Aesthetics, its qualities and attributes

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: When one looks at a product, one finds that it has two characteristics which are exogenous variables—one, the hedonic value of a product, which is defined as ‘the level of pleasure that the product or service is capable of giving to the average consumer’, and the other, the utilitarian value of a product, which is defined as the level of usefulness of a product involving the everyday problems faced by the average consumer (Chauduri, 2002). These always make the product get liked or disliked from two different points, that is, its functional and non-functional aspects.

If one studies the definition of aesthetics in the marketplace, then aesthetics, to some extent, may be defined as the study of the buyer’s cognition, affective and behavioural response to media, entertainment and arts. The aesthetic experience involves attending to, perceiving and appreciating an object with regard to whatever utilitarian function it might perform. Starting from the Greek ideas of structural order to the Gestalt psychology of the principle of unity, many functional products have gained competitive advantage by satisfying aesthetic as well as utilitarian needs, which are functional and non-functional (Holbrook and Schindler, 1994).A product is first purely designed from the functional point of view. Once the utility aspect is taken care of, the aesthetic aspect is taken into consideration.

Two qualities of aesthetic response—the first called ‘hedonic value’ refers to the diffuse sense of pleasure or generalised enjoyment that one feels by looking at a beautiful or attractive object; and the second is the profound experience, which deals with the feeling of being deeply moved.

This points to the fact that aesthetics can be broadly looked upon as the sense of pleasure one achieves by mere physical attraction related to any of the faculties. This means that the aesthetics of a product affect us in a complete sense and not just in the visual sense.

It is said that ‘over the time various expressions of beauty have been made and beauty that inspires desire, passion, and pleasure—the beauty of people, clothes, popular act was correlated with fashion, marketing and advertising’. This again focuses on the hedonic value of the product.