Product pleasure enhancement: Cultural elements make significant difference

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the following arguments: 1) Products embedded with cultural elements have a greater chance to evoke a consumer's pleasure response than ones without; 2) A consumer perceiving the meaning of a cultural product in advance has a greater chance to evoke his/her pleasure than the one without perceiving; 3) Electromyography (EMG) is able to objectively assess consumers' pleasure evoked by a product. In this paper, EMG signal activity was collected as women (n=60) were exposed to three different stimuli. The results revealed that a product with cultural elements, (e.g. pictographic patterns) has a greater chance to evoke participants' pleasure than the one without. It also demonstrated that a consumer, perceiving a product's cultural meaning ahead of time have a stronger pleasure response than those without perceiving the meaning advance. The result shows that pleasant products are able to elicit greater activity over zygomaticus major. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.