Research on Product Gender Inclination Based on FAHP: A Case Study on Watch Appearance

Products with gender inclination are generally attractive to specific consumers. This paper explored influence of product elements on gender inclination by using watches as a case study. We adopt morphological analysis to divide the appearance of a watch into five elements with several types, and then obtained element-wise gender inclination through a questionnaire survey. Next, we adopted fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) to quantify the relative importance of the five elements as well as their types on gender inclinations. To verify the quantitive results of FAHP, we selected several types with obvious gender inclinations to construct five virtual watches, and performed a validation questionnaire based on the virtual watches. It was found that the validation results were consistent with those of FAHP, meaning that FAHP can provide a relatively more quantitive reference for designers and manufactures to examine the gender inclination of products.