g. product), and how important and rewarding to design for emotions. The research has identified four basic concerns of every consumers; personal, cultural, social, and organizational (societal), and it suggests four emotional drivers; seeing-drivers, feeling-drivers, using-drivers, and touching-drivers. Moreover, as a result of the consumer-product interactions, two more emotional drivers are developing overtime to represent conclusive factors in consumer’s decision making process; product and brand experiences. These two emotional drivers also play the role as becoming new consumer’s concerns (emotional references) each time the consumer decide to buy a product