Abstract
Core values are an important part of Volvo Car Group's and Volvo Trucks' strategic development plans. These two companies share the same core values, quality, safety, and environmental care, but they approach these values in different ways. This study seeks to understand how industry professionals and customers perceive these core values and the attributes that are associated with them, using semi-structured interviews with industry professionals from both companies and quantitative survey methods with customers. The purposes of this study are to investigate how designers convey core values to customers through product attributes and how customers perceive those core values through the same attributes. Such an understanding reveals the commonalities and discrepancies between the perspectives of producers and customers, and can contribute to more effective design processes that communicate company values in the early product development phases.
Highlights
The automotive industry today is characterised by a high level of competitiveness, which among other factors has an impact on future car performance, features, and appearance
This study looks at the cases of Volvo Car Group (VCG) and Volvo Trucks (VT), two separate companies that share the same brand heritage and core values but approach these in different ways due to different customer demands
In the premium segment of the automotive industry, the company communicates many of these touchpoints with the customer through perceived quality attributes, such as craftsmanship, surface finish, and split lines
Summary
The automotive industry today is characterised by a high level of competitiveness, which among other factors has an impact on future car performance, features, and appearance. Design processes that seek to address perceived quality and represent core values are driven by a set of requirements that the final product must fulfil. This is challenging because the evaluation of perceived quality attributes is often subjective and intuitive rather than objective (Eckert et al, 2014). Since there are a limited number of players in the premium segment, with limited information regarding competitors, the chance of incorrect importance estimation for product attributes is high In this case the benchmarking process can be detrimental to a product’s success on the market
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