Humorous Product Styles and Pleasure: Positive-Negative and Overt-Subtle Dimensions of Humour

Pleasure is a crucial emotional tie between a product and its consumers. A humorous product design is a strategically critical move to increase pleasure. In general, humour is considered to engender positive emotions, while neglecting that the emotional range of humour is broad and multidimensional. Therefore, this study investigated the application of humour in product design, particularly the humour products, which were classified based on positive-negative and overt-subtle dimensions of humour, and developed a scale to verify the relationship between humorous product styles and sensory pleasure. First, focus group interviews were conducted to categorize the styles of 154 humorous product images, in order to develop the questionnaire items. Second, a pretest questionnaire was administered. Finally, a formal repeated-measures questionnaire was administered to 324 participants resulting in 1926 batches of valid data. The results indicated that humorous product styles can be classified into amusement, hilarity, sarcasm, and offense, four styles; of these, amusement and hilarity were positively correlated with pleasure, whereas sarcasm and offense were not significantly correlated with pleasure. The implications for research and practice are considered here.