Lars Erikson, Director of Design, Electrolux Asia Pacific
talks about the use of light in Electrolux products
If you look at the Australian market today you can easily see that there are some typical things with Australians. Australians are very much about outdoors living, they really do not want too much hassle. They want a very, very, uncomplicated life and to get on with things, and be able to be going out and enjoying life. I think you see that more typically here and in North America than in Europe for instance.
On our new no-frost refrigerators we have very convenient storage for drinks. Both beer and wine can be storied in a very simple way and an easy way to move them in and out of the fridge. We even have made a quick alarm for the freezer which is more like a timer. So if you come home and you’re in a hurry, you’ve brought in two bottles of wine and they’re warm, and you have to take a shower before your guest arrives. You pop them in the freezer and you press a special button, then after ten minutes you get a warning signal that those bottles are ready and that they are cold.
I’m talking a lot about practical and functional benefits now. I think on top of that – and this is where it becomes really interesting is – how can you make a consumer so delighted and feel such pleasure at the moment of purchase that they just don’t even care what the price is, they just say “that’s great I’ll take it”?
We’re actually trying attract consumers to buy more than one refrigerator so you actually have more access to cold drinks and cold food wherever you are in your house.
Lighting is being very, very, strongly used. You see a stronger focus on lighting features in architecture and in furniture. So we decided to look at different products and see “how could we incorporate lighting?” to try to bring these products into a more emotional phase. And was hoping that if people would see a product with this type of lighting they would emotionally latch on to that the way they do with furniture they saw or the architecture they saw.
The interesting thing with the refrigerator was that we are moving the concept of the refrigerator from just a household appliance into something else. Because it is becoming more like furniture or architecture so that your refrigerator is not just a storage box for food it actually even doubles up as a table or a part of the environment or the interior.