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This paper highlights that the strategic use of design, a competitive pattern typically associated with creative industries, those creating and trading meanings, also characterizes industries that produce functional or utilitarian goods not typically considered creative. The paper explores the origins of this phenomenon in the context of three industry settings: cars, speciality coffee and personal computers. The analysis theorizes three distinct strategic paths that explain how design may become an institutionalized aspect of competition in industries that are not creative. We explain how firms link their products to the identities of their users, how design is linked to stakeholders' emotions and visceral reactions to products and how intermediaries are relevant to enhancing attention to design. Illuminating these strategic paths allows harnessing some of the well-established understandings about competition in creative industries towards understanding competition in noncreative industries.

The study applies a multimodal approach to position aesthetic innovation, i.e., the strategic use of aesthetic design attributes, such as color and shape, as an institutionalized aspect of competition, rather than as a firm-specific differentiation strategy, in settings that favor the symbolic meanings of products. Empirically, the study offers a detailed case study of the personal computer (PC) industry to examine the institutionalization of aesthetic innovation as a dimension of competition across industrial firms. The study examines the color and shape of PCs over the 1992–2003 period and situates changes to these attributes in the competitive conditions that characterized the industry, paying particular attention to the introduction of the Apple iMac in 1998. Furthermore, it examines the discursive manifestations of aesthetic innovation by content analysis of reviews of PCs and interviews with industry executives. Findings demonstrate that, in a period coinciding with a decline in demand for PCs and an overall mature market as well as with the introduction of the iMac, the majority of firms engaged in aesthetic innovation and used a greater number of aesthetic words in describing their PCs.