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The High-Rise of the Creative Class
The Cool Hunter (www.thecoolhunter.net) reports that themed-hotel developers are increasingly commissioning artists and designers to develop one-of-a-kind aesthetic experiences for individual rooms and, in some cases, for entire floors.
http://www.thecoolhunter.net/hot-pick/ART-HOTELS-ARE-MAKING-AN-IMPACT/
Hotel guests will receive differentiated and distilled immersions in an artist's world-view as expressed in formal approaches, color strategies, naturalistic vs. surrealistic vs abstract representational approaches. If you've ever inhabited a space like this, you know the experience packs a wallop. You feel more alive.
Without a doubt, the memory of emotional states builds brand equities that flank almost every other strategy. How do you argue with something that isn't conveyed in words?
While using aesthetics as a strategy to add value might seem new, it's been going on very long time.
Over two decades ago, SONY put its design chief on its corporate board. SONY, which has never been short on smarts, understood two critical strategic concepts.
Beauty - which is obviously visible - manages the evidence of excellence of a considerable array of other intangible (invisible) dimensions, like quality of internal circuitry or quality of component engineering. Human beings have equated virtue (quality) with beauty since time immemorial and we're not likely to stop anytime soon. The inverse is also true. We subliminally link ugliness to evil.
Those who understand, develop, and control the vocabulary of aesthetics are more likely to enjoy leadership in markets. Yes, brand language is comprised of elements of aesthetic vocabularies that are harmoniously tasked to create an analog for human identity. They are the eyes, nose, lips, and cheekbones of the brand's "face."
As many savvy international marketers have come to understand, what is beautiful is driven by culturally specific experiences, ideologies, notions, and histories. People from different cultural contexts have different aesthetic constructs, and the language of beauty morphs from place to place.
It will be interesting, over time, to see how artistic and design choices are matched to target markets. Or will the world continue to homogenize? Will the global village erase the subtlest, but most powerful, building blocks of our differences - how we experience and construct beauty?
Posted on April 7, 2006 09:02 AM | Permalink
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