OUGD401 - Study Task 4 - Research Project Proposal

The question that I will base my research on will be "What is the relationship between branding and consumers and their perception of quality?" As I want to explore the difference between how people perceive luxury brands and low budget brands. Is it just down to class? Or is it something more than this.

While doing a case study for my essay I found that people could not taste the difference between expensive and cheap chocolates while blindfolded which interested me a lot when compared to when people used the packaging as a reference to perceive the chocolates value. I plan to use the primary results that I found within my research project to back up my design decisions. I will also explore other products currently on the market to see if there are any products that do what I want to do already.

I plan to prove that there could be perhaps a neutral product that one could not tell the value of. Therefore I want to create packaging for a bar of chocolate that is said to be 'class-less'. Also I want to use both primary and secondary research to see what different class systems of society prefer brand wise, maybe even compare the costs that they are willing to spend in order to determine a 'neutral value'.

Below I have included a gantt chart of what I plan to do within the time that we have been given to complete my project.