PRICING STRATEGIES OF DESIGN COMPANIES FOR PRODUCT DESIGN SERVICES IN TURKEY

Date

2026-9-4

Author

Muslular, Levent

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This thesis investigates the pricing strategies used by design companies and professionals for product design services in Turkey. It approaches pricing not only as a financial calculation but as a professional and relational process shaped by scope, perceived value, client expectations, negotiation, and market conditions. The research combines a literature review, online surveys of 23 designers and 15 client representatives, and semi-structured interviews with 10 designers. The surveys examined pricing models, service scope, pricing factors, negotiation difficulties, proposal expectations, and perceptions of design value, while the interviews explored how designers construct and justify fees in practice. The findings show that pricing is multi-layered and context-dependent. Project- and phase-based fees are the most common client-facing models, although designers internally consider working time, capacity, expertise, opportunity cost, uncertainty, and risk. Clear briefs, defined deliverables, revision boundaries, payment structures, and decision-making responsibilities improve predictability. Client design maturity influences brief quality, hidden preliminary labor, revision risk, and negotiation pressure, while inflation, exchange-rate movements, and delayed payments affect the real value of fees. The thesis proposes a conceptual framework explaining how project characteristics, perceived design value, client design maturity, internal pricing logic, commercial risk, and economic conditions interact in pricing decisions. As a practice-oriented output, it also presents the bilingual Design Proposal Builder, which helps designers structure product design service proposals.

Subject Keywords

Industrial Design, Product Design Services, Pricing Strategies, Design Value, Client Design Maturity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120981

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis