An Ontological Framework to Link Marketing and Design

Communication issues between people with different backgrounds within the same product development team are commonplace. The causes are many, including cultural differences and language barrier. Moreover, cooperation was proved to be strongly correlated with new product success. In the present study, we studied language differences in order to overcome the debate on them by providing a framework able to help both marketers and designers. The framework is based on three design variables (Function-Behaviour-Structure), a set of 77 products and eight consumer behaviour theories. Connecting these three dimensions helps marketers to address customer needs towards specific design aspects.