Balancing Design Freedom and Brand Recognition in the Evolution of Automotive Brand Styling

Designers faced with the task of developing the next model of a brand must balance several considerations. The design must be novel and express attributes important to the customers, while also recognizable as a representative of the brand. This balancing is left to the intuition of the designers, who must anticipate how all customers will perceive the new design. Oftentimes, the design freedom used to meet a styling attribute such as aggressiveness can compromise the recognition of the product as a member of the brand. In this paper, an experiment is conducted measuring change in ten styling attributes common to both design freedom and brand recognition for automotive designs, using customer responses to vehicle designs created interactively. Results show that, while brand recognition is highly dependent on the particular manufacturer, tradeoffs between design freedom and brand recognition may be measured using predictive models to inform strategic design decisions.