Designing-in Emotion for Product Maintenance Care

This paper discusses some of the issues related to the product design of maintenance care service for providing the user with emotional satisfaction. When people purchase the environmental home appliances such as the water purifier, air purifier and bidet, that require maintenance care such as changing filters, they concern about not only the product itself, but also the maintenance care service. That is the reason why people are prepared to pay the extra for the regular visiting maintenance care; on rental basis and on after-sales basis. However, product design with maintenance care service needs to be changed according to the saturated market situation and people‟s expectation change. In the face of the increasing competition leading to market saturation, initiating positive emotional responses from the user could provide the vital competitive edge. This paper will describe how emotional product design approaches can enhance and/or replace product maintenance service. The research aims are to establish: The recent market situation of the environmental home appliances with the maintenance care service; What customers‟ emotional issues from products with a maintenance care system; How the emotional product design can enhance the maintenance service. The research method employed for this study is largely based upon a qualitative analysis of the cases presented. And the market and trend research will be largely based on the reliable statistics and trend information from published materials. The expectation and emotional issues of the consumer are based on individual in-depth interviews and the Likert Scale test. In order to investigate emotional issues related with maintenance care service, the information from in-depth interviews and response to the Likert Scale test could be categorized into two points of view: factors that could satisfy the customers and factors that could disappoint the customers. In the South Korean environmental home appliance market, one rental system company has the biggest market share. With a rental system, the agent can visit their customers once every 2-3 months and provide the customer with an „emotional satisfaction‟ through face-to-face maintenance service. However, the market growth of products with this marketing strategy is slow. The main reason for this is the personality and conscientiousness of an agent cannot be consistent over a period of time. This research will be concluded with some emotional product design approaches to enhance the maintenance service: 1. how to provide the customers with emotional satisfaction; 2. Factors to consider in product design with maintenance care system. These findings and suggestions can be converged toward the issues on how emotional product design can enhance the product maintenance service. Moreover, this study revealed the different viewpoints, with an attempt to solve the maintenance care problems not simply with upgrading the visiting care, but through designing-in emotion for the product itself combined with