Building a 4E interview-grounded theory model: A case study of demand factors for customized furniture

Abstract

With the lifestyle change, users’ demand for furniture has shown a trend for personalization and diversification. The customized furniture market is growing rapidly and gradually becoming an indispensable choice for lifestyle items. The present qualitative study sought to identify the influencing factors and relationships of user demand for customized furniture. This study constructed a 4E semi-structured interview guide, which means that interviews were conducted from 4 dimensions: essential information, information extraction, user experience, and product expectation. The interview results were coded and analyzed in combination with grounded theory. Based on the identified 38 concepts and 10 categories, we obtain 4 main categories: fundamental condition, operation behaviour, sensory value and emotional value. For the factors that affect the demand of customized furniture users, customized furniture enterprises can start from 2 levels of publicity and product design to meet user demand and improve the user purchase probability.