Aesthetics and the Brand

1. Aesthetics and the Brand Jonathan E. Schroeder Professor of Marketing University of Exeter

2. General Research Program • How do images strategically communicate? • How do images circulate in consumer culture? • How do people understand advertising images? • How do images relate to brand meaning? • What does the World Wide Web mean for visual consumption? • What are some ethical and social implications for the reliance on images in marketing communication?

3. Aesthetic Flows between Culture and Commerce

4. Overview of Presentation I Introduction to a visual approach to marketing and consumer research II Research example I: “Aesthetics in the financial sector” III Research example II: “Artist, Brands, and Consumption” IV Counterarguments to the visual approach V Conclusions

5. Multi-level Research Approach • Form: the role of images in the market • Function: what images do – communication, signification, branding, strategy, Web visuals, identity • Meaning: aesthetics, semiotics, cultural analysis, myths, tools for research and understanding

6. Image Economics • UseValue • Exchange Value • Image Value (for giving an appearance, aestheticization, in both exchange and use)

7. Tools for Visual Analysis • Humanities provide theoretical tools to understand image genres, content, and narrative • Social science affords methods for discussing context, effects, and strategic implications. • Visual representations in marketing communication can be considered socio-political artifacts – creating meaning within the circuit of culture beyond strategic intention, invoking a range of issues formerly reserved for the political sphere and widely circulating information about the social world.

8. Brands • Managing brands successfully mandates managing the brand’s meaning in the marketplace – the brand image. Yet, the brand meaning is not wholly derived from the market. Culture, aesthetics, and history interact to inject brands into the global flow of images.

9. Architectural Expression in the Electronic Age

10. A Typical Bank

11. Buildings and Brands Although space and time are transfigured within the information based electronic world of contemporary commerce, classical architecture remains a viable method for communicating consumer values. In a visual genealogy of contemporary marketing communication and branding efforts, this project analyzed banking Websites, corporate reports, and marketing communication to reveal the staying power of classicism for transmitting certain key values about banks and building brand images for global financial institutions.

12. Research Assumptions • Architecture is a rhetoric. That is, built form constitutes a system of representation and signifying practices. Buildings mean something. Form persuades. Architectural form refers to the general style of a building—a castle, a church, or a strip mall, for example. Architecture is a complex signifying system encompassing art, technology, industry, and investment that represents ideals, goals, and values.

13. Classicism: a strategic style 2) Classicism is a particularly persuasive architectural style. Classical architecture has its roots in antiquity, in the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, in the temple architecture of the Greeks and in the military and civil architecture of the Romans.

14. Appropriating Architectural Expression 3) Financial institutions, particularly in the West appropriated architectural expression for strategic reasons: “banks adopted the canons of classical architecture as appropriate forms to house their functions, the less tangible (psychological) attributes of strength, security, and stability characterize them as a distinguishable building type” (Chambers, 1985, p. 20).

15. Architecture’s Expressive Power A typical bank expressed “by means of its bulk, its bronze doors, and its barred windows, that your money was safe; it also said, since it had a façade of a Greek temple, that money was holy” (Barnet, 1997, p. 54). A bank’s appearance should convey an impression that reflects the institution’s character by its air of stability, dignity, and security.

16. Architectural Communication Thus, the less tangible attributes of a bank—its image—can be communicated through architectural form. • Stability(we’ve been around for awhile) • Security (we’re safe and will protect you) • Strength(we’re financially sound)

17. Contemporary Issues 4) The strategic fit between architecture and banking is under strain in the virtual world of electronic, online, and web-based banking. A key element of understanding images is to see how physical forms change into abstracted, visual forms, how materiality transforms into electronic imagery, how the past signifies, and how information technology harnesses the global flow of images for strategic communication.

18. Financial needs today • Speedand innovation- how to communicate these emergent consumer attributes - while maintaining values of stability, strength, and security?

19. Contemporary Architectural Communication • Websites • Marketing Communications • Corporate Reports • ATM graphics and design • Currency

20. Today’s Bank

21. Marketing Images

22. Corporate Communications

23. Architectural Referents: Euro

24. Building Brands • I found evidence of the continuing significance of classical architecture—it remains to symbolize banking’s connection with the past by tapping into classicism as a powerful referent system. • Although the premises of banking have changed, the promises of the banking industry have not. • Contributes to understanding the cultural codes of branding.

25. Arts, Brands and Consumption • Illustrative Case: Andy Warhol

26. The intellectual, disciplinary, and semiotic separation of art and business has obscured the potential of studying the art market as the exemplar of image-based branding. • For it is art that is based on images, value, and identity above all other sectors of the market.

27. Greater awareness of the connections between the traditions and conventions of visual art and the production and consumption of images leads to enhanced ability to understand branding as a representational system and signifying practice.

28. Successful artists can be thought of as brand managers, actively engaged in developing, nurturing, and promoting themselves as recognizable "products" in the competitive cultural sphere.

29. Andy Warhol • Warhol provides a stunning example of artist as brand – he was extremely articulate about his ambition to become famous, “like a brand” – and his work reflectively comments on brands and consumer culture. Warhol’s contributions to branding are many, and he remains a hot brand fifteen years after his untimely death.

30. Andy Warhol • b. Andrew Warhola, Pittsburgh • Achieved great success as Commercial Illustrator, New York City 1950s • Worldwide fame as artist, filmmaker, celebrity 1960s - • Died in 1987, left fortune of around $400 million • Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh 1994 -

31. Warhol on his work • “I love America and these are some comments on it. The image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but important symbols that sustain us.” (1985)

32. Warhol on brands • ”A coke is a coke. You can’t buy a better coke.”

33. Warhol’s contributions • Brands and Brand Equity • Clothing, Fashion, and Beauty • Imagery • Packaging • Consumer Self-concept

34. Advertising Age obituary • “His work pointed out the similarities between mass produced goods–soup, cleaners, celebrities, news ‘events’–in a way that made clearer how images are manufactured. In this pop culture, Andy Warhol saw America. Through him, America saw itself” (Skenazy 1987)

41. Barbara Kruger • Perhaps best known for her photomontage I shop therefore I am, Kruger's combinations of text and found images address a host of representational issues relevant to branding, consumption, and identity. Her images resonate with marketing scholarship on the critical interaction between consumption and identity.

43. Thomas Kinkade • America’s most successful artist: • $300 million per year • NYSE listing • Galleries, products, real estate, and oh yes, art.

44. Branding the Artist • Many contemporary artists utilize brands in their work, commenting, criticizing, and creatively interrogating the branding concept and its role in consumer culture. • Successful artists may be seen as twin engines of branding knowledge – both as consummate image managers, and as managers of their own brand – the artist.

45. Art & Insight • Typical turns toward art, artists, aesthetics –Innovation Creativity Inspiration • But why not – Branding, Brand Management, Networking, Visualization, Value, Image Management • How do artists manage images? What can brand researchers learn from theories of visual representation?

46. Wisdom from the Workshop 1) Interconnections between art, brands and culture 2) Self-reflexivity of brands 3) Brand criticism

47. Art, Brands and Culture • Artists appropriate brands and commercial symbols in their art – brands provide visual raw material.

48. Art, Brands and Culture • Second, the art market itself is greatly concerned with brands – well known global brands like Picasso, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio. Perhaps in no other market is the relationship between name recognition, value, and branding so clear.

49. Art, Brands and Culture • Third, artists create visual brands via their work – their style or look. At times, this style directly derives from the branded world, in Andy Warhol’s case, for example. Moreover, the logic of advertising informs artistic production -- Barbara Kruger’s work formally resembles advertising. Cindy Sherman uses the film and film stills.

50. Art, Brands and Culture • Finally, artist’s use of branding helps articulate cultural meanings and associations that constitute brands.