Empathic design
Encyclopedia
Empathic design is a user-centered design
approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product(Crossley 2003). The empathic design process is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Empathetic design.
Empathic design relies on observation of consumers as opposed to traditional market research which relies on consumer inquiry with the intention to avoid possible biases in surveys and questions, and minimizes the chance that consumers will provide false information.
Observation are carried out by a small team of specialists, such as an engineer
, a human-factors expert
, and a design
er. Each specialist than document their observations and the session is videoed to capture subtle interactions such as body language and facial expressions.
The seminal publication on empathic design is "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design” by Leonard and Rayport.
Leonard and Rayport identify five types of information that can be gathered using observation, and that may not be captured using traditional market research:
Learning users’ unarticulated needs through a process of keen observation and interpretation often leads to breakthrough designs. Deszca et al. argue that market forces and competitive pressures in today’s fast paced world are augmenting the importance of product innovation as a source of competitive advantage. They argue that in empathic design techniques, users are almost as involved in product design as designers and engineers. Therefore, such technique, when used effectively, can achieve breakthrough designs in potentially shorter product development cycles. To achieve this, they caution that observation group should consist of several others that simply designers and engineers, including trained anthropologists and/or ethnographers.
Von Hippel’s research strongly supports the theory that customers or users themselves are the source of much innovation. Empathic design using field observation can reveal opportunities to commercialize innovations existing users have already developed to improve products.
Prototypes, simulation and role-playing are other forms of learning processes, typically used to gather customer feedback to designs that have been developed based on empathic design.
One of the leading practitioners of empathic design is the leading design company IDEO
. IDEO believes that "seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears is a critical first step in creating a breakthrough product” IDEO refers to this as "human factors” or "human inspiration” and states that "Innovation starts with an eye”, and in their experience once you start observing carefully, all kinds of insights and opportunities can pop up. IDEO routinely include empathic design in their projects and list the key steps to their method as:
The empathic model is a technique used to simulate age-related sensory losses to give designers personal experience with how their product performs for users. An example is how designers of a retirement community used empathy tools, such as glasses which reduced their vision and gloves which limited their grip and strength. Suri et al. reported another method of empathic design, involving designers shadowing vision-impaired users. The designer was then were required to utilize non-visual cues to learn about a product by working in a dark environment.
Since its introduction, empathic design techniques for new products were first adopted by automotive and electronic product manufacturing industry. However the techniques have been successfully used by several other organizations for designing innovative products. While the five abovementioned steps are at the foundation of empathic design process, several other techniques are used in combination with these five steps.
A study performed on UK based textile fiber manufacturer, Tencel Limited, by Lofthouse et al., shows that use of the Kano model
in combination with the first step of user observation has led to understanding of new insights into how customers really perceived Tencel’s fiber, and enabled the product development team to ‘walk in the shoes’ of the end user. The Kano model offered some insight into which product attributes were perceived to be important to customers. The questionnaires used to seek information from users, an important part of Kano model, were used in multiple focus groups consisting of target customers and multidisciplinary design teams. These focus groups carried the process into next three steps of capturing data, reflection and analysis, and brainstorming. In doing so they developed a so called "journey diagram” to record activities that these groups identified to be necessary to move the project towards its final target.
Jääsko and Mattelmäki have studied user-centered design techniques such as empathic design by means of case studies in which they found extensive use of empathic design techniques when developing innovative patient monitoring instruments in hospitals by Datex-Ohmeda division of Instrumentarium Corporation. Datex-Ohmeda used a new technique called "probing” in combination with observation for gathering instrumental, visual and empathic data from "sensitive settings” – that is, situations and places where design team had no access or the access was only temporary. The probing process consisted of diaries, cameras, and illustrated cards with open questions and tasks for documenting routines, actions, and needs in different use situations.
Brandt and Grunnet have studied the use of drama and props as tools in empathic design process to collaboratively generate and explore innovative design ideas. They argue that use of drama and props may aid in engaging users more directly in the design process, especially during the prototype simulation step.
One of the aspects of this difference between empathic design and other, more traditional design methods is the environment in which data is acquired. Traditional design methods rely on such mechanisms as surveys, focus groups, question-and-answer sessions, and direct interviews. By their nature, these methods isolate the customer from the environment in which they use the product. Empathic design, by relying on observation to acquire usage data, places the acquired data in the context of the environment in which the product is used. With traditional design methods, there is the risk that useful information for the market researcher may not be obtained simply due to the fact that the researcher is missing the context.
Another difference is the average level of authenticity that can be achieved with the design method in use. With traditional design methods, authenticity can be corrupted by inadvertent inputs from two different sources – the author/driver of the method (e.g. the survey author or interviewer), and the source themselves. Often, the author of the survey may shade the questions to elicit a specific response without meaning to. On the other hand, the subject being asked the questions may color their answers to unconsciously meet the expectations of the asking party, or avoid mentioning product uses that are either perceived to be embarrassing or not appropriate. However, by utilizing observation, the researcher may remain relatively unobtrusive and capture usage information that may not be elicited by a set of predetermined lines of questioning.
Empathic design also requires a set of capabilities in the researcher that are not typically part of the expected skill set. Traditional market researchers must be skilled in developing questions, conducting interviews, and managing focus groups. Practitioners of traditional market research methods must also be adept at presenting text and numeric data. However, empathic design requires a different set of skills. Both collaborative abilities and interdisciplinary interactions are required to be strong in the practitioner of empathic design. The ability to observe unobtrusively is also needed. Finally, the empathic design researcher must be able to tease insights from visual information as well as the spoken word and numerical data.
Wright and McCarthy presented a summary of the various tactics used to evoke or employ empathy for design. Their work is summarized at the Polojono web site. They list several examples of methods in the three broad categories of:
Fritch et al. present the case of gaining empathic understanding of a population living on an isolated island through repetitive story telling.
Rodriguez summarizes the importance of empathic design process as:
Dubinsky discusses the value of training Customer contact personnel to have the right mental attitude for treating customers with concern, respect, civility and genuine empathy.
According to Jet Blue, customer empathy and respect present a low-cost approach to building and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Traditional market research is usually unhelpful when developing a new technological capability. By contrast, watching customer’s behavior can often yield valuable information because it moves the designer into the world of end-users. In particular, empathic design techniques can yield at least five types of information that cannot obtained through traditional market or product research: trigger of use; interactions with the user’s environment; user customization; intangible attributes of the product and unarticulated user needs.
To move beyond its competition, a company needs to deliver unexpected products or services that exceed the potential customer’s expectations. However, traditional market or product research is ineffective at identifying radically different or new customer requirements, especially when customers cannot even articulate what they really need, either because of their limited experience or because the customer is so accustomed to current conditions that asking for a new solution does not even come to mind. At this time, empathic design can be an excellent tool for uncovering latent user needs.
In 2006, by observing the children in kindergartens and immersing in the homes of some first-time mothers, Italian designers from Design Continuum in Milan found tender gestures in the bottle feeding rituals, such as the baby’s hand on top of the mother’s hand, and the baby’s first attempts to grab and hold the bottle. These observations were applied in the redesign of a bottle experience that breaks away from tradition. This is how the new Chicco Baby Bottle weaning line was born. "Our task was to identify new product solutions”, – says Valentina Ziliani, senior designer in Continuum, and "to do this we have applied our user research and design process, an empathic process based on the observation of baby’s mothers and kindergarten teachers.”
At first, the researchers need to clarify who should be observed, what behavior should be observed, and then go to the location of end users and keep track of their behavior on a daily basis to identify any possible hidden needs. Therefore, compared with traditional market research, empathic design is undoubtedly a longer procedure and of course, as such, will cost more.
Empathic design is feasible in theory but needs multiple efforts to be in place when put into practice. The first challenge concerns the people being observed: since empathic design is carried out in the context in which the product is used, i.e. the end users own environment, it is not a simple task to look for customers who are willing to be monitored by a group of strangers every day. Additionally, according to organizational behavior theory, people seldom behave exactly the same way in different situations, especially when they are under observation. Many users will behave differently when they are aware of being under observation, and this could lead to the collection of inaccurate data. Another challenge is for the researchers: they need to have a keen eye, break away from assumptions or preconceived ideas, and they must be constantly vigilant to capture minute details that can often be overlooked. Meanwhile, the researcher must take care to not interfere with the customer’s activities. Additionally, instead of a sequence of questioning, empathic design researchers need to be trained to rely solely on their observation and analysis to explore any hidden demand.
User-centered design
In broad terms, user-centered design or pervasive usability is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process...
approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product(Crossley 2003). The empathic design process is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Empathetic design.
Characteristics of empathic design
The foundation of empathic design is observation and the goal is to identify latent customer needs in order to create products that the customers don’t even know they desire or, in some cases, solutions that customers have difficulty envisioning due to lack of familiarity with the possibilities offered by new technologies or because locked in a old mindset.Empathic design relies on observation of consumers as opposed to traditional market research which relies on consumer inquiry with the intention to avoid possible biases in surveys and questions, and minimizes the chance that consumers will provide false information.
Observation are carried out by a small team of specialists, such as an engineer
Engineer
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...
, a human-factors expert
Ergonomics
Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities.The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics as follows:...
, and a design
Design
Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
er. Each specialist than document their observations and the session is videoed to capture subtle interactions such as body language and facial expressions.
The seminal publication on empathic design is "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design” by Leonard and Rayport.
Comparison with more traditional methods accordingly to Leonard and Rayport
- In traditional inquiry, people cannot ask for what they don’t know is technically possible, whereas observation of users in action, when performed by a well-chosen group of observers with deep knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of technical and technological expertise available at their disposal, can expose new applications of that technology.
- Observers learn from real actions as opposed to (potentially incorrectly) reported behavior from surveys and market inquires.
- In verbal or written questions, people tend to give answers they think are expected; in contrast, observers can seek feedback using user’s body language, spontaneous and unsolicited reactions, and other nonverbal cues that express emotions and feelings.
- The observation process can overcome limitations of traditional questions, which can sometimes be unintentionally biased and reflect the inquirer’s unrecognized assumptions.
- Questioning often stifles opportunities for users to suggest innovations, whereas observers in field often identify user innovations that can be improved further and used for the rest of the market simply by seeing the customer’s frustration with certain aspects of the product or service.
Leonard and Rayport identify five types of information that can be gathered using observation, and that may not be captured using traditional market research:
- Triggers of use – What causes a customer to use your product? Is the customer using it as you expect?
- Interactions with user’s environment – How does your product fit in their home or workplace routines?
- User Customization – Do users modify your offering to better suit their needs? If so, is there a general need in the market for this modification? (An example of this principle in action can be found by examining Harley Davidson. Harley Davidson has released many product enhancements and accessories based on sending designers to Harley Owners Group gatherings to see how riders modify their bikes.)
- Intangible attributes of the product – Does it have any peripheral or intangible attributes, or invoke any emotional or psychological reactions that can be leveraged?
- Unarticulated user need – Are the users working around missing features or poorly designed features, or are there features or modifications that they don’t think to ask for? Target customers often cannot recognize their future needs, because they are unaware of technical possibilities that can be used in a product design. They often identify their needs in terms of products or services they are already familiar with, resulting only in suggestions for incremental improvements when surveyed.
Learning users’ unarticulated needs through a process of keen observation and interpretation often leads to breakthrough designs. Deszca et al. argue that market forces and competitive pressures in today’s fast paced world are augmenting the importance of product innovation as a source of competitive advantage. They argue that in empathic design techniques, users are almost as involved in product design as designers and engineers. Therefore, such technique, when used effectively, can achieve breakthrough designs in potentially shorter product development cycles. To achieve this, they caution that observation group should consist of several others that simply designers and engineers, including trained anthropologists and/or ethnographers.
Von Hippel’s research strongly supports the theory that customers or users themselves are the source of much innovation. Empathic design using field observation can reveal opportunities to commercialize innovations existing users have already developed to improve products.
Steps involved in empathic design
Leonard and Rayport identify the five key steps in empathic design as:- Observation
- Capturing Data
- Reflection and Analysis
- Brainstorming for solutions
- Developing prototypes of possible solutions
Prototypes, simulation and role-playing are other forms of learning processes, typically used to gather customer feedback to designs that have been developed based on empathic design.
One of the leading practitioners of empathic design is the leading design company IDEO
IDEO
IDEO is an international design and innovation consultancy founded in Palo Alto, California, United States with other locations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Munich, Shanghai, and Singapore, as well as Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo. The company helps design products, services,...
. IDEO believes that "seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears is a critical first step in creating a breakthrough product” IDEO refers to this as "human factors” or "human inspiration” and states that "Innovation starts with an eye”, and in their experience once you start observing carefully, all kinds of insights and opportunities can pop up. IDEO routinely include empathic design in their projects and list the key steps to their method as:
- Understand the market, client, technology and perceived constraints.
- Observe real people in real-life situations to find out what makes them tick, that confuses them, what they like, hate, where they have latent needs not addressed by current products and services.
- Visualize new to the world concepts
- Evaluate and refine the prototype
- Implement the new concept for commercialization.
The empathic model is a technique used to simulate age-related sensory losses to give designers personal experience with how their product performs for users. An example is how designers of a retirement community used empathy tools, such as glasses which reduced their vision and gloves which limited their grip and strength. Suri et al. reported another method of empathic design, involving designers shadowing vision-impaired users. The designer was then were required to utilize non-visual cues to learn about a product by working in a dark environment.
Since its introduction, empathic design techniques for new products were first adopted by automotive and electronic product manufacturing industry. However the techniques have been successfully used by several other organizations for designing innovative products. While the five abovementioned steps are at the foundation of empathic design process, several other techniques are used in combination with these five steps.
A study performed on UK based textile fiber manufacturer, Tencel Limited, by Lofthouse et al., shows that use of the Kano model
Kano model
The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 80s by Professor Noriaki Kano which classifies customer preferences into five categories:*Attractive*One-Dimensional*Must-Be*Indifferent*Reverse...
in combination with the first step of user observation has led to understanding of new insights into how customers really perceived Tencel’s fiber, and enabled the product development team to ‘walk in the shoes’ of the end user. The Kano model offered some insight into which product attributes were perceived to be important to customers. The questionnaires used to seek information from users, an important part of Kano model, were used in multiple focus groups consisting of target customers and multidisciplinary design teams. These focus groups carried the process into next three steps of capturing data, reflection and analysis, and brainstorming. In doing so they developed a so called "journey diagram” to record activities that these groups identified to be necessary to move the project towards its final target.
Jääsko and Mattelmäki have studied user-centered design techniques such as empathic design by means of case studies in which they found extensive use of empathic design techniques when developing innovative patient monitoring instruments in hospitals by Datex-Ohmeda division of Instrumentarium Corporation. Datex-Ohmeda used a new technique called "probing” in combination with observation for gathering instrumental, visual and empathic data from "sensitive settings” – that is, situations and places where design team had no access or the access was only temporary. The probing process consisted of diaries, cameras, and illustrated cards with open questions and tasks for documenting routines, actions, and needs in different use situations.
Brandt and Grunnet have studied the use of drama and props as tools in empathic design process to collaboratively generate and explore innovative design ideas. They argue that use of drama and props may aid in engaging users more directly in the design process, especially during the prototype simulation step.
Comparison to conventional design methods
Leonard and Rayport identify several points on which traditional design methods and empathic design diverge. As described above, conventional design methods lean on customer research that is mainly driven by inquiry – the designer asks questions of the user base, and based on the answers received, is able to derive requirements for the product to drive the design. Empathic design, on the other hand, is driven mainly by observation – the designer is trained to watch the customer and extracts actionable design information by noting both the active and the latent customer needs as the customer demonstrates them. (Leonard and Rayport, 1997). There are many implications based on the nature of the two activities – inquiry and observation.One of the aspects of this difference between empathic design and other, more traditional design methods is the environment in which data is acquired. Traditional design methods rely on such mechanisms as surveys, focus groups, question-and-answer sessions, and direct interviews. By their nature, these methods isolate the customer from the environment in which they use the product. Empathic design, by relying on observation to acquire usage data, places the acquired data in the context of the environment in which the product is used. With traditional design methods, there is the risk that useful information for the market researcher may not be obtained simply due to the fact that the researcher is missing the context.
Another difference is the average level of authenticity that can be achieved with the design method in use. With traditional design methods, authenticity can be corrupted by inadvertent inputs from two different sources – the author/driver of the method (e.g. the survey author or interviewer), and the source themselves. Often, the author of the survey may shade the questions to elicit a specific response without meaning to. On the other hand, the subject being asked the questions may color their answers to unconsciously meet the expectations of the asking party, or avoid mentioning product uses that are either perceived to be embarrassing or not appropriate. However, by utilizing observation, the researcher may remain relatively unobtrusive and capture usage information that may not be elicited by a set of predetermined lines of questioning.
Empathic design also requires a set of capabilities in the researcher that are not typically part of the expected skill set. Traditional market researchers must be skilled in developing questions, conducting interviews, and managing focus groups. Practitioners of traditional market research methods must also be adept at presenting text and numeric data. However, empathic design requires a different set of skills. Both collaborative abilities and interdisciplinary interactions are required to be strong in the practitioner of empathic design. The ability to observe unobtrusively is also needed. Finally, the empathic design researcher must be able to tease insights from visual information as well as the spoken word and numerical data.
Empathic Design Techniques
Empathic design encompasses a variety of techniques that are participatory, in-depth and qualitative in nature.Wright and McCarthy presented a summary of the various tactics used to evoke or employ empathy for design. Their work is summarized at the Polojono web site. They list several examples of methods in the three broad categories of:
- Empathy through ethnography and related methods
- Empathy through narrative
- Empathy through the imagined other
Fritch et al. present the case of gaining empathic understanding of a population living on an isolated island through repetitive story telling.
Empathic Design Model
Van Vliet and Mulder present an analytical framework based on their experiences with experience-research which has helped them develop measurement tools.Services
Empathic design has also been applied to services and processes. Jet Blue’s back end reservations, personnel and logistics systems were all designed with an empathic understanding of the needs of everyone with a roll in the flight experience.Rodriguez summarizes the importance of empathic design process as:
South describes emphatic design of aircraft interiors supports emphatic design in his quote
The design of successful business systems begins where good design thinking always does: from a point of empathy for end users. This means getting insights by going out into the world to understand and observe people interacting with products, services and environments.
If you are looking to innovate around the passenger experience, then focus first on the passenger, not technology.
Dubinsky discusses the value of training Customer contact personnel to have the right mental attitude for treating customers with concern, respect, civility and genuine empathy.
According to Jet Blue, customer empathy and respect present a low-cost approach to building and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Empathic design through the web and remote access
The Internet provides an opportunity to conduct empathic design for manufacturers of software and computer products. Software can be configured to log user actions and report problems and bugs back to the vendor. Many companies currently build such features into their products to some extent, but the opportunity may exist to allow companies to perform deeper observational research over the web through the use of instant chatting, web cameras and tracking software. The use of web cameras and audio may enable researchers to observe body language and facial expressions and note customer frustration as well as satisfaction while they go through the installation or configuration of a new product. These approaches face privacy concerns, but may be successful if utilized on a focused, cooperative group of customers.Strengths
Unlike conventional market research, which is aimed at products or services that are already well understood, empathic design bypasses the traditional focus group and survey methods and instead concentrates on viewing the user’s daily life. Therefore its advantages arise in different ways and have different competitive effects compared with traditional market research:- Empathic design allows researchers to get more information than is commonly accessible through other research methods.
Traditional market research is usually unhelpful when developing a new technological capability. By contrast, watching customer’s behavior can often yield valuable information because it moves the designer into the world of end-users. In particular, empathic design techniques can yield at least five types of information that cannot obtained through traditional market or product research: trigger of use; interactions with the user’s environment; user customization; intangible attributes of the product and unarticulated user needs.
- Empathic design can help the company move beyond its competition.
To move beyond its competition, a company needs to deliver unexpected products or services that exceed the potential customer’s expectations. However, traditional market or product research is ineffective at identifying radically different or new customer requirements, especially when customers cannot even articulate what they really need, either because of their limited experience or because the customer is so accustomed to current conditions that asking for a new solution does not even come to mind. At this time, empathic design can be an excellent tool for uncovering latent user needs.
In 2006, by observing the children in kindergartens and immersing in the homes of some first-time mothers, Italian designers from Design Continuum in Milan found tender gestures in the bottle feeding rituals, such as the baby’s hand on top of the mother’s hand, and the baby’s first attempts to grab and hold the bottle. These observations were applied in the redesign of a bottle experience that breaks away from tradition. This is how the new Chicco Baby Bottle weaning line was born. "Our task was to identify new product solutions”, – says Valentina Ziliani, senior designer in Continuum, and "to do this we have applied our user research and design process, an empathic process based on the observation of baby’s mothers and kindergarten teachers.”
Weaknesses
As a popular saying goes: everything has two sides. This is also applicable to empathic design. Generally speaking, the potential downfalls of empathic design usually arise in the following ways:- Empathic design can be more costly and uses a great deal of the researcher’s time.
At first, the researchers need to clarify who should be observed, what behavior should be observed, and then go to the location of end users and keep track of their behavior on a daily basis to identify any possible hidden needs. Therefore, compared with traditional market research, empathic design is undoubtedly a longer procedure and of course, as such, will cost more.
- Empathic design may be less practical when compared with traditional market research.
Empathic design is feasible in theory but needs multiple efforts to be in place when put into practice. The first challenge concerns the people being observed: since empathic design is carried out in the context in which the product is used, i.e. the end users own environment, it is not a simple task to look for customers who are willing to be monitored by a group of strangers every day. Additionally, according to organizational behavior theory, people seldom behave exactly the same way in different situations, especially when they are under observation. Many users will behave differently when they are aware of being under observation, and this could lead to the collection of inaccurate data. Another challenge is for the researchers: they need to have a keen eye, break away from assumptions or preconceived ideas, and they must be constantly vigilant to capture minute details that can often be overlooked. Meanwhile, the researcher must take care to not interfere with the customer’s activities. Additionally, instead of a sequence of questioning, empathic design researchers need to be trained to rely solely on their observation and analysis to explore any hidden demand.
Examples in practice
The following examples demonstrate cases where empathic design was applied to the new product development process successfully.- Design Continuum from Milan - Italy designed a series of baby bottles by using empathic design techniques where a team of designers collected data on user needs by observing kids in kindergartens and immersing themselves in the homes of some first time mothers.
- The Instrumentarian Corporation’s Datex-Ohmeda division used empathic design (including the use of user diaries, cameras, and short-term observation in critical situations) to assist in the improvement of products provided to nurses in the health care industry.
- Polar Electro Oy, a manufacturer of heart rate monitors, used empathic design principles to observe and record user interactions with their product. The resulting data was fed back in to the design organization to influence future designs and product development.
- Tencel LTD, a textile manufacturer in the United Kingdom, used empathic design techniques to solicit feedback on their current product line, understand positive and negative traits, and determine areas for immediate improvement.
- IDEO, Inc., a broad-based design services company, is well known for its employment of empathic design and brainstorming as its principal design methodology. Most products designed by IDEO incorporate some features based on the results of an empathic design experience.
See also
- User-centered designUser-centered designIn broad terms, user-centered design or pervasive usability is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process...
- Contextual designContextual designContextual Design is a user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human-computer interfaces...
- Design philosophy
- EthnographyEthnographyEthnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
- Kano modelKano modelThe Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 80s by Professor Noriaki Kano which classifies customer preferences into five categories:*Attractive*One-Dimensional*Must-Be*Indifferent*Reverse...
- Whole ProductWhole productIn marketing, a whole product is a generic product augmented by everything that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy. The core product is the tangible product that the customer experiences. The whole product typically augments the core product with additional elements...