Brand Beauty Unleashed

The Value of Aesthetics in Marketing

Roberto M. Álvarez del Blanco

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429655456
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Comportamento dei consumatori

This book presents an in-depth, careful study of our understanding of the concept of beauty in everyday objects and its impact on markets and brands. Moving beyond artistic notions of beauty, it demonstrates how beauty is an asset that can be leveraged in the marketplace.

Traditionally, beauty has been examined in relation to its influence on painting, sculpture, literature, music, and architecture. However, its value and power in the marketplace is understudied. Álvarez del Blanco provides a systematic analysis of beauty in commonplace objects and brands, drawing on cutting-edge research at the intersection of marketing and neurosciences. Through examining the neuroscientific evidence for how the brain processes beauty, the author articulates the implications this may have on marketing and brand management. He also offers a glimpse of how beauty may evolve, and its marketing implications for firm strategy in the coming decades.

Written by a recognized authority in marketing and brand strategy, Brand Beauty Unleashed gives students with an interest in marketing, consumer behavior, branding, and neuromarketing an exciting new perspective on this intangible asset.

PART I

Beauty

A supreme evolution

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BEAUTY

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Confucius

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode, st. 2

The ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

Albert Einstein, Forum and Century

In 1817, the French novelist Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal and widely considered as one of the first and foremost Realist writers, visited Florence to enjoy all the details of its artistic beauty, which he planned to write about in his diary. He spent his first day in a state of bedazzlement, admiring the city’s numerous churches, museums, monuments, and art galleries. At every step, he felt moved by the overflow of Renaissance art: the magnificent domes, towers, paintings, statues, fountains, and facades that filled the city. But, when he entered the majestic Franciscan Basilica of Santa Croce and witnessed Giotto’s frescoes, Stendhal’s reverie was disturbed. All of a sudden, he was overwhelmed by an attack of palpitations, vertigo, anguish, and shortness of breath, which forced him to leave the chapel to get some fresh air.

When he went to the doctor, Stendhal was told that he had suffered an “overdose of beauty.” From that moment on, the symptoms he experienced have been known as Stendhal’s syndrome. By chance, the great French writer discovered an affliction that strikes millions of world travelers every time they visit Florence: the city is so beautiful that it overwhelms their senses. In this type of ailment, exposure to a surplus of beauty and aesthetic pleasure may lead to a high cardiac rhythm, vertigo, confusion, trembling, palpitations, depression, and even hallucinations. In other words, Stendhal’s syndrome is a romantic reaction in the face of the highest forms of beauty.

Something unique also happens when we read a book that moves us and propels us into a different state of mind, in an experience that is much like entering another world. A similar phenomenon occurs when we admire a painting or a melody that leaves an impression on our most intimate emotions. This experience could be described as a sensation of elevation, as if we were able to rise beyond the material world and participate for a moment in something sublime. In his spiritual essays, the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner explored this type of feeling and explained that, when awakened by beauty, his emotions “reached the point of transforming my spiritual state and produced an intense joy in the depths of my soul” (1).

In 1936, Pablo Picasso confessed to the art critic and editor Christian Zervos that “art is never the application of a beauty canon; it is what the brain and instincts can conceive regardless of this canon.”^a Picasso exalted the introduction of a new artistic language—a new sense of aesthetics—into the modern art world. For him, beauty was not a given, but something that was continually redefined through the reinterpretation and transformation of reality. As he redefined the arts, Picasso helped shift conventional ideas about beauty and revealed its multiplicity. He inherited a world of norms and conventions but left us with an improved model.

Marvin Minsky, the creator of the idea of artificial intelligence, has suggested that the experience of beauty is a temporary way of blocking the mind from negative knowledge. In his view, negative knowledge is all the accumulated information that tells us what not to do. Minsky argues that, when we experience beauty, our brains receive a signal that suspends all forms of evaluation, choice, or criticism (2). Meanwhile, recent neuroscientific research has shown that the brain regions that are activated through the experience of beautiful art or exquisite music are the same areas that are stimulated when mathematicians pursue their own visions of beauty and quantitative data (3). It is well known that the mathematical pursuit of beauty is, as in other scientific disciplines, an unavoidable principle.

Often, when philosophers consider the idea of beauty and ask themselves why people desire and cherish it so intensely, they reach the conclusion that this is due to how beauty satisfies our imagination. In other words, our being is filled with the dreams that the experience of beauty animates, and we are thus filled with feeling. In some ways, beauty means an escape from reality. But it is also a basic, essential form of pleasure. Imagine for a moment that you are immune to the experience of beauty. Eventually, it is quite probable that you will envision yourself immersed in an abyss, without any physical, spiritual, or emotional health. In fact, various experiments have demonstrated that we fall into a deep depression when we cannot experience beauty (4). Our organism responds to it viscerally, not through rational contemplation, but through an affective response to a pressing need.

Yet, to think about beauty solely through the perspective of biology limits the temporal frame of our analysis. After all, the history of beauty dates back to time immemorial. Ever since we became a species, we have had the ability to perceive and respond to beauty. What is more, the development of the neural circuits that recognize its presence has taken tens of thousands of years. Essentially, beauty is a universal component of human experience that produces pleasure, captures our attention, and triggers actions that help ensure our survival as species. Our acute sensibility to beauty is not only ingrained in our brain, but also controlled by a neural network that has evolved throughout history.

The origin of beauty

A long historical process full of anonymous protagonists has allowed beauty to shine and evolve up to the present. We have no knowledge of who were the first human ancestors that sketched a line, created a drawing, carved a bone, or sculpted a stone with aesthetic intent. Nor do we know who was the first to notice that the lines they drew on the sand resembled the shape of an animal. Yet, even though we will never know who created the first “sketch,” we do know that, whoever it was, he or she paved the way for our entire visual culture.

In order to understand the development of beauty, it is necessary to offer a brief account of various historical eras. This panoramic view is crucial not only because it reveals the spirit of each period, but also because it helps us clarify how the meanings of beauty have changed across time. In this manner, we can better visualize where the divergent contemporary concepts of beauty come from and where they are heading. To say the least, the future of beauty, discussed in the last chapter, is quite fascinating.

Wherever humans have expressed themselves, beauty has existed. For more than 100,000 years, as our ancestors traced and highlighted the physical appearance of objects and the human self, they incorporated beauty into their language as a way to articulate their beliefs, values, or aspirations. The pursuit of beauty has been a constant obsession since then, revealing itself through an unimaginable range of practices: for instance, the aesthetics of the body have been traditionally accentuated through the use of ornaments, tattoos, and body painting. Furthermore, such practices have had the goal of giving a unique, artistic value to objects, a meaning that goes beyond mere utility.

Needless to say, these processes and their results have had an enormous impact on what we consider to be beauty today, how we define and understand it as such. Each historical period has been characterized by its particular aesthetic methods and techniques, which in turn reflect different cultural and social legacies. According to an analysis developed by historians, anthropologists, philosophers, sociologists, and artists from 35 countries, although the exploration of beauty has manifested itself in all societies, its emergence and development have resulted from a combination of biological, social, and psychological imperatives (5). In this long process of evolution we can identify five distinct eras:

• Prehistory—The Origin of Beauty: fictions and stereotypes, Homo aestheticus, and the fantasy of the body.

The pursuit of beauty has persisted since the first human communities emerged. Our first ancestors developed and reproduced the use of color, ornaments, and art on their own bodies, which led to the rise of societies divided by gender and the creation of social hierarchies based on the visual expression of beauty. Homo sapiens devoted considerable time and energy to exploring beauty, stressing its significance for both their world and the afterlife.

• Antiquity—The Ascent of Civilizations: Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, the Olmecs, and their descendants.

The rituals of beauty reached their highest manifestation through the art of decoration, painting, sculpture, architecture, clothing, hairstyle, and perfume, as well as the creation of elaborate luxury items such as jewelry and utensils. From Egypt to Greece and the other civilizations, human society developed a constant fascination with beauty that continues to have a pronounced influence today.

• Classical Era—Cultural Confrontations: the Islamic world, medieval Europe, Japan (from the Heian to the Edo period), China (from the Ming to the Ching dynasty), Africa, the Italian Renaissance, the Mongol Empire, the Spanish Golden Age, the Dutch Golden Age, France (from Louis XIV to the Illustration).

The medieval and modern periods witnessed widespread trends in the world of art and fashion, reflecting a wave of unlimited creative energy. Increasingly, the sciences began to play a role in the pursuit of beauty, although religion limited its scope in some cases. Also, fashion and artistic trends started to travel from one culture to another. In this way, as international commerce expanded, the different canons of beauty became globalized.

• Modernity—Globalization: technology, individualism, narcissism, myths, conformity and rebellion, the universal and the particular.

As people progressively valued their quality of life, the modern age led to an era of individualism. While some industrial sectors focused on the democratization of beauty and its consumption, Western culture created the world of media celebrities. Social equality also had a significant impact in varying ways throughout this era, from the expansion of the job market to anti-racism, women’s liberation, and human rights. From both a psychological and a sociological perspective, these phenomena have influenced the pursuit of beauty in profound ways.

• The Future—Predictions: cosmopolitism, immortality, the third sex, hypernarcissism, cyber sapiens.

The digital era boom has produced a new form of beauty. Increasingly, we have more freedom to manipulate social expectations, our gender, and our biological age. In this context, beauty represents a challenge to all innovative research in medicine and biotechnology. Meanwhile, new lifestyles and virtual forms of human interaction continue to emerge. Where will these new evolutions take us? What new forms will society take? Beyond these enigmas, we do know one thing for certain: the world will never be the same again. The changes that we face are so profound that artists and philosophers are now asking vital questions about the fundamental biological and aesthetic thrusts and what they mean for the future of beauty. The life to come looks to be fascinating indeed.

To put it differently, beauty has been constantly renewed with the passage of time. From the beginnings of humankind, it has been a universal component of human culture and learning. Even when we encounter a beautiful object that is thousands of years old, we marvel and admire the originality of its style while enjoying the allure and emotional reaction it generates. Beauty represents an extraordinary and vital connection between humans, curiosity, and our historical journey into...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of figures
• Epigraphs
• PART I Beauty: a supreme evolution
• PART II Beauty and the brain
• PART III The spell of beauty
• Index