| Product design and brand equity have been hailed as key strategic weapons that companies can use to gain a competitive advantage. However, while acknowledged as important to marketplace success, consumer researches have not examined the value of design relative to equity in generating favorable consumer response. This dissertation addresses this issue by examining how product design and brand equity interact to influence consumer evaluations of manufacturers' products and brand names.;The study postulated that product design can enhance or diminish consumers' product and brand evaluations depending on the congruence between a product's design and consumers' expectations (i.e., cognitive representations) of the brand name attached to the product. An alternative to the main hypothesis was that consumers would engage in subtyping, resulting in no change in their brand evaluations despite design and brand name inconsistencies.;Two experiments tested this study's hypotheses. Experiment One examined the influence of design and equity on consumers' product evaluations (liking, quality, and price) and brand evaluations (liking and cognitive structures) using experimental booklets. Experiment Two further investigated the impact of product aesthetics and brand equity (two "first impression" cues) on participants' product and brand evaluations using a response latency test. In both experiments, participants evaluated eight different products.;With regard to product evaluations, results showed product design to positively impact consumers' liking, quality, and price judgments. Brand equity, on the other hand, exhibited no significant impact on product liking, but did influence judgments of quality and price when there was a conflict between a product's design cues, or there was conflict between aesthetics and brand equity. In these situations, brand equity was used to resolve the conflict and guide evaluations.;With regard to brand evaluations, results showed design to have no impact on consumers' overall liking for strong or weak brands. Together, with the product evaluation results, this finding suggests that inconsistent instances were subtyped.;While having no impact on participants' global brand evaluations, there was evidence that design did impact consumers' cognitive structures for strong and weak brands. These results imply that over time, or with repeated exposures, design may impact consumers' global brand judgments. |
