What if beauty was a KPI?
Humans tend to turn things we have to do into things we desire. Let's explore the cultivation of desire as a business-critical factor.
Humans are the masters of turning things we have to do into things we enjoy doing.
We’re the animals who turned “we have to eat or we’ll starve to death” into “let’s go to that new restaurant in town, they just won a Michelin star”. We are the animals who turned “we have to multiply or we’ll go extinct” into “I do”. We’re the animals who turned “we have to wear clothes or we’ll freeze to death” into “this jacket is so me; every time I wear it, I feel like I’ve discovered my real self”.
In other words, we’ve turned things that are teleologic—that we do for an ulterior goal—into things that are autotelic—that we do for their own sake.
However, if you look at where branding and marketing has gone this last decade, it would appear that we’re heading into the diametrically opposed direction: lots of extrinsic purpose and very little intrinsic pleasure. It’s no longer “drink this because it tastes amazing”. It’s “drink this to do x”, where x can be anything from “save the planet” to “crush your goals”.
Which leads me to the question: how many problems that are not aesthetic could be solved if beauty was top of the list of KPIs?
Think about it: how many NIMBYs would there be if the newly proposed 1,000-house estate was going to be as beautiful as Venice?
How many cars would be thrown on the trash heap if they were designed for people to fall in love with them every time they drive to the shops?
Or, in your own life, how many times would you skip exercise if—instead of thinking about it as something you have to do—you delighted in the intrinsic pleasure of doing it?
Now that it’s framed like that, you can see the value of beauty and how weird it is that it should be a contrarian thing to aspire to.
This contrarian aspect is our opportunity. The greatest value is often hidden where nobody is looking. To illustrate, I’ll quote Bernard Arnault, who a couple of years ago wrote the following in an LVMH quarterly report: “The principal objective is neither growth, nor profit, but the development of desirability”.
I wrote earlier that humans are the animals who turn things they have to do into things they enjoy doing. A better way of saying it is that we’re the animals who turn needs into desires. Which means that, just as many businesses ask themselves what problem they are solving, there is great value to be uncovered by asking ourselves what desire we are cultivating.