Identifying the influence of design features on vehicle style recognition using contour deletion

Abstract

In the automobile industry, maintaining recognizable brand style is known to be paramount for realizing market competitiveness. To develop and maintain style recognition, understanding how consumers recog- nize car styles and investigating the visual significance of each design feature of a car design are necessary. The objective of this research was to identify the quantitative visual influence of design features on car style recognition, focusing on shapes of design features. To do so, we first decomposed car design into design features, applied contour-deletion methods to each design feature, and tested each pair of each design feature at three contour-deletion levels for conjoint analysis. We conducted the consumer survey in three phases. First was the pretest to test the effect of contour-deletion method. Second was the main survey to estimate the visual significance coefficients through conjoint analysis. Third was verification survey for verifying the coefficients derived from the main survey. All surveys were done through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The visual significance results were all different for brands, but all brands had high visual significance coefficients for the grill. The main finding of this paper is that design features with a high visual significance have a more important impact on consumers’ perception of the brand styles of the car design. Thus, the primary implication of this is that designers and others involved in the formal evaluation of product appearance are able to reason and make judgments concerning brand recognition from designs less subjectively.