Pauline Brown

When it comes to aesthetics, editorial command is all-important; as Coco Chanel said, “Elegance is refusal.”

Aesthetic businesses tend to draw on all five senses and provide products or services that are a pleasure to buy and consume.

Aesthetic propositions shift consumers’ motivations from functional and transactional to experiential, aspirational, and memorable.

Computers can and will solve more and more functional problems; they cannot and will not be able to deliver new and meaningful ways to reconnect us with our humanity.

Studies show that feelings, not analytic thinking, drive an estimated 85 percent of buying decisions.

These companies have products similar to their competitors’: Apple’s smartphones have comparable computing power to Samsung’s; Airbnb, Marriott, and Craigslist offer competing accommodation services to travelers. Aesthetics is the differential

Learn to recognize and use this ability to distinguish between what makes an object or experience pleasurable or not in other areas.

Though fast-fashion brands may churn out patterns, styles, and silhouettes similar to those of coveted high-end designer wares, the value of those replicas diminishes with each wear. Just as with a brand-new car, there is little resale value in a knock-off. On the other hand, Hermès Birkin bags often sell at auction for far more than their original retail price.4

What the company needed most was not more in-depth financial models but the insights of a person who genuinely enjoyed buying and applying beauty products.

Each of us is a product of where we’ve been and what we’ve done