Product Description

By offering a strategy for managing a company's total aesthetic output and with chapters on consumer brands, service-based companies, and international organizations, the authors aim to show how any organization can differentiate and elevate themselves above the competition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58521 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From the Author
Review from the Design Management Institute News
I'd like to share with the Amazon.com audience the highlights of a review of the book, which was just published in the Design Management Institute News. The review was written by Rob Wallace, managing partner of Wallace-Church Associates, a strategic brand consultancy.

"If you have not already done so, read this book. Read it from cover to cover. Read every word, from Tom Peter's entertaining forward straight through to the 137 footnoted references. Read it with a highlighter. Read it with a pencil because you'll want to take notes. Read it full knowing that it is one of the most comprehensive and articulate texts on branding. Read it because it's enjoyable as well as informative. Read it because you need to know what's inside. When brand identity and design management are taught at Harvard and Columbia, this work could be the only required textbook. It's a complete analysis of the branding process highlighting its most effective component, the 'sensory brand experience.'"

Customer Reviews

Demystifying the '90s consumer culture
Schmitt and Simonson have accomplished quite a feat--demystifying the dominant visual culture of the 1990s. Their book, Marketing Aesthetics, is the first scholarly text to introduce this topic as one that is to be seriously considered by anyone in business today. This book is written for the entrepreneur who wishes to understand what often separates companies with success and status from those ill-defined in their market. The authors show how aesthetics fit in the well established models of consumer behavior, market research, and communications with customers. Marketing Aesthetics' encompassing sensory considerations are to the turn of the millennium what In Search of Excellence's customer service was to the early 1980s. This book, however, should be of interest to more people than marketing majors. Sociologists, art historians, and cultural critics need this book because it gives a language to define the 1990s, and especially to explain megamalls, Disneyfication, and personal identity achieved through consumption. Schmitt and Simonson elucidate the corporate strategies that have come to define consumer experience at the end of the century. The mall culture of Victoria's Secret, The Body Shop, and Starbuck's Coffee are analyzed to show how the shops, spaces, architecture, packaging, and products, come together to create a total sensory experience for the customer and ultimately result in a purchase. Their examination of internet pages formulate how virtually anybody can create a positive presence in this medium that "levels the field" for small business. Ultimately, this book indicates why post-modernism, simularcum, and the society of the spectacle work. As goods and services like coffee, luxury automobiles, and air travel are relatively the same in and of themselves, it has become necessary to move beyond the utility of the product, and to create meanings and associations that differentiate the company and its offerings. The examples in Marketing Aesthetics are the practical application of displaced meanings that have come to define entities, objects, and consumers.

EXCELLENT - A GOOD WORK
Simonson and Schmitt or Schmitt and Simonson did a fine job here - the book reflects varying styles of writing with Schmitt's foreign style and Simonson's clear English - as I've seen in their other publications too. The substance is real, and full. I'd recommend this work to get a good balance of backgrounds (Schmitt more international and Simonson more domestic) - as theyu describe in the "About the Authors" section.