Introduction
The design of products on today's markets often become increasingly complex since they contain more functions and they have to meet more demands on e.g. user-friendliness, manufacturability and ecological consideration. Shortened product life cycles are likely to increase development costs. This contributes to making errors in estimations of market trends very expensive. Companies therefore perform benchmarking studies that compare competitors on strategic-, process-, marketing- and product level. Also, they need a reliable instrument, which can predict the product’s reception on the market before the development cost gets too critical. However, success in a certain market segment does not only require knowledge about the competitors and their products' performance, but also about the impressions the products make on the customer. The latter requirement becomes much more important the more mature the products and the companies are. This means that the customer purchases a product based on more subjective terms such as manufacturer image, brand image, reputation, design, impression etc., although the products seem to be equal. A large number of manufacturers have started development activities to consider such subjective properties so that the product expresses the company image. This demand triggers the introduction of a new research field dealing with the collection of customers' hidden subjective needs and their translation into concrete products. Research is done foremost in Asia, namely Japan and Korea. In Europe a network has been forged under the 6th EU framework. This network refers to the new research field as “emotional design” or “affective engineering”.
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