When competing products offer nearly identical features and performance, companies often rely on visual design to win over shoppers. Brands from Apple to Adidas invest heavily in the look of their merchandise and packaging on the assumption that beauty sells. Yet consumer psychology studies over the years have produced mixed results, with some experiments showing that an overly attractive design can actually make shoppers doubt a product’s performance or hesitate to use it.
A new study published in the Journal of Marketing brings together three decades of data to measure how much visual appeal really matters to consumers. The research confirms that attractive design generally provides a substantial boost to both consumer opinions and buying behavior, such as purchase intentions and choices. It also pinpoints the specific combinations of circumstances that can cause a focus on aesthetics to backfire.
The investigation was led by an international team of marketing scholars: Chenming Peng of the University of International Business and Economics in China, Martin Eisend of the University of Vienna in Austria, and Zengxiang Chen of Sun Yat-sen University in China. The researchers wanted to resolve several lingering debates in the academic literature. While past studies had examined individual design features in isolation, no one had calculated their relative importance to see which visual traits contribute the most to a product’s appeal.
Previous research also offered conflicting evidence on how external context changes the way shoppers react to design. For instance, some studies suggested that visual beauty matters most for unfamiliar brands, while others found that brand familiarity makes no difference at all. Similarly, scholars had rarely looked at how broad macroeconomic and cultural forces shape the value of product aesthetics across different countries.
To address these questions, Peng and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis, a statistical method that combines data from multiple existing studies to uncover broad patterns. They gathered 118 published and unpublished papers spanning from 1993 to 2024, yielding 263 independent samples and 727 specific statistical effect sizes. In total, the dataset captured more than 164,000 consumer evaluations of products and packaging.
The building blocks of an attractive product
The team first examined how basic design features shape a consumer’s perception of overall visual appeal. Following established design theory, they divided these features into two groups: structural properties that define an object’s physical layout, and interpretive properties that depend on how consumers compare a product to other options on the market.
The structural group included complexity (the level of detail or intricacy), curvature (how rounded or angular the lines are), symmetry (balance around a central axis), and harmony (how well visual elements fit together to form a unified, coherent pattern). The interpretive group included typicality (how closely a product resembles a standard example of its category; black coffee, for instance, is more typical than red coffee) and novelty (how unique or unexpected the design is).
The analysis revealed that all six design properties positively contributed to overall visual attractiveness, but harmony had the strongest link. Curvature showed the second-strongest relationship with visual appeal, while complexity, symmetry, typicality, and novelty all had smaller, roughly equal effects. The authors note that because symmetry and curvature appeared in only a handful of samples in their dataset, those specific traits warrant further testing in future product studies.
Does beauty actually sell?
Next, the researchers measured how overall visual attractiveness relates to consumer reactions. They separated these reactions into attitudinal responses (such as a shopper’s mood, perception of product functionality, and overall brand evaluation) and behavioral responses (such as willingness to pay, purchase intentions, and actual spending).
In consumer research, shoppers frequently express positive attitudes toward an item without actually buying it, a discrepancy known as the attitude-behavior gap. A shopper might admire a sleek coffee maker on a store shelf, for example, but walk away because of the price tag or competing alternatives.
Across the combined dataset, however, visual appeal showed a strong positive link to consumer reactions with no significant gap between attitudes and behaviors. When the authors compared their findings against past meta-analyses of other product attributes, the positive effect of visual aesthetics ranked near the very top, matching the influence of product advantage and exceeding the effects of product scarcity, tactile touch, and technological sophistication.
How context changes the value of design
Even though visual appeal paid off on average, its strength varied widely depending on the situation. To map out these situational influences, the researchers treated product design as a form of visual communication between a company and a buyer. Drawing on consumer psychology theory, they proposed that aesthetics have the greatest impact under two conditions: when visual appeal aligns with the buyer’s personal goals, and when the design stands out without other information competing for the buyer’s limited attention.
Looking at brand and product characteristics, the team found that visual aesthetics boosted consumer attitudes much more when applied to the product itself rather than to its packaging. Visual appeal also had a stronger link to positive attitudes for unfamiliar brands than for familiar ones, supporting the idea that shoppers rely heavily on visual cues when evaluating a company they do not know, whereas prior reputation overshadows design for well-known brands. Whether a brand was positioned as a luxury, premium label or a mainstream one did not significantly change the impact of aesthetics.
Product quality and usage settings also played major roles. Aesthetics gave a much larger boost to attitudes when the product met expected quality standards than when quality was low, aligning with the principle that shoppers care more about good looks once basic functional needs are satisfied. In addition, visual appeal had a much stronger link to both attitudes and buying behavior when a product was consumed in public rather than in private, reflecting how people use attractive items to signal taste and social status to others.
For buying behavior specifically, the nature of the product mattered. Visual appeal had a stronger positive link to purchasing behavior for pleasure-focused, experiential items (hedonic products) than for purely practical, task-oriented items (utilitarian products). A product’s physical durability, by contrast, did not significantly alter how consumers responded to its design.
In terms of marketing communications, showing an actual picture or physical version of the product during the decision process tended to strengthen the link between aesthetics and attitudes compared to situations where shoppers relied on memory. Conversely, displaying price cues alongside the product weakened the positive effect of aesthetics on attitudes. According to the researchers, price information competes for the shopper’s mental bandwidth, making the visual design less prominent in their evaluation.
When examining consumer demographics, the study found no difference between men and women, contradicting the common marketing belief that female shoppers are more swayed by visual appearance than male shoppers. Age, on the other hand, produced a surprising result. The authors had initially predicted that the pull of visual aesthetics would weaken among older consumers due to natural declines in vision and a greater focus on practical utility.
Instead, the positive link between visual appeal and attitudes grew stronger with consumer age. The researchers suggest this happens because older adults develop “aesthetic maturity” through decades of life experience and exposure to different cultural styles. This accumulated knowledge allows older shoppers to interpret and appreciate complex design elements, compensating for any decline in basic sensory perception.
The role of culture and the economy
Some of the strongest contextual influences in the study came from macro-level environmental conditions that previous aesthetics research had largely ignored. By matching the studies in their dataset with national economic and cultural data from the World Bank and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the team tested how societal context shapes consumer reactions to design.
Economic growth, measured by a country’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, emerged as one of the most powerful amplifiers of visual appeal for both attitudes and behaviors. The authors explain that in fast-growing economies, rising disposable incomes prompt consumers to shift from purely functional shopping toward expressive consumption that signals modernity and upward mobility. At the same time, rapid economic expansion draws more competitors into the market, prompting firms to use visual design to stand out.
Cultural values and wealth distribution also shaped purchasing behavior. Visual appeal had a stronger link to behavioral responses in individualistic cultures, where people prioritize self-expression and personal uniqueness, than in collectivist cultures. High income inequality tended to weaken the behavioral pull of aesthetics, suggesting that in societies with more equal wealth distribution, shoppers are more inclined to use visual taste and style as a way to distinguish themselves.
Using these environmental findings, the researchers calculated predicted aesthetic effects for major economies across eight global regions. Their model indicated that product aesthetics have the strongest positive impact on both attitudes and behaviors in the Middle East, led by the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Conversely, the predicted effect on attitudes was lowest in Russia, while the predicted effect on buying behavior was weakest in Latin America and South Africa.
Strategic takeaways and when good design backfires
For business leaders, the findings highlight the importance of aligning design investments with specific marketing goals. While visual appeal boosts attitudes and behaviors equally on average, the contextual factors that sway attitudes are not always the same ones that drive behavior. For example, brand familiarity, price cues, consumer age, and whether the design is applied to the product or the packaging significantly altered consumer attitudes, whereas individualism, income inequality, and whether a product is practical or pleasure-focused altered buying behaviors.
The analysis also reveals when investing in visual appeal can actively hurt a brand. Although no single contextual factor turned the effect of aesthetics negative on its own, combining several unfavorable conditions caused visual appeal to backfire. For instance, when marketers focus on attractive packaging rather than the product itself for a low-quality, nondurable, practical item used in private, such as a cheap household cleaning tool, the predicted effect of visual appeal on consumer attitudes turns slightly negative.
In that scenario, the researchers note, the mismatch between an elaborate package and a subpar, mundane product can trigger consumer skepticism about the design’s authenticity. When the authors modeled the worst possible combination of factors across all five categories (brand, product, communication, consumer, and environment), the predicted relationship between visual appeal and consumer responses became strongly negative for both attitudes and behaviors.
The authors note several boundaries to their investigation that point toward future research. Their dataset focused entirely on how products and packages look, leaving open how visual appeal interacts with other sensory experiences like touch, scent, and sound, or how these rules apply to the aesthetics of retail store layouts and advertisements.
Finally, the researchers point out that major corporations including PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and Toyota are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to generate product designs. Because existing studies show that people generally prefer human-created artwork over machine-made art, future research will need to test how consumers respond when companies disclose that an algorithm designed the look of a product.
