In late 2015, I met with Frances Frei, then senior associate dean for faculty planning and recruiting at Harvard Business School, to discuss my interest in teaching. At the time, I was the chairman of the North American division of the world’s leading luxury company, LVMH Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton. Based on my résumé, Frances assumed that a course on brand management, retailing, or luxury marketing would be in the offing. Maybe . . . except that the idea of teaching any of these topics made me bristle. “I’m not interested in merely passing on what I’ve learned as an industry insider,” I said. “I’d like to explore how my insights and experiences can be applied to other businesses.” Frei seemed intrigued and asked me what the class would be called. “The Business of Aesthetics,” I blurted out. She lit up. “I love it!” As she started to jot it down, she looked up and said, “I only have one question: How do you spell it?” It came as no surprise, then, that the course I proposed would be a first for the university.
Within forty-eight hours, I received my teaching contract, and two months later, I officially joined the faculty at Harvard—an extraordinary turnaround time for an academic institution. Graduate students welcomed the course. I was not altogether surprised by their level of interest. People, in general, hunger for new angles in business. The concept of aesthetic value is not normally associated with financial value. Yet, when I look back at my own career—from spearheading acquisitions for the Estée Lauder Companies to setting strategy for Avon Products to investing in retail companies at The Carlyle Group—my appreciation and understanding of aesthetics arguably contributed as much if not more to my professional success (and the success of the businesses I worked with) than did my Wharton MBA or rigorous analytic training at earlier employers such as Bain & Company.
This book is intended to bring that Harvard classroom to you. My goal is to show you how aesthetics can be used to unlock value and help businesses succeed. I also want to help you rediscover and refine your own personal aesthetic gifts—what I call aesthetic intelligence, or “the other AI,” and apply your AI to your own business in ways that will create and sustain financial value
If you see aesthetics as merely appealing to the superficiality of consumerism or the whims of fashion, please hear me out. Aesthetics is far more essential than that—it is a crucial element of business strategy. Businesses, both established and start-up, ought to take this proposition seriously.
In this book, I make four fundamental points: (1) aesthetics matter in business (and beyond); (2) aesthetic intelligence can be cultivated; in fact, each of us possesses far more capacity than we use; (3) aesthetic vision and leadership have the power to transform companies and even entire sectors; and (4) in the absence of aesthetics, most businesses are susceptible to potentially fatal challenges. In other words, when a company’s aesthetics fail, so does the company.
Each chapter provides insights from case studies of companies that have used aesthetics to build market share, gain customer loyalty, and create lasting value. Though I rely on theory and science to explain the power of aesthetics, the stories of people—the business founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders—and their companies are at the heart of this book. The case studies include dozens of profiles of companies and their leaders, many of whom I have had the good fortune to have worked with. Real-world examples, in which businesses’ aesthetic properties enhance or detract from their overall value, show how these principles work in real time.
I am also a pragmatist, so although I believe that each of us has the potential to boost our aesthetic intelligence, it takes time and effort. It is just like developing other muscles. To that end, I’ve included approaches and concrete exercises for building your aesthetic muscles and using them to win over customers, starting with exercises for enhancing attunement, or developing a higher consciousness of your environment and the effect of its stimuli; interpretation, or translating your emotional reactions (both positive and negative) to sensorial stimuli into thoughts that form the basis of an aesthetic position, preference, or expression; articulation, or expressing the aesthetic ideals for your brand, product, or service such that team members not only grasp the vision but also can execute it with precision; and curation, or organizing, integrating, and editing a wide variety of inputs and ideals to achieve maximum impact. When it comes to aesthetics, editorial command is all-important; as Coco Chanel said, “Elegance is refusal.”
Though I am your guide or sensei in this book, I was not born with a particular knack for aesthetics. It took time to understand what was aesthetically appealing and why, and why aesthetics is so important in both business and life. The process of aesthetic discovery is not trivial. Creativity and taste are not things you can relegate to metrics and analytics. The process of developing “the other AI” is highly personal and qualitative. That makes it no less valuable. On the contrary, in an age in which most businesses have lost their raison d’être, I believe it is an imperative. After all, people do not need more “stuff.” But they do need opportunities to learn and discover, they need ways to express who they are and how they feel, and they need tools and inspiration to make themselves and the world more beautiful.
A pivotal moment in my own aesthetic evolution happened in 1976, when I was ten years old. I yearned for only three things in life: pierced ears, a puppy, and a Panasonic Take-N-Tape. I begged my parents for all of them, though getting any one of them would have made me deliriously happy. Ten years passed before I had my ears pierced and another thirty before I adopted my first-ever puppy. But for Chanukah of that bicentennial year, my parents gave me that coveted cassette recorder in electric blue.
The Take-N-Tape had an auratic power over me, with its lightweight yet sturdy design, its groovy curved edges, the shiny, glossy finish on the paint, the starlike speaker grooves in the upper right corner. Its bold, cheerful color coordinated well with my beloved and oft-worn polyester Adidas tracksuit. I marveled at the device’s capacity to record my voice and play my Shaun Cassidy tapes. It could even receive AM/FM radio on the go, thanks to its dual capacity to work by battery or plug. Above all, I loved pressing the stubby black buttons: play, fast-forward, rewind, and especially record. I was the only one of my girlfriends who owned a Take-N-Tape. That enhanced my popularity and also served as leverage for playdates. My friends and I would spend hours listening to playbacks of our own voices. We were in awe of the power of technology.
I wasn’t the only preteen who coveted that little wondrous machine; it was one of Panasonic’s most successful and iconic consumer product launches of that era. Though there were many other portable tape recorders on the market, none had the visual and emotional power of the Take-N-Tape. Looking back, I believe my passion for the product was based on its distinct and particular look and feel. That was one of the first of my many “aesthetic epiphanies.”
Growing up in a traditional European Jewish home (albeit in suburban New York), with cabinets full of curios and heirlooms from the Victorian Age, I found the machine all the more alluring for its pared-down Space Age design and its symbol of reinvention. Indeed, the Take-N-Tape perfectly captured its Japanese maker’s longtime design philosophy: to “create provocative, bold, attractive designs with an emotional connection, by honing in on the essence and characteristics of the product.”1
Such personal epiphanies—like the Take-N-Tape—continue to shape my tastes, desires, and buying behavior four decades later. I grew up in Great Neck, an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Long Island, where F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived and dreamed up the Great Gatsby’s nouveau-riche West Egg. The girls around me grew up fast, especially when it came to their shopping habits, and I observed and absorbed everything they bought and wore.
By thirteen, most girls of my generation owned their first pair of designer jeans, preferably Sasson, which was distinguished from less coveted brands by its iconic white stitching, red label, and “Ooh la la” campaign. My parents had neither the means nor the tolerance for such indulgences, and my babysitting income hardly covered the $34 entry price for that brand of jeans, so I turned my attention (and babysitting dollars) to premium hair care instead. Vidal Sassoon shampoo gave me hope. Specifically, I believed that by using such a luxurious product, my hair would become as straight, silky, and chic as the women in Vidal’s ads. I longed for the full range of products, from the shampoo and protein remoisturizer to the finishing rinse. Beyond the formulations, the tubular shape and rich chocolate brown color of the bottles captivated me. I was charmed by the idea of “Sassooning.” Above all, I loved the cherry almond scent that infused my entire shower as soon as I began to lather up.
In my first year of high school, the accessories brand LeSportsac took off. Every girl I knew had at least one of those ripstop parachute nylon totes. The coolest girls amassed an entire family of Sacs. Each LeSportsac came with a matching pouch, and the most daring girls intermixed their bags and pouches to create unique ensembles. Our individuality was also expressed through our choice of colors. Mine was olive green, not because it was one of my favorite hues—it wasn’t—but because I liked what I thought it suggested: that I was original, soulful, and sophisticated.
In 1984, as a first-year student at Dartmouth College, I was introduced to an entirely different aesthetic: that of the New England prep school kids. Although I never sought to dress like them—in truth, I eschewed the defeminized look of my female classmates—I was nonetheless enthralled by their carefree, fun-loving, and confident air. Physically free but not tarty. Tousled yet clean-cut. The style of clothing was perhaps best represented by L.L.Bean. At the time, the factory store in Maine was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Many classmates would take overnight trips to pick up yet another fleece pullover or pair of duck boots.
The aesthetics of Dartmouth College went well beyond the conventional “uniform” of the student body. It was embedded in all sorts of institutional codes such as the school’s emblematic use of pine green—Pantone PMS 349, to be exact—its Latin motto (“Vox clamantis in deserto,” or “A voice crying out in the wilderness”), and its traditional seal with reference to its 1769 founding. The spirit of the school was expressed through the natural elements as well: the jagged mountains, tough granite, and tall, stalwart evergreens of New Hampshire. It was all a constant reminder that the Dartmouth brand was built on a distinctly American tradition, one that revered the wilderness and was willing to forgo sensual comforts in favor of a hardy, pioneering spirit. By the time I graduated from Dartmouth, my own sense of style had become, well, rather muddled.
Years of contrasting influences—from European finesse to Long Island flamboyance to New England utilitarianism—contradicted styles that I had once found appealing and undermined whatever appetite or confidence I might have had to tie these conflicting elements together. Moreover, my rigorous education, which had served to sharpen my intellect, only numbed my senses. By the time I entered my twenties, my entire being was confined to my head. Personal expressions of taste were shut down or ignored, and all my decisions and actions were based on rational assessment. In the process, I not only lost my sense of style—I lost my way.
It took more than two decades for me to get back on track, aesthetically speaking. One of the first measures was to stop divorcing my professional (or public) identity from my personal one. When I first started my career, I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that in order to be taken seriously and be successful I would need to block off all nonessential and nonconventional expressions of who I was or at least how I wanted to be seen. In other words, I would need to fit in and become stylistically invisible.
In reality, my biggest breakthroughs, both personal and professional, came when I had the courage to stand out and to showcase the one and only thing that I actually do better than anyone else in the world—that is, to be Pauline Brown. The more I experimented with that advantage, my personal aesthetic advantage, the more attention I drew, praise I received, confidence I gained, and success I enjoyed. And the more I could apply what I knew to the businesses I was helping to acquire, shape, or grow.
In 1997, when I entered the beauty industry, I started to understand the power of melding my personal self with my professional self. By immersing myself in a sector that deeply values beauty, style, and creativity, I was given not only every opportunity to express my own tastes but also the tools to experiment with different looks and techniques. Even then, I made plenty of stylistic mistakes along the way. At one point, in an attempt to restore my then–butter blond hair back to auburn, I ended up with a full head of fuchsia. On another occasion, I wore five-inch stiletto sandals to a company-sponsored picnic, effectively aerating the lawn with each step (and ruining my $500 Manolo Blahniks). With each experience, I continued to learn, grow, and evolve. While I was careful not to repeat my mistakes, I never stopped taking risks and experimenting.
By the time I landed one of the senior-most roles in the global fashion industry as head of the North American division of LVMH Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton, home to about seventy luxury brands in sectors including ready-to-wear, cosmetics, and fine jewelry, I had worked out a strong sense of personal style—one that embraced many of the disparate elements of my past but also looked beyond fashion for inspiration and self-expression. I also was able to see the business value in this personal evolution and apply my aesthetic judgment—alongside more traditional financial and operational analysis—to solving most business problems. I saw the importance of hiring and retaining the right talent, setting and reinforcing a strong internal culture of aesthetics, as well as investing in creative resources.
In this book, you will learn why this is important, not just for design-oriented companies such as LVMH but for all companies. You will learn ways to fine-tune your own judgment and style and develop the finesse needed to balance commercial and creative interests. I believe you will emerge with an understanding of what constitutes an aesthetic business and how to apply the principles to your own business to achieve an aesthetic advantage.