#WhatTheInternetWants: Beauty
Winning in marketing today means playing according to the rules and implications of the technology that has transformed the world.
“Most evolved things are beautiful, and the most beautiful are the most highly evolved.”
?– Kevin Kelly
The Internet wants to be beautiful because it wants your attention, and people pay attention to beauty. That’s why beauty is a still a generative in the Age of the Internet.
But beauty is easier said than done, though – as anyone with a mirror will tell you.
Far beyond appearances or the eye of any particular beholder, beauty lives on the head of a pin at the intersection of intention, heritage, continuity, mélange, balance, function, innovation, humility, detail, generosity, sustainability, imperfection, and to an increasing extent, technology (as a signal) itself.
Beauty is the carefully-blended sum of these internal and external attributes. It projects from the soul out and from the packaging in.
In short, beauty is a tall order.
Beauty only results from careful, tireless design, or as Kevin Kelly puts it, “evolution.” It can’t be templated or SaaS-ed; it can only be crafted. Grown. Then nurtured.
It’s why most made things are not beautiful, and why truly beautiful things are special. That’s why we’re drawn to beauty and that’s why the Internet loves it: it will always be scarce. It’s economics.
And while the Internet may alter economics, it’s never above it.
The marketing lesson: Devote unremitting time, skill and will to making your brand beautiful in spirit, strategy and execution.
A hybrid, multi-disciplinary creative/brand strategist with skills developed across the entire marketing ecosystem, Todd Lowe does everything from brand, connections, campaign and content strategy to communications/content ideas and marketing innovation.
As he decodes the marketing lessons from #WhatTheInternetWants, offline he unpacks the underlying strategic implications and applies them to building solutions on behalf of brands, agencies and consultancies.
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Background/sources:
Beauty is an endlessly debated notion and admittedly, I’m no expert on the subject. My laundry list of beauty characteristics is directional and largely derived from the sources below. Surely, there are even more facets to beauty and surely some of the aforementioned traits are debatable -- or minimally are begging for optimization.
“We are deeply attracted to [the Internet’s] beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution… [It] will soon leave imitation behind and create obviously nonhuman intelligences and obviously nonhuman robots and obviously non-Earthlike life, and all these will radiate an evolved attractiveness that will dazzle us.
As it does, we’ll find it easier to admit that we have an affinity for it… Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this or that technology’s charms and marvel at its subtlety. We will travel to it with children in tow to sit in silence beneath its towers.”
– Kevin Kelly
“Our brain automatically responds to beauty by linking vision and pleasure. These beauty detectors, it seems, ping every time we see beauty, regardless of whatever else we might be thinking.
…We also have a "beauty is good" stereotype embedded in the brain… And this reflexive association may be the biologic trigger for the many social effects of beauty. Attractive people receive all kinds of advantages in life. They're regarded as more intelligent, more trustworthy, they're given higher pay and lesser punishments, even when such judgments are not warranted..
…[Beauty is] sculpted by factors that contribute to the survival of the group. Many experiments have shown that a few basic parameters contribute to what makes a face attractive. These include averaging, symmetry and the effects of hormones.
…[C]omposite or average faces are typically more attractive than each individual face that contributes to the average has been replicated many times. This laboratory finding fits with many people's intuitions. Average faces represent the central tendencies of a group. People with mixed features represent different populations, and presumably harbor greater genetic diversity and adaptability to the environment. Many people find mixed-race individuals attractive and inbred families less so…
…People generally find symmetric faces more attractive than asymmetric ones. Developmental abnormalities are often associated with asymmetries. And in plants, animals and humans, asymmetries often arise from parasitic infections. Symmetry, it turns out, is also an indicator of health…
…The third factor that contributes to facial attractiveness is the effect of hormones… Testosterone produces features that we regard as typically masculine. These include heavier brows, thinner cheeks and bigger, squared-off jaws. But here's a fascinating irony. In many species, if anything, testosterone suppresses the immune system. So the idea that testosterone-infused features are a fitness indicator doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Here, the logic is turned on its head. Instead of a fitness indicator, scientists invoke a handicap principle… Only especially fit men can afford the price that testosterone levies on their immune systems…
The most commonly cited example of [this] handicap is the peacock's tail. This beautiful but cumbersome tail doesn't exactly help the peacock avoid predators and approach peahens. Why should such an extravagant appendage evolve? Even Charles Darwin, in an 1860 letter to Asa Gray wrote that the sight of the peacock's tail made him physically ill. He couldn't explain it with his theory of natural selection, and out of this frustration, he developed the theory of sexual selection.
On this account, the display of the peacock's tail is about sexual enticement, and this enticement means it's more likely the peacock will mate and have offspring. Now, the modern twist on this display argument is that the peacock is also advertising its health to the peahen. Only especially fit organisms can afford to divert resources to maintaining such an extravagant appendage.
-- Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics
"WABI-SABI occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West…" [It] is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. it is a beauty of things unconventional.”
-- Leonard Koren
“Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design makes a product understandable
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Good design is environmentally friendly
Good design is as little design as possible”
-- Dieter Rams
“[T]he concept of beauty in classical Greece was often not limited only to the sphere of aesthetic, but extended to the realm of morality…
…Socrates brought to the philosophical level…“kalokagathia”– the beautiful and the good that functioned in the borderline of ethical-aesthetic notions, i.e., that served as a characteristic of the ideal person…
…Plato understood calocathia as the proportionality of the soul and body. One of his definitions reads: “Kalokagatiya is the ability to choose the best… In Plato, the beautiful often side by side with the good, but he puts the latter higher.
…According to Aristotle, being calcareous means being beautiful in all respects, and virtuous.”
-- https://simplyphilosophy.org/study/beautiful-definition/