2019 CMF Trends Research for Chinese Brand Smartphone

Nowadays, the smartphone is a consumer electronic product with rapid iteration. With the dominance of ultra screen smartphones, more and more mobile phone manufacturers become devote to themselves to design and implement appealing CMF. They treat the CMF design as a magic weapon to a successful sale among such intense competition in the Chinese smartphone market.

This project aimed to help our client to gain insight into the mobile phone CMF design trends in the next year from a cross-industry view, as well as to analyze and summarize the strategy of future application of CMF, with the directions of science and fashion,  to five different product lines.

In this project, We spent two weeks doing desk research, including reviewed the primary colors and materials applied to different types of dominant smartphone brands during the last five years, particularly collected and analyzed the CMF elements of relevant product categories in terms of materials, such as glasses, perfume bottles, and watches, and studied driven factors of emerging trends in recent one year. With these fundamental desk research, we can understand the regularity of smartphone CMF development in China, get new inspirations regards to deliver fashion and science through CMF design from other product categories, and plan the marketing field research in Shanghai and Seoul. Furthermore, it enabled us to speculate about the primary themes of macro CMF trends.

Expert interviews and in-depth interviews can also help us speculate and verify future trends. In this project, we invited three senior designers profession in fashion, branding, and accessory design to share their understanding of fashion and science and the innovative CMF application of metal, ceramics, and glass.
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Combined with all the researched outcomes, we conducted face- to- face interviews with 18 consumers. With the understanding of their lifestyle characters, preferences and habits of smartphones usage, perception of fashion and science, as well as the preferences of materials, we verified the speculated trends themes , and clarified the strategies of future application of CMF.

1. From the desk research of smartphone CMF development regularity, we found that neutral colors and red are current dominant colors. In contrast, generally, chromatic colors haven't become quite prevalent,  but with novel finishing, they are more potential to lead a unique appealing design trend.
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2. According to the experts' interviews, we found that among different SKU for the same series product, it usually includes both conservative colors as main features color and some novel colors as trendy colors to attract consumers. We adopted that as a main CMF strategy for different smartphone types. As to the price, lower saturation colors tend to be more popular among high- priced products.
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3. Highly interests in the exploration of nature and consider smartphones as a kind of fashion accessory.

We proposed sixteen CMF design directions with two macro trends, trendy science, and anti-aging luxury.
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We also matched those CMF directions to different type series based on the features of different personas. Such as the direction, Meteorite mechanic, which matched to the NEX series, while the steam rose, which matched to the X series. For every CMF direction, we proposed an interpretation, three corresponding featured colors, and furnishing.
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To present the CMF trend directions, we also categorized them with different purchased samples during the marketing field research, which could help the client understand the intangible themes with tangible artifacts.

VIVO has released new series types with new CMF strategies.  Some of them could correspond to our trend research.