Aesthetic Intelligence

How to Boost It and Use It in Business and Beyond

Pauline Brown

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062883315
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Longtime leader in the luxury goods sector and former Chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton North America reinvents the artand science of brand-building under the rubric of Aesthetic Intelligence. In a world in which people have cheap and easy access to most goods and services, yet crave richer and more meaningful experiences, aesthetics has become a key differentiator for most companies and a critical factor of their success and even their survival. In this groundbreaking book, Pauline Brown, a former leader of the world's top luxury goods company and a pioneer in identifying the role of aesthetics in business, shows executives, entrepreneurs, and other professionals how to harness the power of the senses to create products, services, and experiences that stand out, resonate with their customers, and create long-term value for their businesses. The power is rooted in Aesthetic Intelligence—or "the other AI, " as Brown refers to it.

Aesthetic Intelligence can be learned. Indeed, people are born with far more capacity than they use, but even those that are naturally gifted must continue to refine their skills, lest their aesthetic advantage atrophy. Through a combination of storytelling and practical advice, the author shows how aesthetic intelligence creates business value and how executives, entrepreneurs and others can boost their own AI and successfully apply it to business. Brown offers research, strategies and practical exercises focused on four essential AI skills.

Aesthetic Intelligence provides a crucial roadmap to help business leaders build their businesses in their own authentic and distinctive way. Aesthetic Intelligence is about creating delight, lifting the human spirit, and rousing the imagination through sensorial experiences.

Part I
Mastering the Other AI

Chapter 1
The Aesthetic Advantage

One of my first assignments at LVMH was to immerse myself in the inner workings of the company’s individual brands, including the world’s oldest champagne house, Ruinart, as well as its Italian jewelry line, Bulgari. The experience of visiting the underground chalk quarries and vineyards of Ruinart and marveling at the skilled stone setters, gem cutters, and engravers at Bulgari opened my eyes to a new and different world of brand building—by arousal of the senses, or aesthetics. The quality, originality, and care taken to create those products resonated right through to their customers, thanks to their companies’ elevated aesthetics. Aesthetics equals longevity. As Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH, noted, “I have myself an iPhone. But can you say that in twenty years people will still use an iPhone? Maybe not. Maybe we’ll have a new product or something [more] innovative. But what I can say today is twenty years from now, I’m quite convinced that people will still drink Dom Pérignon.”1

The term aesthetics is typically used to describe how things look. In business, that means product and packaging design, brand image, and corporate identity. However, the word is far more useful if we embrace its full meaning, which extends well beyond visual elegance. Here’s how I teach students to understand the term and how I use it throughout this book: aesthetics is the pleasure we—i.e., all humans—derive from perceiving an object or experience through our senses. Aesthetic intelligence—another term we will come back to—is our ability to understand, interpret, and articulate feelings that are elicited by a particular object or experience.

Aesthetic businesses tend to draw on all five senses and provide products or services that are a pleasure to buy and consume. In turn, consumers gladly pay a premium not for the utility of these products or services but for the sensorial delight that they arouse, including visual, gustatory (taste), olfactory (smell), auditory (sound), and somatosensory (touch). Aesthetic propositions shift consumers’ motivations from functional and transactional to experiential, aspirational, and memorable. For businesses, that means more demand for their products, stronger loyalty among their customers, and higher value for their shareholders.

In a world where people want fewer things, crave richer and more meaningful experiences, and have unprecedented market power to get precisely what they want precisely when they want it, the aesthetic value of a company’s product or service is critical to its long-term success. Executives, entrepreneurs, and other professionals can capitalize on the power of aesthetics by learning how to identify and apply it to their own business interests. I call this critical skill set aesthetic intelligence, or “the other AI.”

When businesses engage a consumer on an aesthetic level, they win. In 1995, when I earned my MBA from the Wharton School, I didn’t appreciate this. Few did. As I traveled through the ranks of the luxury sector, working for brands that would not have survived the years (in some cases, centuries) without an intense commitment to aesthetics, I realized that nonluxury sectors—which historically have focused on scale, efficiency, and innovation—were undermining their financial and consumer value by dismissing, misunderstanding, or underinvesting in aesthetics.

Unlike “design thinking,” with its focus on processes for problem-solving and solution-based strategies, the value of aesthetics in business is about delight—the opportunity to lift the human spirit and rouse the imagination through sensorial experiences. Done right, it pays big dividends to both businesses and their patrons. These days, and for the foreseeable future, that’s where the money is. Computers can and will solve more and more functional problems; they cannot and will not be able to deliver new and meaningful ways to reconnect us with our humanity.

The automation of society means that many tasks are now and will increasingly be done by computers: analytics, data collection and interpretation, even routine physical tasks and jobs. However, people must still apply their talents and skills to activities that cannot be so easily and economically overtaken by technology, including our ability to make art, create beauty, and forge deep human connections. Those are places where we can and will continue to outperform computers.

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts it, those of us who want to succeed in the future must learn to observe this “separation of powers” and collaborate with computers where relevant while specializing in what we do best. As we work to mitigate the ill effects of overproduction and industrial development, we must put more value on the quality, meaning, beauty, and durability of goods rather than on their price, accessibility, and disposability. Developing aesthetic standards and strategies is crucial to the economic and social sustainability of all people and business.

The Good News: Aesthetics Can Be Learned

To lead aesthetic businesses, executives need to be attuned not only to their own aesthetic sensibilities and values but also to those of their customers. Studies show that feelings, not analytic thinking, drive an estimated 85 percent of buying decisions. However, marketers typically focus their efforts on the remaining 15 percent of a buying decision: a rational evaluation of features and functionality.

The value of aesthetics in business starts at the top—with the leader’s own AI—but it also depends on the leader’s ability to build, support, and sustain the right organization and culture around that aesthetic position. Everyone is born with more aesthetic capacity than he or she uses. Of course, some people are naturally advantaged, or gifted, such as the musician Bob Dylan with his extraordinary ear for sound and rhythm or the chef Wolfgang Puck with his legendary ability to balance flavors, textures, and tastes. However, even people like Dylan and Puck must continue to hone their skills and evolve their styles in order to remain active and relevant in their fields, lest their aesthetic advantage atrophy. They also have to keep up with changing tastes in the broader marketplace and, over time, modify or tweak their individual forms of expression.

After all, even classics have to be modernized to remain relevant. For example, Louis Vuitton—a brand that came of age during the first wave of global travel, the Steamship Era—might have died after World War II with the steamship. Yet, the brand is more valuable, influential, and relevant today than ever before. How has it managed to remain so? By striking the right balance between legacy and renewal. In these fast-moving times, the value of tradition and heritage is all the more important. However, brands ought not be preserved and presented like artwork in a museum. They still need to be useful and meaningful. Marketers should take time to understand what aspects of a brand’s legacy are still relevant and what aspects are simply of historic interest.

Vuitton, a French luggage maker in the mid-1800s, introduced a trunk that was flat-bottomed (stackable), made of canvas (relatively lightweight), and airtight (protective from water damage)—a useful and meaningful innovation for travelers in the Steamship Era.

Flash forward to the twenty-first century; the notion of toting a large, rigid piece of luggage is not remotely appropriate for modern-day travel. However, the allure of global travel has never been more exciting. Louis Vuitton has remained relevant as a brand, in large part, through its strong, modern, and consistent references to global travel, as captured by the images in its advertising campaigns, the motifs in its stores, and even the curation of its glamorous pop-up exhibit “Volez, Voguez, Voyagez,”2 which “retraces the adventure of [the brand] from 1854 to the present.” Its products, however, are all lightweight, compact, and optimally sized for aircraft overhead bins.

Other leading companies—such as Apple, the Walt Disney Company, Adidas, and Starbucks—all honor their heritage and “brand codes,” while continuing to refine their distinct aesthetic qualities and enhance their desirability. None of the best remains stagnant.

These companies have products similar to their competitors’: Apple’s smartphones have comparable computing power to Samsung’s; Airbnb, Marriott, and Craigslist offer competing accommodation services to travelers. Aesthetics is the differential. It is the reason some customers are willing to stand in line to pay $1,000-plus for the iPhone X or pay a $1,000 deposit to get onto the waiting list to buy a Tesla. Aesthetics explains why Airbnb is, by far, the number one vacation rental marketplace, beating both the world’s largest hotel group and an incumbent internet company with a twenty-year head start in the marketplace. The aesthetics of the booking experience is intuitive and pleasing: the look of the website is clean, elegant, and, in terms of function, intuitive. You’re never more than three clicks away from a booking. Even more important than its user-friendliness, the site is designed to help people and encourage them to dream.

One final point about the process of cultivating and harnessing aesthetic intelligence is a notion that I call aesthetic empathy: whereas AI begins with the development of one’s own aesthetic sensibility, it also requires a deep understanding of and respect for other people’s sensibilities insofar as they may differ from our own yet better reflect the marketplace. That there are different kinds of good taste doesn’t mean that bad taste doesn’t exist—it certainly does. Knowing the difference between good taste and bad, while also being sensitive to the good taste of others (i.e., aesthetic empathy) is a valuable means of envisioning and predicting who will (and will not) respond to your own product’s or service’s aesthetic expressions and how.

When you understand how aesthetics can benefit your business—and how it can be effectively and credibly applied—your prospects for survival and longevity dramatically increase. Consider one of the most iconic champagne brands in the world, Veuve Clicquot, as a prime example. Madame Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, a French businesswoman in the early nineteenth century, became known as the “Grand Dame of Champagne” for her innovation in the aesthetic expression of champagne. In 1798, she married François Clicquot, son of the founder of Maison Clicquot. François shared his passion for and knowledge of champagne with his wife, so when she was widowed at twenty-seven in 1805, she was able to take the reins of the business. Under her leadership, the business continued to thrive.

Not only did Madame Clicquot save the family business, she improved it by developing a novel production technique, called riddling, which drastically improved the taste and visual appeal of champagne. She developed the technique to counter the unappetizing look of sediment that accumulated in the bottom of the bottles. The technique is still used by winemakers today. Madame Clicquot also innovated the first blend of rosé champagne—the seductive pink bubbly popular at weddings and other special occasions throughout the world. The egg yolk–yellow label, a signature of Clicquot since 1772, remains a powerful visual marker of the brand’s heritage and personality.

Madame Clicquot used her aesthetic intelligence to improve an existing product, create something special, and make it timeless. The power of a st...