Aesthetic and Seductive Leadership Carlo Romanelli

Aesthetic and Seductive Leadership

by Carlo Romanelli

After the Family Leadership, we continue our journey to discover the peculiar characteristics of Italydership: none of these characteristics, if taken individually, make a difference, but all together they represent Italydership.

“We consider ourselves winning in the interpretation of the product, which must convey emotion and must be characterized by the so-called “style Guzzini “: soft, not edgy, and reassuring forms. However, the form is not enough. In recent years, we are more and more looking at functional performance … performance is essential. In fact, now our slogan is beautiful and well done.”

Domenico Guzzini

The Aesthetic Vocation

We give a triple explanation to the Italian aesthetic vocation:

• Environmental
• Historical – cultural
• Anthropological

• We are the country known all over the world with the nickname of ‘beautiful’. Italy deserved this name, originally for its own environmental characteristics.

Harmony and landscape variety are two concepts that belong from the beginning to the Italian territory, even before being associated with the work of man.

From the alpine to the insular landscape, from the Apennine to the hilly landscape, from the north to the south, in fact the richness and variety of the Italian environment offer a landscape diversity without equal.

• Living in a country that boasts the richest monumental heritage of the world produced over time and the result of our history, has constituted a kind of collective school that explains ‘the addiction’ to the contiguity with luxury and beauty: Italy is the country that has the most important artistic and cultural heritage in the world (more than 50%), both in terms of quantity (we are the country with the largest distribution of museums in the area) and quality.

Italy is currently the nation that holds the highest number of sites included in the list of human heritage (to date, 54 sites).

• A “life in the Squares”: assisted by a mild and favorable climate, the Italians were lucky enough to carry out their life mostly outdoors, in the city centers, in the squares, making them more prone to observing out of oneself. In this awareness of mutual observation, we have placed ever greater attention to the aesthetic aspects of one’s own and others, in reference also to the way of dressing.

From the aesthetic vocation to the “obsession” for beauty

The aesthetic vocation has assumed the connotations of a real obsession with beauty that has profoundly influenced the production system of our country, translating into the will to produce not mere objects of use, but shared meanings incorporated into a form.

The competitiveness of the Made in Italy is based on associating products with a system of values that represent it.

There is therefore a precise Country Branding: each nation has a legacy of symbols, values, traditions that make up its intangible heritage. These legacies are the result of the combination of natural resources and the ways in which human creativity has developed in a specific historical and geographical context: history, culture and values form the basis of the so-called country branding.

The branding of a nation assumes importance above all in reference to its inimitability and its attractive and seductive capacity

An example of the meanings attributed to “Italian branding”

* Results obtained on a sample of 400 students from 26 different countries, between 20 and 30 years of age, during the 2002/03 two-year period. (Corbellini and Saviolo, 2004)

The aesthetic dimension is therefore a fundamental value attributed to products made in Italy. Compared to France, where it equates above all extravagance if not provocation, in Italy the aesthetic means elegance, beauty and still passion and functionality.

This is why buying an Italian product means buying the key to a community, a history, a culture that finds its glue in beauty and taste.

Therefore, we can say that the strength of the aesthetic dimension lies in the evocative capacity: it is the beauty that evokes beauty! The aesthetic dimension at the figurative level is able to recall beauty at different levels: the quality of a well-made product, the beauty of a country’s history, its landscapes, its atmospheres, the people who live there with their beautiful way of life, elegance in dressing, taste in decorating houses, eating well.

The beauty that evokes beauty

• ‘Nice things’:

Love for beauty translates primarily into love for doing things well. Not only the care of details and materials, but also the consideration of the usability of things (the aesthetics that is associated with functionality). Hence the expression of BEAUTIFUL AND WELL DONE expresses, besides aesthetics, the ability to work and ennoble the material first of all in the design sense. From this point of view, the Italian know-how much owes to the shops and the corporations of arts and crafts born in Italian Renaissance.

The workshops and the guilds of arts and crafts were an incubator of collective creativity that carried out a systematic training of young people through apprenticeship and a continuous incentive for improvement, in order to be able to make themselves autonomous and start a new workshop. The corporations also introduced practices to improve the quality and control of the measures, measures that made the market more reliable and transparent.

To do things well is to do something that is not repetitive but is associated with a high level of creativity and imagination. Craftsmanship therefore, in its most noble meaning, is the passion for beautiful things, it is the taste of innovation; it is the idea of creating a unique, precise, perfect in detail, non-standardized, tailor-made, exclusive object. A process that focuses on the hand of man: hands that draw, weave, cut, pack and dye every single piece of a collection.

Craftsmanship derives from our individualism, made of the need to differentiate ourselves and express this diversity, the need to be visible, the sense of challenge that leads us to a form of creative competition.

While the Orientals are more oriented towards continuous improvement of the process and standardization with a view to economics of scale, our obsession with craftsmanship of the product as a reflection and extension of oneself leads us to a continuous search for the element that will make it excellent and unique by continuously feeding the creative process.

The fact, value and modus operandi on which Italian credibility is based, is not reduced to the mere concept of luxury and prestige, since it invests all sectors and processes of the supply chain, from the final product to the mechanisms of the machines that produce it. We characterize ourselves for a beautiful well done that remains beautiful over time. The Italian product in a world in crisis of values remains a product with meaning thanks to the historical capacity of relationship between manufacturing and conception, able to maintain linked material production of objects to the creation of immaterial meanings. However, much still remains to be done in terms of communicating our excellence.

This means working by making known to the foreign consumer not only what the product evokes and represents (easily imitated by counterfeit labels) but what the product ‘is’.

Italian excellence is not just a matter of high range and prestige but of ‘quality truth’ or the distinctiveness and recognisability of the processes and the beauty of the raw material.

We can concentrate the challenge in translating the “Beautiful and Well Done” into the creation of an “Artisan Industry” based on the following principles:

• Combining industrial seriality with artisan uniqueness (‘industrial refinement’);
• Keeping technological innovation in balance with artisan design skills (for example, machines that remind the type of sewing of the craftsman);
• Develop a ‘digital handicraft’ that brings together the ‘handmade’ and ‘found on the net’.

• ‘A nice story’

We are children of a very long foreign domination. We have served all the peoples of the earth, Greeks, Byzantines, Barbarians, French, English, Austrian, Russian, Spanish … we have been accused of servility, and then also of arrogance. We have known great poverty and misery, but we have been protagonists of great stories capable of representing culture and beauty.

An inheritance that has its roots in the arts of sophisticated Greek culture.

After the darkness of the Middle Ages it was the Humanism of the ‘400, a movement born in Italy, to give life to the recovery and interpretation of the texts and finds of the Greek and Roman civilization, giving back to Italy awareness of a past of splendor.

It was with the Renaissance that an idea of beauty was consolidated as a synonym of perfection based on mathematical laws. The renaissance began just as a search for beauty, coming to conceive aesthetics as a harmony of perfect relationships that only numbers can reveal.

The wealth of the country lies in the coexistence of different cultures. The strategic geographical location has made it become a crossroads of different peoples. Today Italy appears as a territory that maintains its territorial specificities between different regions but also between different municipalities. Diversification has not only been synonymous with division, but when it is enhanced, it becomes synonymous with wealth.

The same ‘made in Italy’ is not identified with a particular style but is associated with the multiplicity of traditions, styles and cultures that still characterize the different lands of Italy.

We can therefore say that “History is the Territory”: perhaps one of the most unprecedented aspects of Made in Italy is the ability to represent a nation through products that are distinctive only of a territory, sometimes even of a single country. Made in Italy product is able to enclose the landscapes, the atmospheres, the ‘knowledge’, the same knowledge that have developed the production techniques.

“Staring with a very large magnifying glass the parmesan cheese, it is revealed not only as an immutable crowd of granules associated with being a cheese, but even as a panorama. It is an aerial photo of Emilia taken from a height equal to that of the Heavenly Father”.

(Giovannino Guareschi 1908-1968, writer and journalist)

• ‘Nice people’

Italy, that locus amoenus where everything flows at a different pace, where colors, tastes and sounds have taken unimaginable hues and shades, touching the deepest ropes of the soul of whoever has visited it.

The lifestyle of Italians is associated with what is commonly called the ‘ease of living’ for relaxed rhythms, the ability to enjoy the small daily pleasures, the warmth in relationships, the sense of authenticity. The idleness that in the past was experienced as a vice becomes the virtue of the sweet life that still today represents Italy and its products in the collective imagination.

Italians as “enjoyable people” tend to satisfy their senses in the round; this entails a tension towards that which responds to harmonious aesthetic criteria without forgetting the functionality that make life more comfortable and convenient: the beautiful warm sweater, the beautiful comfortable armchair, the beautiful cozy kitchen etc etc …

The desire to always get the best for itself, the ability to have developed a very clear idea of how it should be a good and beautiful product explains why the big luxury brands are often Italian: the companies that built them were addressed by the demanding Italian consumers.

The Italian lifestyle is also made of: hospitality, warmth, conviviality, joy, generosity

In the post-war period, the positive image of Italians as good people was affirmed, redeeming it from a previous image of virility (aggressive) associated with national patriotism.

The main effect of these considerations turns out to be on the tourism product: “Identified in the imaginary of the foreign tourist-type with the binomial culture-food and wine (according to 60% -64% of international Tour Operators), in Europe but above all in the long markets haul, Italy is a destination dreamed by foreign tourists for its history (41%) and for the valuable naturalistic and environmental heritage of its tourist resorts (29% of the Tour Operators), but also for “the Italian way of life” , an essential element of the Italian appeal according to 26% of the major international tour operators who sell trips and vacations in our country, the US and Australia in the lead. “

How much is the beauty worth?

Is it possible to calculate what is the value, with the same intrinsic value, the good?

A product that is able to excite, to evoke feelings and to satisfy their aesthetic needs, how much is more valuable than similar products, that are ugly or otherwise not beautiful?

These are some of the questions we wanted to answer through the research commissioned to CENSIS.

What are the beauties of Italy (%val)

CENSIS 2011 survey

The reasons for hope

CENSIS 2011 survey

The challenge for the future

Who will do the Well Done? If the distinctiveness of Made in Italy is based on craftsmanship and therefore a lot of manual skills, we are witnessing a cultural process that goes in the opposite direction. A cultural idea that appreciates the value of manual work. There is certainly no lack of new stylists in the fashion industry, but are missing figures able to transform a model into a packaged product.

The external pressures should not fall into the “subtractive trap”, that is, in the perspective of “reducing in quality” but inducing as Leonardo emphasizes to increase their dedication, just as the clothes should be multiplied with the multiplication of the cold.

From this point of view, the direction to be taken may not be so much to increase production quantitatively to increase turnover, but to increase the quality to achieve this increase.

It is necessary to re-evaluate patience as a means of achieving excellence, “doing better than anyone“; indeed, it is excellence itself that acts as a strategic lever to allow the Italian enterprise to enter the global market; this is why the Italian challenge consists in knowing how to communicate outside its borders as well as producing it.

IF THE TRADEMARK IS IMITABLE AND REPUTATION IS NOT …. DO WE HAVE TO FEAR IMITATIONS?