Product style

Virtually all consumer goods, and many industrial goods, are now styled or readily adaptable to styling. In some lines, style and style changes become the most important single marketing or selling point. Everyone is familiar with the importance of style in women's clothing. But the importance of style in such items as automobiles, electrical appliances, home furnishings, furniture, house building, and almost every other field of consumer-goods merchandising cannot be overlooked.
Product styling is a distinct manner of design or mode of expression. The shape, or style, can often differentiate one product from another. The same article may be presented in various styles, such as the different styles of women's shoes. The most popular or generally accepted style becomes the fashion for the duration of its popularity.
Thus, a style can stay fashionable for a comparatively long time, or it may go out of fashion in a short time. Some years ago, the "sack" styling of women's dresses swept the country and died in a matter of months. On the other hand, the style for mink jackets has endured for many years. Sometimes style comes back, after having gone out of fashion for a time.
Style is dominant in the field of apparel, but it is also important in other fields. Whenever basic quality and engineering, such as in automobiles, are taken for granted, the choice between different offerings is often made by consumers on the basis of style. Since it is generally true that several manufacturers can easily reproduce or match each other's quality, the only way to differentiate one product from that of a competitor may be through changes in styling.
Most marketing people recognize that styles pass through what is called the style cycle. When first offered, even with heavy promotion, a new style is apt to encounter consumer resistance or, at least, consumer indifference.
Most products have a period of distinctiveness when the product is first offered in a particular style. This period is often marked by high price, exclusive or high-style merchandising, with a few of the more daring, style-conscious buyers indulging in it. If it catches on, however, such style passes quickly into the second stage, the "stage of imitation." More producers copy the style; more merchants offer it to the public; prices drop; and more consumers adopt it. The style becomes popular. It becomes the fashion.
If a style is very popular, it passes into the third stage of the style cycle, "mass imitation." In this third stage, mass producers flood the market; every outlet in the land sells the same style; and the original high-style outlets withdraw and start looking for a new style offering which may or may not become the fashion. The process is virtually continuous. Some styles are slow to become popular. Some become popular overnight. The duration of the style cycle is always a gamble. Timing is important. While fortunes have been made with new and creative styles, perhaps more fortunes have been lost by coming in too late or hanging on too long. It is very difficult in marketing to forecast, with any degree of accuracy, the life of a given style. The consumer is notoriously fickle, and in matters of style he is particularly unpredictable. Part of the cost of all new styling is risk.