Recorded Wednesday, August 24 – Presented by Eastman
Consumers care about the sound levels of their small appliances—and are willing to pay a premium for products that combine reduced noise, improved sound quality, and robust performance. The biggest source of sound in motorized appliances is the vibration from the motor resonating throughout the whole structure. This makes appliances act as virtual speakers, converting mechanical vibration into audible noise.
Typically, there are three ways to reduce noise:
- Reduce vibration at the source with either a less powerful or higher quality motor
- Isolate the motor further from the housing
- Dampen the vibration using sound damping materials
The third is the easiest—and cheapest—solution.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about the sound-damping properties of several popular materials, including PC, ABS, PC/ABS blends, PVC, and Eastman Tritan™ copolyester. You’ll also see how sound damping values are measured and compared—and how Tritan helps dampen sound, improve customer satisfaction, and increase margins.
Download the slides (for Prospector Members only) | Webinar Transcript
Webinar Transcript
Steve: So before we go into the data, there’s a couple more colorful good example that I think sometimes speak better than charts and, you know, graphs. So a few examples here. Obviously, one of the main things we learned is that consumers can be really creative when they review products online. For example, comparing it to “an F16 taking off in the living room,” while at the same time something to know what its rank in a product, five stars.
The second review there is really interesting, because it actually…they actually said that the only reason they ranked a product four stars and five was noise. So certainly, that’s one of the biggest barriers sometimes to really getting full customer satisfaction. That’s a good example of that.
And then a few other colorful examples, comparing it to “a jar of angry hornets,” or “worrying about going deaf,” or comparing it to “a tornado that might tear your house down.” Obviously, all are very colorful, interesting examples.
So now looking a little bit of the data, this will show you actually which blender models exactly we’ve looked at. They all had very good ratings as you can tell. Most of them are over four stars on average. So these are well-reviewed products. And as you can see across all categories, across all reviews, about 8% of reviewers actually talked about loudness of the product in some context.
So you can see, almost one tenths of customers who review products think about, at least blenders, think about the sound level that those products produce. The other interesting point here to notice is that in the four and three-star categories, especially the four-star categories, those are the areas where consumers mentioned the product noise level the most. So as you can see, it’s not quite as important in the five-star and one-star range, and this could mean that product…the reviewers, they tend to maybe think more about it and put more thought into their reviews, and potentially be more critical are the ones that tend to pay attention a lot more to that characteristic.
So now let’s talk about a different product in the, basically in the opposite end of the spectrum, when it comes to sound performance. So in the blenders, you have products that makes a large amount of noise in a very short period of time, and dishwasher’s a product they’re on for a very long time and makes a relatively low amount of noise by comparison.
Download the full transcript here…
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