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This paper presents a questionnaire study of brand‐specific perceptions of automotive design using subjective rating methods. The purpose of the paper is to explore the multiple modalities of the visual product experience of automobile design as perceived by the general public. Furthermore, the experiences were analysed using a framework for visual product experience (VPE).

Respondents were asked to assess the design of two car models at an international car show in relation to brand perceptions and visually perceived attributes using, among other tools, visual analogue scales. Analysis was done using a qualitative technique.

Results from the study indicate that there is a correlation/relation between experiential modes, in that respondents tended to rate attributes consistently high or low across modes. This implies that if the aesthetics are not perceived as favourable, neither is the expression of the car. Furthermore, respondents' assessments of aesthetic appeal and expression are on an average strikingly similar, suggesting that the level of aesthetic appeal correlates with the level of semantic understanding of the design. The general rating of emotional response follows a similar consistent pattern for the two studied cars.

Study approach as a way to gain insights into subjective perceptions of products based on appreciation and interpretation of visual product form. VPE framework recognising, mapping and clarifying the multiple modes of the visual experience.

Since the late 1980s, brands have gained centre stage in marketing and in the managerial discourse. From having been a mere marker that identifies the producer or the origin of a product, the brand is today increasingly becoming the product that is consumed. For the corporation, the brand is conceptualised as the essence of the firm, its most crucial “asset”. In the literature, branding is described as a process of expressing core values through the use of persuasive stories. By questioning the conception of brands as corporately managed stories, the article aims to re‐conceptualise branding as a process of aesthetic expression, where the conventional distinctions between senders and receivers become blurred. The paper looks into how brands have become depicted in the branding literature, and thereafter discusses the narrative and pictorial modes of communication. On the basis of this, the article finally discusses how images are used and reused in the joint construction of brands, thus challenging the idea of brands as stories crafted and controlled by the corporation.

This paper aims to contribute to the body of practical knowledge about reorienting teacher education to address sustainability by reflecting on an action research experience from a study course on sustainability in a regional university.

It contemplates the usage of aesthetic learning to activate pre-service teachers’ presentational knowing about inclusion and exclusion – modes of relationships which are essentially sustainable and unsustainable, respectively. The research participants are involved in creation, interpretation and discussion of drawings-cum-concept-maps about inclusive and exclusionary relationships in social and educational contexts.

The participants are found to express their knowledge through presentational forms such as colour, spatial alignment, direction and mimicry.

This qualitative study being an action research into the particulars of a specific situation precludes abstract generalisation. Yet it is hoped that the findings may illuminate related concerns in similar contexts as educators seek inspiration and guidance for improving their practices of implementing teacher education for sustainability.

The paper proposes aesthetic learning as a means to involve pre-service teachers in active generation of personally meaningful and practically applicable insights, enabling communication of complex ideas and fostering emotional engagement with peers. It is also suggested as a pathway towards accessing, exploring and, potentially, enriching the participants’ assumptions about relational issues such as inclusion and exclusion as pre-service teachers strive to make personal sense of what it means to live sustainably.

This paper aims to consider the visual literacy mobilized by consumers in their use of brand aesthetics to construct and communicate a curated self.

The research surveyed a range of visual material from Instagram. Specifically, the goal was to use “compositional interpretation”, an approach to visual analysis that is not methodologically explicit but which, in itself, draws upon the visual literacy of the researcher to provide a descriptive analysis of the formal visual quality of images as distinct from their symbolic resonances. The research also incorporates 10 phenomenological-type interviews with consumers. Consistent with a phenomenological approach, informants were selected because they have “lived” the experience under investigation, in this case requiring them to be keen consumers of the Orla Kiely brand.

Findings indicate that consumers deploy their visual literacy in strategic visualization (imaginatively planning and coordinating artifacts with other objects in their collection, positioning and using them as part of an overall visual repertoire), composition (becoming active producers of images) and emergent design (turning design objects into display pieces, repurposing design objects or simply borrowing brand aesthetics to create designed objects of their own).

This research has implications for the understanding of visual literacy within consumer culture. Engaging comprehensively with the visual compositions of consumers, this research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics or concepts of social status to examine the self-conscious creation of a curated self. The achievement of such a curated self depends on visual literacy and the deployment of abstract design language by consumers in the pursuit of both aesthetic satisfaction and social communication.

This research has implications for brand designers and managers in terms of how they might control or manage the use of brand aesthetics by consumers.

To date, there has been very little consumer research that explores the nature of visual literacy and even less that offers an empirical investigation of this concept within the context of brand aesthetics. The research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics and social status to consider the deployment of abstract visual language in communicating the curated self.

The term “everyday” can be found in almost every qualitative sociological study done today, though its usage, meaning, and importance are often taken for granted. The everyday world has not always had such a prominent place, however. This paper examines the development of “the everyday” an as area of study through everyday life sociologies and cultural studies, using quilting to compare sociological usage to the development of the everyday as a topic in the arts in the 1960s. As a focal point for discussions of art hierarchies, as cultural resistance, and as a form of women's cultural production, quilting's role in everyday life illuminates the new way of seeing that everyday life sociologies developed.

This article aims to explore the potential of Dewey's theory of aesthetic expression to expand knowledge about aesthetics in branding and better understand how brands work. The paper aims to mine the pragmatic theory of aesthetic expression as involving artistry, intention and imagination to reveal the role beauty plays alongside usefulness in defining and refining brand image and meaning.

Dewey's dialectical method of holistically combining tensions such as beauty and usefulness is applied to brand theory and used to critique current brand management practices.

The application of the theory of aesthetic expression emphasizes: understanding humans holistically in order to explain how beauty and expression create value and enrich lives; redefining brand ownership and use to accommodate the aesthetic ways people handle expression/expressiveness; and managing brands with appreciation of how beauty empowers them to attract users.

Seven dialectical tensions featured in Dewey's theory are identified and developed into holistic propositions for the future study of brands and branding: beauty/usefulness, act/object, inner/outer material, private/public, expression/statement, appreciation/control, symbolic/instrumental.

The primary practical implication derived from application of the theory of aesthetic expression to brands and branding is that the most beautiful brands emerge from acts of co‐creation that respect the artistry, intention and imagination of the brand's stakeholders.

The article offers increased depth to the study of the expressive/emotional/aesthetic aspects of branding and offers an enriched aesthetic foundation for studying and practicing brand co‐creation.

This paper aims to demystify the creative experiences of an extraordinary group of pastry chefs – The Malaysian World Pastry Team, champions of the 2019 World Pastry Cup. The authors adopted an expressionist theoretical lens informed by two aesthetic philosophers – John Dewey and Wassily Kandinsky.

A two-year portraiture was conducted – a qualitative methodology that draws features from phenomenology and narrative inquiry, rendering artistically and empirically written “portraits” that reflect themes and patterns of participants’ experiences. In-depth interviews, observations and material artifacts were collected amid a journey alongside nine extraordinary Malaysian pastry chefs.

Presented in story structures, the authors offer three “portraits” of culinary creativity, each representing a core essence of the creative phenomenon: creative harmony in the form of sensorial and symbolic poetry; imaginative episodes as a hypnotic state of inspiration and incubation; and the creative duality of scientific rationalism and artistic fashion. The authors delineated the intricacies of each theme by presenting them as individual narratives.

The portraits indicated that culinary creativity reflects an organic and emancipating aesthetic experience that is unbounded by formative structures or sequential processes. This provides a novel theoretical view that moves beyond conventional studies’ capitalistic frameworks, and toward the intimate viewpoints of the chef-creators. Specific contributions are discussed.

Through a unique qualitative approach and an aesthetic theoretical framework, this study provided a novel perspective on the culinary creative process. The aesthetic view captures culinary creativity through the eyes of the creator, a viewpoint less considered, yet imperative to the culinary profession.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aesthetic dimension of entrepreneur poems. The notion of the entrepreneur as storyteller, and the entrepreneur story as cultural genres have become so firmly entrenched in the collective social consciousness that little consideration is given to the existence of other narrative genres, such as business poetry as expressions, or manifestations of enterprising behaviour and indeed identities. Poetry, like art, possesses aesthetic dimensions which make it difficult to theorize and analyze. Indeed, as a genre, poetry seldom features as a heuristic device for better understanding entrepreneurial behaviour or learning. This is surprising because poetry in particular is a wonderfully creative and expressive narrative medium and accordingly, many entrepreneurs engage in writing poetry as a form of creative expression.

In this study the author considers the entrepreneur as poet and from a reading of the literatures of entrepreneurship and aesthetics develops an aesthetic framework for analysing entrepreneur poetry which is used to analyze six poems written by entrepreneurs or about entrepreneurs.

That poetry has value in terms of entrepreneurial learning because of its atheoretical nature it permits listeners to experience the emotion and passion of lived entrepreneurial experiences and to relive these vicariously. In particular entrepreneur poems are a variant form of entrepreneur story devoid of the usual cliché.

There are obvious limitations to the study in that the analysis of six poems can merely scratch the surface and that aesthetic analysis is by its very nature subjective and open to interpretation. The study opens up possibilities for further research into entrepreneur poems, the aesthetics of other non-standard entrepreneur narratives and consideration of the aesthetic elements of entrepreneurship per se. Poetics and aesthetics are areas of narrative understanding ripe for further empirical research.

The paper is original in terms of creating an aesthetic framework used to analyze entrepreneur poems. Indeed, little consideration had previously been given to the topic.

This study aims to understand the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of the IKEA effect in self-expressive mass customization (MC). It examines the effect of the extent of choice in MC toolkits in terms of perceived value of self-designed products, as well as how self-expression mediates this effect and what kind of consumers are more inclined to experience such effect.

Two experiments were conducted, using online MC toolkits. In total, 393 consumers participated in the experiments. Data collected were analyzed using t-tests, analyses of variance, path analyses, bootstrap analyses and spotlight tests.

The results show that offering a greater extent of choice in MC toolkits to consumers provides a greater opportunity for self-expression, resulting in higher product valuation. Further, consumers who have high romanticism in aesthetic preference and high self-esteem are more inclined to influences associated with this effect.

This research adds to the literature on the IKEA effect in self-expressive MC by identifying a key antecedent (extent of choice), its underlying mechanism (self-expression), and two boundary conditions (aesthetic preference and self-esteem). The results of this study provide firms with a better understanding of how they can improve their self-expressive MC strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance regarding the satisfaction of customer needs in the competitive restaurant industry. Restaurants have seen a transformation in employees’ labor, changing from primarily physical and mental to emotional and aesthetic dimensions. In this study, the effect of managers’ emotional and social competence (ESC) on the aesthetic labor of service and kitchen employees has been investigated.

Empirical data was collected from employees and managers of a restaurant chain. Structural equation modeling was the main analytical tool used to assess the results.

The findings indicated that managers’ ESC affected the aesthetic labor of their service (aesthetic traits (AT), aesthetic requirements and service encounters) and kitchen (AT, aesthetic creativity and aesthetic harmony ) employees. Achievement orientation and adaptability were among the dimensions of emotional competence that contributed the most to aesthetic labor. The most significant elements of social competence were inspiring leadership and conflict management.

The study suggests that managers can improve the aesthetic performance of their employees by using their ESC.

This is the first study of this kind to include kitchen employees while considering the effects of restaurant managers’ ESC on aesthetic labor. The findings indicate the importance of the ESC of managers in improving the aesthetic labor of employees.