The Utility of Beauty

I recently came across a design studio tagline that claimed “We design for growth, not aesthetics”.

This struck me as an antithetical statement. Designing for aesthetics is designing for growth.

Beauty is often overlooked in product and growth, but touches on fundamental human wiring of how we direct and filter information. Our neurochemistry is programmed to allocate cognitive resources to beautiful things.

In a world of abundance, cognitive resources become scarce. The use and value we attribute to mental filters for resource allocation becomes even more important. Beauty is one of those filters, and using it strategically in business or product strategy can be wise.

Beauty is also a signal. It indicates what is fit for survival and worth paying attention to. I like to believe that the same is true in product: the beautiful ones have a greater tendency to attract and proliferate.

From an economic and business perspective, dismissing beauty as futile would be a mistake. What you would have otherwise spent on trying to convey a message or influencing behaviour, you can delegate to beauty (and biology) to work its magic.

We default to beauty to inform our desires. Beauty compels us to want and do things without anyone or anything getting involved. It becomes an operational efficiency advantage when applied to demand-generation.

Regardless of one’s rational posture towards beauty, human biology is designed to care. The heuristic of beauty is intuitive to us - it triggers impulses that do not need to be taught or engineered. It might literally be the most “organic” growth strategy there is. We can decide to take advantage of that fact, or decide to ignore it and compensate in other ways.

The question is not whether or not one needs to attend to beauty to succeed, but rather what could happen to their product, business, and the world if they did.

It would make our products better, our businesses more efficient, and the world more beautiful. That is the dream of any marketer, or human being.