Of Bono, Sex, Style & Substance
A friend pointed me over to an article at The Huffington Post entitled What if Apple Designed Cars, inspired by an op-ed at the New York Times by Bono (yes, the lead singer from U2).
In the op-ed, Bono suggests 10 ideas for the next 10 years, one of which he calls the Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object (I’d hate to be Bono’s therapist). All fun aside, Bono’s suggestion is interesting to contemplate from a design point of view because it contains a false assumption as well as a conflicted message:
That’s why the Obama administration — while it still holds the keys to the big automakers — ought to put some style fascists into the mix: the genius of Marc Newson … Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive from Apple … Frank Gehry, the architect, and Jeff Koons, the artist. Put the great industrial designers in the front seat, right along with sound financial stewardship … the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels, the sexier for me. Check out the Tesla or the Fisker Karma car, designed by the same team that gave the world the Aston Martin.
Bono’s key premise seems to be that the auto makers suffer because the cars they are producing aren’t somehow ‘sexy’ enough, as if to say that a few changes in the stylistic decisions made by auto manufacturers would cure what ails them. Granted, Bono does hint at the shift toward ‘greener’ cars (which I’ll point to later) but the examples he provides are of cars costing more than some homes. The theme of ‘sex’ is the foundation upon which Bono’s other comments are built, suggestive of the fact that if properly aroused, customers would respond purely on emotion alone. This line of thinking in my opinion is overly simplistic and ignorant of the socioeconomic context within which said ‘sex’ takes place.
The fact of the matter is that there is nothing more off-putting to ‘sex’ than worries related to long-term safety, security and finances. In other words, it’s hard to be sexually aroused when you’re in the middle of a world gone awry.
So the argument that despite the 10% unemployment, this hot, sexy $140,000 car is going to make you sign on the dotted line is a fantasy of those who are disconnected from the real world.
The funny thing is that Bono hints at a better way to position his argument when he says, “the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels, the sexier for me,” but he somehow doesn’t separate the old notions of sexy from this new reality because he calls on heavy hitting architects like Frank Gehry and industrial designers like Apple’s Ive to lead this effort, insinuating that a hard hitting focus on aesthetics is the key to increasing automobile sales.
It seems that at least subconsciously, Bono is hinting at the the fact that our definition of ‘sexy’ is shifting away from style (purely aesthetic considerations) and becoming more ‘aroused’ by matters of substance (meaner on fossil fuels, for example), or that matters of substance are becoming as important as matters of style as they relate to ‘arousal’ within customers.
I don’t think that today’s customers are the customers of the 1940s — we are more educated and have access to more information than we had 70 years ago. We don’t fall for the same old line. We are much more demanding and not as turned on by sex the way previous generations might have been.
Today’s customer is way too sophisticated to fall for sex alone when style is positioned as the primary means to arousal. Today, substance (socioeconomic considerations like affordability and impact on the environment) is as powerful a driver of customer arousal as style. This is not to say that style is not important, but that it is part of a bigger picture that must be considered when attempting to compete in the ever evolving and complex marketplace.