This is an article “The Marriage of Art and Business” by Marc Warren
It’s not easy to treat art and business as a happy couple since they actually are two polar opposites. Art connotes creativity and imagination, while business is more associated with strategy and numbers. Arguably, these bedfellows may either come into blows with each other or live happily ever after, depending on how people see the marriage.
Nowadays, art has more to do in business than when there was no internet as the larger group of consumers (millennials and Generation Zers) are getting more and more engaged in visual design. They also place a great premium on brands that support social awareness (or what the young ones say being ‘woke’), and contributes to sustainable development. What art does here is compel and raise awareness for brands that eventually lead target markets to go through the marketing funnel and end up as consumers. This marketing awareness among today’s consumers is so powerful that advertisers can create simple art materials that use minimal words to convince markets to try out their brands.
When we talk about the private companies’ perspective on the importance of art and design to the industry, successful organizations such as Apple, Facebook and Google who all go for simplicity and minimal elements have blazed a trail for others to follow. The late great Steve Jobs quoted another late great Pablo Picasso who said “Good artists copy, great artists steal” which somehow illustrates the relationship between art and business by how Jobs approved Apple artworks with simple monochrome designs bearing the company’s logo and product during his time.
Practically most of what we see around us today-- furniture, mobile phones, food items, drove us to buy them because of the aesthetics we saw on ads. Art is an essential factor in how consumers decide what they need or want which is why businesses place higher stakes in their production. Each aesthetic detail, be it color, structure, or perspective, appeals to our personality and emotions.
Then there’s also the progress of fashion technology as most clothing designers have joined the art and industry coupling bandwagon. Ralph Lauren started creating smart fitness shirts that enable its wearers to know their heart rates, breathing, and steps. Since technology is the way forward in entrepreneurship, art designers have also embraced functionality to gain more sales.
At any rate, art has and will always have its own ability to reach consumers on a personal level which business executives can never put price tags on. Oftentimes artworks for marketing collaterals go through a long process of 'back and forth' in their approval journey because artists have a hard time retaining their clever visual ideas while marketing bosses are pursuing more spoon-fed messages. That then manifests a collision between the profound challenge to think versus the simple ease to comprehend. The only time an approval can be met is when the visual aesthetic finally connects with the general perspective of any beholder. And that’s what makes art and business work well together.
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