What is Product Design? And Why is it Important?

Many products in the market are different in designs but are the same product. For instance, desktops and laptops are both personal computers. But in the past years, it is noticed that the desktop’s market share has dropped while that of laptops has jumped – thanks to product design.

Product design is vital to a brand or organization as it tells the difference between a brand to another. You can tell a specific brand of jeans or shirt through their designs.

Designing the product is also a great way to arrange the benefits and features to attract more customers. The design alone can offer significant benefits to consumers. In the past, people used a boombox to play music wherever they wanted.

Then comes a lighter portable cassette tape player with headphones that lets you listen to your favorite music without disturbing people around you.

These changes are a type of product design that involves different technology. Few more years have passed, portable cassette players have been overtaken by portable mp3 players that are more compact and play digital music without using cassette tapes or compact disks. Later on, smartphones took away the market share from these portable players.

Why is product design important?

There are some reasons why product design is crucial for a brand from a marketing perspective.

• Having a better product design than your competitors will put you at the top of the game.
• Product design attracts more customers, especially in technology products, such as smartphones and laptops.
• Product designs are also important in heavy machines as they can separate the chaos from efficiency.
• The design comes in a different form. Better product design’s acceptability over time means the organization will build better brands.
• Packaging also has an essential role in product design as it can affect the product, making it the company’s last sales point. A good product design with amazing packaging can make a great difference.

It affects consumer behaviour

Product design can drastically influence consumer behaviour. Designer brands and other luxury items are all created based on product designs.

These luxury brands and items offer unique product features. With that in mind, these brands that heavily invest in product designs and include customers in the process are guaranteed to get a better return on investment and stay on top of the competition.

Product design process

Product design has three base process:

• Observation/analysis: Observing your customers will give you a good understanding of their behaviour and let you know the factors that keep them from buying a product. Many marketers might overlook this part because they think it is not the customer’s job, or customers don’t know what they want.
• Idea/concept: During this step, the designers will create different prototypes based on concepts. These concepts are ideas to be compared to each other to see which is better among them. This step needs pure creativity, which the research and development department do all the time.
• Implementation: Once the designers have decided on the best concept, they will create a prototype product. The product will be tested through a pilot launch to see the consumers’ response. If the pilot launch is successful, the product is ready for mass production.

Design plays an important role in any product. Without it, every brand will be producing the same products without offering something special to consumers. With that being said, each brand or organization should be very careful when choosing the best design. After all, it can make or break their products’ and their business’ success.