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Synopsis: Minimalist marketing aesthetics (e.g., stylized brand logos; reductive packaging design) are popular—but are they universally beneficial? This research shows that equally attractive aesthetically minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design leads consumers to expect products to be superior on utilitarian dimensions (as perhaps intended by the marketer), but inferior on hedonic dimensions (as perhaps unintended by the marketer). This pattern is driven by minimalist aesthetics communicating that the product is more focused on fewer purposes (thereby boosting expected performance) but concurrently appearing less stimulating due to its limited sensory features (thereby hampering expected pleasure). Accordingly, when marketers emphasize utilitarian (vs. hedonic) product benefits, displaying a product featuring minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design enhances ad liking. Likewise, when consumers hold utilitarian (vs. hedonic) purchase goals, minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design boosts choice. The insights from this research help expand existing theoretical understandings of minimalist aesthetics as well as consumers’ intuitions about antecedents of product efficacy, and they caution marketers to think carefully about when to use minimalist aesthetics for their brands and products. Sometimes, less really is less.

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Fred Selnes 

Professor of Marketing at BI Norwegian Business School 

How Marketing Should be Taught? 

Synopsis: The title of my talk is “What is marketing management?” with the follow up question “How should marketing management be taught at a business school?”. My starting point is that how marketing management is described in textbooksis not how marketing management is practiced nor how most people outside the marketing departments in business schools think of marketing. This is very different from other fields like finance, strategy, logistics and accounting where we find a stronger link between theory and practice. A lot has been written in our journals describing the diminishing power and influence of marketing in top-management and in the board rooms, but without any good solution to what we as a field in a business school need to do. I believe the STP and marketing-mix approach to marketing management is making marketing management tactical and not strategic, and that we rather should think of marketing management as how organizations should better connect theirresources to customers to grow the (future) value of the customer portfolio. Our work on CPLV illustrates the some of links between strategic marketing decisions and the mechanism of creating customer portfolio growth.  And our work on developing more valuable relationships through brand relationship adaptation illustrates how we can start to think of managing heterogeneity and the dynamics of customer needs. I will also illustrate how the CPLV approach can be presented in marketing textbooks. I hope my talk will inspire academics in marketing to a critical reflection on how we should teach marketing management and to build a stronger bridge between theoretical research and practice in our field.