ALL THAT IS USERS MIGHT NOT BE GOLD

How Labelling Products as User Designed Backfires in the Context of Luxury Fashion

Brands

Some Terms

•User: A user is a consumer or community member who primarily realize a product’s benefit and uses it.

•User Design: Drawing on users

•Advantages of User Designing:

1.Reduces NPD Cash

2.Improve time to market

3.Derive innovative products that are better at meeting consumer needs and wants

You are Threadless, You make the ideas, You pick what we sell, You

are why we exist. Join us, why don’t you?

Does user design labelling strategy benefit all products?

• Source of design can affect the consumer preference at the point of purchase. The large fraction of potential consumers called as the observing consumers decide the market of any product rather than the participating consumers. Do these observing consumers also develop a similarly positive attitude for user design products as prior researches has demonstrated?

Luxury Brands v/s Mainstream Brands

• Luxury Fashion Brand:

Defined as brands that entail the highest level of quality and are thus premium priced

Example : Prada, Burberry

• Mainstream Fashion Brands:

Defined as brands that entail a lower but reasonable level of quality, consequently they are also more affordably prices

Example: Diesel, Lee

Backfire•Being close to users does not help but rather

harm luxury fashion brands, because user design hinders consumers from signalling high status.

Based on prior researches: Mainstream brands benefit from user

design but fully reverse for luxury fashion

STUDY 1

For luxury brands, user design strategy backfires mainly because of the following

two reasons:1. Design quality perceptions

2. Status Signalling

STUDY 2

Mitigation:Luxury brands can mitigate the negative implications of user design if the user in

question have social distance from regular customer

STUDY 3

Mitigation:The negative effect can be mitigated if the

product category is characterized by lower status relevance

STUDY 4

These findings imply that luxury fashion brands can involve there users as long as

signalling high status is not integral to the product category being produced

CONCLUSION