Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 19(1), Feb 2025, 14-28; doi:10.1037/aca0000531
Recently, design innovation has become a promising competitive advantage for companies. Implementing metaphors in a product’s visual appearance make a novel design easier to process while still being different in its appearance and maintaining visual novelty. However, insufficient studies have been conducted to understand how consumers’ process product metaphors and how the integration of metaphors facilitates comprehension, thus leading to aesthetic liking. Additionally, the role of processing fluency has not been sufficiently considered. We analyze the effects of product metaphors using four studies. These studies explore whether differences between pleasure-based and interest-based aesthetic liking can be identified and whether individual levels of need for cognition influence the effects of product metaphors. The studies examine the role of processing fluency to investigate whether initial disfluency can be reduced by experiencing an aha moment. The results reveal that metaphorical design can serve as a design innovation and help to reduce initial disfluency, which finally leads to more positive aesthetic judgements compared with designs without a metaphor in their visual appearance. As the need for cognition (NFC) and the experience of an “aha moment” in particular reinforce these positive judgements, marketers should consider this when implementing product metaphors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)