How to Build Aesthetic Intelligence to Win Over Luxury Customers Building aesthetic skills can help you build market share, gain consumer loyalty and create lasting value for your business.
By Marilisa Barbieri Edited by Micah Zimmerman
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The concept of aesthetic value is not usually associated with financial value. Metrics and analytics cannot measure creativity, style and taste. But aesthetic intelligence is a crucial element in the luxury business strategy. It can enhance or detract from the overall value of a company.
Aesthetic intelligence in business is about delighting and elevating clients' experience with the brand. That's why elevating your aesthetic judgment and skills can help you win over affluent clients.
Awakening your aesthetic skills
If practice leads to polish, then aesthetic skills can be awakened and learned. Aesthetic intelligence is being able to judge the quality of not only a product or service but the quality of everything clients experience when coming in contact with the brand.
Applying aesthetic judgment means putting ourselves in our clients' shoes and articulating how they perceive each interaction they have with the brand. This skill also requires the understanding and interpretation of feelings elicited by a product or experience.
The ability to draw on all five senses and provide products that are a pleasure to buy and consume add to the company's value. Lacking this ability means detracting from the overall company's value.
That's how important it is to awaken your aesthetic skills and dive deep into aesthetic learning. It takes effort to boost this other type of intelligence, and even if you are naturally gifted, you must continue to redefine your skills.
Related: Marketing To A High-End Consumer, Using The Luxury Strategy
Aesthetic learning for brand longevity
Learning how to notice sensorial elements in consumer reactions helps to improve products and brand longevity. Luxury brands that know how to balance renewal and legacy and their products are the results of aesthetic learning. They take time to understand what aspects of their legacy are still relevant and what aspects are simply part of their past. The essence of their aesthetic intelligence lies in the editorial command they possess.
Non-luxury sectors more focused on scale, efficiency, and innovation often dismiss expressing their aesthetic intelligence. They don't see business value in it. This misunderstanding has sometimes resulted in undermining both their financial and consumer value and ultimately in a shorter brand's life span.
Related: 6 Key Factors in Attracting High-Level Clients
Building aesthetic skills
Modern consumers look for products that help them reconnect with nature and transform even the most mundane tasks into experiences. By strengthening your aesthetic skills, you will be better equipped to express depth and meaning in your products and appeal to customers' humanity.
Set the intention to reconnect with your natural senses. Observing only with rationality won't be enough if you aspire to become a leader that genuinely understands, appreciates and cares about the company's value proposition.
Reconnecting with natural senses requires you to adapt to the environment. The first step in building aesthetic skills is understanding how the natural senses work, which means developing higher consciousness. Shift your focus to how humans connect to places, community, nature, etc., and how they respond to different stimuli.
The second step is interpreting the emotional reactions to sensorial stimuli you observed. You want to form an original aesthetic position, framework or ideal.
The next step is articulating how you can express that aesthetic ideal for your brand. Provide clear instructions to your team about the aesthetic ideal and how to execute it. Ultimately, you want to curate a variety of aesthetic ideals to integrate into your organization and brand.
The sound and shape of good taste
When building retail and digital experiences, luxury brands rely on the basic language of the five senses to elevate a brand's codes, build market share, gain consumer loyalty, and create lasting value for the business. As distinct and visible identifiers of the brand, codes are built over time and are rarely, if ever, changed.
To engage people's senses and elevate your brand, first understand your brand codes and how the five senses can help refine them and capture consumers' attention.
Explore the archives of your company to mine the codes of your brand. Codes link past and present and project the brand into the future. They are guidelines and must permeate all products and experiences with a spirit of consistency and quality.
Related: The Luxury Watch Market Presents Opportunities for the Savvy Investor
Key takeaway
Developing your aesthetic skills will help you detect your clients' changing aspirations and desires, and it will help you conceive ideas that product design alone won't be able to provide. The language of the five senses can help you elevate your brand's codes and forge lasting emotional connections with your clients.
