Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 26 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter provides an overview of the role of empirical aesthetics in the field of consumer behavior. It is developed around the idea that individuals have consumption-related aesthetic experiences in daily life, ranging from the products they use to the places and spaces they frequent. The chapter introduces the notion of everyday consumer aesthetics to capture this idea. The chapter begins with a discussion of the cognitive and emotional response that consumers have to visual features such as color, shape, and surface appeal, and visual concepts such as cuteness and anthropomorphism. Next, the outcomes of aesthetic appeal and a broad categorization of aesthetic products are presented. The chapter concludes with challenges and future directions for the study of consumer aesthetics.

Keywords: everyday consumer aesthetics, art, color, shape, surface appeal, cuteness, anthropomorphism, consumer behavior

Vanessa M. Patrick

C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston

Henrik Hagtvedt

Carroll School of Management, Boston College

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.