Similarity or complimentarity between product design and consumer's body and its relationship with his/her behavior

The human being is made of three decisive elements, which they are known as spirit, soul and body. The individual, has two considerable aspects. The first one is the immaterial aspect (spiritual), and the second one is the material aspect (body). The consumer as a human being is the base of many marketing researches. This study addresses the consumer as a human being from a bodily perspective by reviewing the relationship between the body features of the consumer and the design features of the product. In other words, the relationship between the morphology of the body of the consumer and the shape of the product is investigated. For this study smartphone's shapes were selected as product examples and classified into three criteria, size criterion (large or small), width criterion (narrow or wide) and finally the criterion of roundness (angular or rounded). All these criteria have been distinguished to meet the possible consumer's body types ectomorph (linear or thin), mesomorph (not too thin and not too wid ) and endomorph (transversal or wide) with considering the sex of the consume , male or female. Through the development of a qualitative study, we have distinguished the presence of a "similarity" or "complementarity" between the consumer's body (based on the sex and the somatotype) and the preferred shape of the martphone (based on size, width and roundness criterion).