Aesthetics and brands

: crosscultural evaluation of furniture design

Abstract

Do aesthetics relate with brands? In this work, we try to find out if brands interfere with aesthetics, and we use experimental aesthetics in trying to develop a new brand. The brand will apply to the furniture of Álvaro Siza, a famous Portuguese architect, and our concern was consumer’s assessment of it. We confront his design with the one of other relevant authors, and analyse how consumer’s judgement varies in face of some basic factors. Our approach is market oriented, explores cultural differences, uses WMDS - Weighted Multidimensional Scaling, and we believe it brought us a preliminary, but fundamental understanding of consumers’ opinion, as well as some evidence about such a relationship.

Date of Award	Jun 2002
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Paulo Lencastre (Supervisor) & Pedro Duarte Silva (Co-Supervisor)