The Enlightenment of Marketing Aesthetics to Contemporary Aesthetic Education ()
1. Introduction
Aesthetics permeates every aspect of life. When we take pictures, whether it’s a selfie or a landscape shot, our subjective aesthetic sense comes into play. People with different perceptions of beauty will choose different angles for composition. In marketing, aesthetics plays a vital role [1]. However, its importance is often overlooked in daily life. I believe that only by recognizing the significance of aesthetics and making full use of it in marketing can we achieve success.
2. The Role of Aesthetics in Marketing Aesthetics
2.1. Aesthetics as a Strategic Means
In marketing, aesthetics is not only a strategic approach, but also an essential element for identity management. By strategic approach, we mean strategic measures, which are the means and methods to achieve strategic goals. Aesthetics is vividly demonstrated in strategic approaches, with the primary aspect being the creation of identity and image through aesthetics [2]. In our daily lives, brands that resonate deeply with people usually have their own distinct images and identities. Take the globally popular vodka as an example; it has a unique image. When we look at the vodka bottle, we can sense its product features and culture. In its advertisements, the minimalist bottle style and font are combined with unexpected sensations, providing a visual treat [3]. This form of expression builds its own brand image and enhances its recognizability. The vodka advertisements effectively showcase aesthetics as a strategic approach. By integrating natural landscapes with the vodka bottle, the advertisements further accentuate the premium feel of the bottle. Customers, attracted by the exterior design, develop a sense of product identification, thus accelerating the sales of vodka. The vodka company’s full utilization of aesthetics in advertising and marketing has turned items like advertisements and bottles into collectibles for enthusiasts [3]. Evidently, aesthetics, as a strategic approach, is a highly advantageous strategic measure.
2.2. Aesthetics in Identity Management
Another crucial role of aesthetics in marketing is identity management. Identity management is different from brand management. Identity creates images and identity projects. Nakaniishi Takeo was the first to point out that aesthetics is of great significance to identity management, and a framework is needed to utilize aesthetics to handle identity. Identity planning encompasses the past, present, and future. Only a systematic identity can promote the development of an enterprise. An enterprise and its brand image are established through identity [2].
Aesthetic elements are contained within identity factors. Take Steve Jobs’ Apple as an example. The brand’s logo is a silver-colored apple with a small piece missing on the right side as if it has been bitten. The unique logo has become the identifier for all of Apple’s electronic products. Jobs believed that nothing in the world is perfect, so the apple has a “bite” in the upper right corner. From an aesthetic perspective, the missing part on the right side of the apple prevents it from looking like a tomato. The visual presentation of this apple logo, with a silver body paired with a white apple, gives the entire product a strong sense of technology. When customers see the product logo, most of them will be attracted by its unique appearance. Coupled with Apple’s iOS system, the product has become deeply ingrained in people’s minds, gaining a competitive edge in marketing.
In marketing aesthetics, the style of an enterprise is established through identity, covering various aspects such as product design, advertising design, and product packaging. The enterprise’s style is reflected in vision (color, font, etc.), hearing, and touch. It is determined according to the enterprise’s theme. Also, the enterprise style reflects the enterprise’s characteristics and theme. The style and theme presented by the enterprise can be feedback through the overall impression of customers.
In identity management, integrated identity management also holds a very important position. Integrated identity management includes global identity management, as well as retail locations and the environment. A typical example of global identity management is Lego: the Danish entertainment concept. Lego is the fourth-largest toy manufacturer in the world. Lego toys are assembled from building blocks of different colors, which not only exercises imagination but also allows users to engage in color matching. The products are distributed to sales organizations and dealers in various countries. Lego has become a global toy, setting off an entertainment concept, and it has more than 60,000 retail stores worldwide. Evidently, Lego has fully utilized the integrated identity elements of global identity management, printing brochures in 25 different languages.
It can be seen that products that are deeply rooted in people’s hearts always have their unique features, making them the first choice for customers when they are in need. Achieving such success is inseparable from aesthetics as a strategic means of identity management in marketing.
3. Contemporary Aesthetic Education in China
3.1. What is Contemporary Aesthetic Education in China
The Chinese nation has always regarded “beauty” as an important part of life, and the education and inheritance of “beauty” as an important cornerstone of national development. From ancient times to the present, aesthetic education has not only been highly valued, but also demonstrated distinct characteristics of Eastern thinking in the precipitation of history, becoming an indispensable cultural force in promoting the progress of Chinese history.
Contemporary aesthetic education in China refers to the aesthetic education after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It stipulates an all-round development education for students in terms of morality, intelligence, physical fitness, and aesthetics [4]. The requirements for aesthetic education are specific and feasible. For kindergartens, the requirement is to cultivate children’s concepts and interests in beauty and enhance their imagination and creativity. For primary school students, the requirement is to enable children to have a concept of beauty and a preliminary ability to appreciate art. For middle school students, in terms of cultural level, the requirement is raised further: “Cultivate students’ aesthetic concepts and inspire their artistic creativity.”
Educating people with beauty, using aesthetics to guide people’s outlooks on life, the world, and values, and establishing lofty ideals and beliefs are important ways to improve cultural confidence in socialism with Chinese characteristics [5]. Aesthetic education is a process of appreciating beauty, perceiving beauty, and creating beauty. It is not only aesthetic education, sentiment education, and spiritual education, but also an education to enrich imagination and cultivate innovative awareness. In today’s view, our advocacy of aesthetic education is actually to let aesthetic education play its due role in the all-round development of people, enabling people to capture beauty in daily life, and further enabling people to feel the beauty of life rather than being stuck in the dark side of life.
The essence of aesthetic education is still education. Aesthetic education refers to all human aesthetic activities that have a subtle impact on people’s subjective consciousness and exist in all aspects of people’s lives [5]. For example, when traveling and enjoying the natural beauty, the exclamation of the great rivers and mountains of the motherland, or the empathy when people appreciate art works, etc. Therefore, aesthetic education plays an irreplaceable role in cultivating new Chinese youth in the new era.
Aesthetic education actually cultivates our aesthetic and creative abilities. The carriers of aesthetic education are not only limited to art. Natural beauty, scientific beauty, social beauty, etc., should all become important resources for aesthetic education. Aesthetic education in the new era should start from multiple aspects. Break the boundaries of multiple disciplines and achieve the integrated development of multiple disciplines. Vigorously carry out interdisciplinary education and teaching with aesthetic education as the theme and build an educational system that comprehensively cultivates morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetics, and labor, which obviously conforms to the positioning and value of education in the new era.
3.2. Problems Existing in Contemporary Aesthetic Education in China
Firstly, the educational content is not rich enough, and the teaching methods are not innovative. The content of aesthetic education is insufficiently diverse. Due to the traditional educational models and curriculum systems, classroom activities in most schools are monotonous and dull, failing to attract students’ interest. For instance, when we had music classes in primary and middle schools, we couldn’t truly experience the beauty of music. We just sang along with the music teacher mechanically, without really feeling the charm of music or conducting serious appreciation. Additionally, because of the importance of exams to students’ grades, most teachers focus only on imparting theories rather than practical application abilities. Especially in high school, for the sake of the college entrance examination, teachers of major subjects often occupy the time of music, art, and physical education classes. I believe this has a negative impact on students’ minds, making them think these courses are unimportant. On the contrary, these courses are as important as Chinese, mathematics, and foreign languages, all playing an irreplaceable role in students’ physical and mental health. From this perspective, the inadequacy of contemporary aesthetic education lies in the lack of rich content and innovative teaching methods.
Secondly, there is a weak awareness of cultural heritage protection. Contemporary teachers have a weak sense of cultural heritage protection. They neither pass on historical culture to the next generation nor apply current popular culture to teaching. As a result, few people in the current era truly pay attention to and appreciate excellent cultural works. Firstly, there are problems with teachers. Not all teachers attach importance to aesthetic education. Some teachers just read from textbooks without truly inspiring students. Secondly, students don’t really understand excellent cultural works. They often focus only on the plot of stories. In novels, they don’t truly feel the power of beautiful words. When watching movies, they don’t seriously enjoy the beauty of the pictures and the pleasure brought by the background music. When appreciating cultural works, they only see the surface and don’t appreciate the works as a whole or in-depth. Most of them just skim through. Another problem in contemporary aesthetic education is that few people truly focus on and appreciate literary works.
Thirdly, the experimental conditions are poor, and the experimental equipment is far from advanced. At present, most schools are characterized by the “three olds” (old ideas, old systems, old equipment). The experimental conditions are poor, and schools can hardly afford expensive experimental equipment. Therefore, there are few opportunities for students to truly experience and understand relevant content in physics, biology, geology, etc. The number of times that primary and middle schools organize visits to museums, science and technology museums, etc., is far from enough in terms of time. True aesthetic education cannot be achieved. Students are not given enough time to appreciate the mystery of cultural relics and the wonders of science and technology, and they don’t truly feel the beauty of museums and science and technology museums. Aesthetic education has not taken root in people’s hearts.
Fourthly, there is a shortage of teaching staff. Currently, the strength of the teaching staff is significantly lower than the ideal level. Due to the increasing pressure on talents, teachers can hardly bear the work pressure. Moreover, because exams still account for a large proportion of the sense of achievement, there are also latent problems at the teaching staff’s level. Due to the pressure of exams, teachers tend to attach great importance to grades and often neglect the role of aesthetic education. The allocation of teaching resources is also unreasonable. There are relatively few teachers who focus on aesthetic education. It’s not that only music and art teachers teach aesthetics, but all subject teachers should pay attention to the teaching of beauty because different subjects have different kinds of beauty, such as natural, scientific, literary, historical beauty, etc. Even in physical education, there is the beauty of movement and life. However, due to the pressure of exam-oriented education, subject teachers rarely emphasize aesthetics and mostly focus on grades, thus neglecting aesthetic education.
4. Enlightenments of Marketing Aesthetics to Contemporary Aesthetic Education
4.1. Strengthen Aesthetic Awareness
In today’s era, consumers’ aesthetic awareness is constantly increasing. Therefore, to better attract consumers’ attention, it is necessary to strengthen the cultivation of aesthetic awareness. Only by strengthening aesthetic education to cultivate students’ sensitivity to product appearance, packaging, advertising content, and expression methods can children judge the quality of products and reject inferior ones. Only when aesthetic awareness is enhanced can students truly experience deep emotions and understand the beauty conveyed by works when visiting museums and art exhibitions and appreciating literary works such as movies. From a small perspective, enhancing aesthetic awareness helps improve personal comprehensive qualities. From a large perspective, it contributes to building national cultural confidence. Only by truly achieving cultural confidence can national consciousness be strengthened.
An important inspiration that marketing aesthetics brings to contemporary aesthetic education is to strengthen the education of aesthetic awareness. Aesthetic awareness is an indispensable part of aesthetic education and plays an irreplaceable role.
4.2. Emphasize Innovative Thinking
With the increasingly fierce market competition, enterprises must constantly think innovatively to maintain their competitive edge. Therefore, we should also regard innovative thinking as an important part of teaching. It is crucial to help enterprises maintain their competitive advantage by continuously thinking and inventing unique and useful concepts or unique and useful systems. To cultivate innovative thinking, first, we need to enhance students’ innovative awareness. Students are required to think about problems from multiple aspects, find the root causes of problems, and be able to think about problems from different angles. Second, cultivate students’ innovative ability: Cultivate students’ innovative ability through practical activities, allowing them to experience the joy brought by innovation in practice. In practice, not only can innovative ability be exercised, but aesthetic awareness can also be improved. In practice, like “crossing the river by feeling the stones”, students keep exploring and discovering various forms of beauty. The last point is to guide students to discover unknown things: Teachers should teach children how to discover unknown things and how to try different methods to achieve goals. Let students understand that there is not only one way to solve a problem, thus exercising their thinking ability.
An important inspiration of marketing aesthetics to contemporary aesthetic education is the emphasis on innovative thinking. The design of Apple’s logo, the bottle design, and the advertising design of vodka all have their own innovations, which lead to marketing success. The same is true for our aesthetic education. Only by focusing on innovation can we achieve success. For example, our current domestic animations, such as “Big Fish & Begonia” and “Boonie Bears”, have achieved success based on continuous innovation.
4.3. Focus on Personality Cultivation
From marketing aesthetics, one of the successful factors worthy of our learning is identity management. The success of marketing aesthetics is inseparable from comprehensive identity management factors, among which the most important is the human factor. Personality cultivation is an essential factor in cultivating outstanding talents, and our contemporary aesthetic education should also follow this principle.
Personality cultivation is one of the most significant factors influencing life achievements and also one of the key factors for winners in market competition. Therefore, we should consider personality cultivation an important part of teaching, enabling children to gradually establish integrity, courage, diligence, progressiveness, optimism, and adherence to principles. Pay attention to the cultivation of teamwork ability: Most of the time, we work in teams or collaborate to achieve a goal. Therefore, we should focus on cultivating teamwork ability. Aesthetic education needs to help students establish correct outlooks on life, the world, and values. And in contemporary aesthetic education, it is necessary to guide students to establish cultural confidence.
4.4. Create a Cultural Atmosphere
Nowadays, our cultural confidence has been enhanced, and the recognition of traditional culture has also increased. For example, the Yingge Dance in Chaoshan is a cultural form that is now loved by many people. The inheritance and protection of traditional culture have also improved. The country has issued relevant laws and regulations, and the public is also more conscious. The current development and inheritance of the recitation of traditional culture are the best examples. Although the cultural atmosphere has improved, it is still far from enough.
Contemporary aesthetic education can further create a deeper cultural atmosphere through the following three aspects. First, establish cultural cognition. To improve contemporary aesthetic education, we must first establish cultural cognition, guide students to establish correct value orientations, and enable them to understand the connotations of traditional culture. Second, strengthen practical teaching: Strengthen practical teaching in the classroom and experience the connotation of traditional culture through practical actions. For example, we can hold Chinese traditional culture experience days or rich and colorful folk activities. Try to create an atmosphere conducive to teacher-student interaction so that teachers have the opportunity to inspire students’ understanding of excellent Chinese culture through language, expressions, and gestures and then promote the formation of positive energy. The last is to pay attention to campus culture, strive to create a campus atmosphere full of genuine Chinese charm and infiltrate Chinese historical figures and events into the campus through different means, allowing students to feel the elegance left by different historical periods. Especially on college campuses, we can further create a cultural atmosphere by holding more cultural festivals and cultural clubs, making everyone intoxicated in it.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.