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Marketers and designers are likely to work together on innovation teams as they both have customer satisfaction as their end goals. Collaboration between these disciplines in innovation teams is often impaired due to the different thought-worlds that drive decision making: intuitive versus rational. To facilitate collaboration between design and marketing it is valuable to teach marketers about designers' ways of thinking. Approaches to teaching design thinking to marketing students often focus on students becoming more creative, intuitive, and innovative themselves. However, the integration of the two disciplines does not require that marketers become designers, and vice versa, as both bring unique skills necessary for successful innovation. An educational framework is presented that aims to teach marketing students an "understanding of the thought-world of design thinking" rather than to become design thinkers themselves. The focus is on recognizing how the others' approach to the same goals are complementary to their own approaches instead of being different or "wrong." This framework is unique in aligning design thinking phases with critical thinking phases--marketing students' dominant thinking style--through specifically chosen activities to scaffold the understanding of an intuitive, divergent, and creative thinking approach to the development of innovative marketing ideas.

Designers use product attributes (e.g., trendiness) to design aesthetically appealing products. The relationships of physical properties (e.g., shape) of product designs with product attributes and aesthetic appraisal are often considered to be generalizable over product categories and markets. However, in line with an interactionist view, we show that the product's physical properties in combination with a person's previous exposure to products influence perception and aesthetic appraisal of product designs. Previous exposure to products provides a prototype to which to compare newly encountered product designs. We show that deviating the physical properties from the combination of physical properties that the prototype is made up of makes a product design look more trendy, and therefore, more aesthetically appealing. Because product categories have different prototypes, the physical properties that make a product design look trendy and aesthetically appealing are product-category dependent (Study 1). Moreover, people in a local market perceive product designs from a global brand as more trendy and more aesthetically appealing than people in a global market, because these product designs deviate more from their prototype (Study 2). Hence, in order to create a product design that is trendy and aesthetically pleasurable, designers should take into account product designs that people are exposed to in their daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]