1. ALLTHAT IS USERS
MIGHT NOT BE GOLD
How Labelling Products as User Designed
Backfires in the Context of Luxury Fashion Brands

2. SomeTerms
•User: A user is a consumer or community member who
primarily realize a product’s benefit and uses it.
•User Design: Drawing on users
•Advantages of User Designing:
1.Reduces NPD Cash
2.Improve time to market
3.Derive innovative products that are better at meeting
consumer needs and wants

3. You are Threadless,You make the ideas,
You pick what we sell,You are why we
exist. Join us, why don’t you?

4. Does user design labelling strategy benefit all
products?
• Source of design can affect the consumer preference at the point of
purchase.The large fraction of potential consumers called as the
observing consumers decide the market of any product rather than the
participating consumers. Do these observing consumers also develop a
similarly positive attitude for user design products as prior researches
has demonstrated?

5. Luxury Brands v/s Mainstream Brands
• Luxury Fashion Brand:
Defined as brands that entail the highest
level of quality and are thus premium
priced
Example : Prada, Burberry
• Mainstream Fashion Brands:
Defined as brands that entail a lower but
reasonable level of quality, consequently
they are also more affordably prices
Example: Diesel, Lee

6. Backfire
•Being close to users does not help but rather harm luxury
fashion brands, because user design hinders consumers
from signalling high status.

7. Based on prior researches:
Mainstream brands benefit from user design but fully
reverse for luxury fashion
STUDY 1

8. For luxury brands, user design strategy backfires mainly
because of the following two reasons:
1. Design quality perceptions
2. Status Signalling
STUDY 2

9. Mitigation:
Luxury brands can mitigate the negative implications of
user design if the user in question have social distance
from regular customer
STUDY 3

11. Mitigation:
The negative effect can be mitigated if the product
category is characterized by lower status relevance
STUDY 4

12. These findings imply that luxury fashion brands can
involve there users as long as signalling high status is
not integral to the product category being produced
CONCLUSION