Don’t Sell Cute Short: How we all can benefit from having more of it in our lives
Part of my job is knowing how to visualize attraction. From a young age, I paid close attention to things that visually interested me. Over time, I noticed that cute was one of the most common and instant articulations of attraction. “Babies are cute. Those shoes are cute. The new guy on campus is cute!” It wasn’t uncommon for me to say, several times a day at my job, how cute a design was. I understood that if my work didn’t get the cute response from the team, it probably wasn’t going to get it from the public either.
Fast-forward twenty years and I often find myself standing around a small cluster of designers, waiting for someone to say, “oh my god, that’s soooo cute!” When I stop to think about it, the most surprising part of this ritual is that I haven’t gotten tired of it yet. Why is that?
Why is cute such an endearing attribute for me? Hell, for everyone?
To find out what other people thought about the idea of cute, I hosted a salon in February that included my co-workers and a handful of curiously inquisitive friends. The salon is a causal event, held once a month after work, to encourage open conversations and divergent thinking.
To start things off, I asked the group to discuss what cute looked like and heard a fairly cohesive response in terms of babies, pets, and the proportions and visual cues that signal new life and youthfulness. But, the aesthetic of cute goes further still. Objects that are surprisingly small or simple are commonly called cute. The element of surprise, exaggeration, or playfulness can also make an image cute. Fashion is an area where we use the term often. In simplest terms, it means that something feels new and fresh. The Kawaii trend in Japan combines a few of these principles, along with a strong feminine filter, to create a style reminiscent of childhood.
Keep in mind, Kawaii is one version of a cute aesthetic. This phenomenon doesn’t exist in all cultures because it’s not considered attractive across the board. Our group conceded that the idea of cute is rooted in a common theme, but manifestations of it live at varying altitudes. It’s only when these visual cues are seen in the wrong context, like a cigarette ad for example, that cute feels out of place. All in all, everyone agreed on what cute looked like and had positive feelings about it.
Next, I asked the group to discuss what cute felt like and the conversation immediately became more diverse. One of the first things mentioned was the origin of the word cute, which came from acute, which meant to be shrewd, keen, or clever in the late 1700s in England. An often used example of this is “don’t be cute”. Surprisingly, the word expanded from just an intellectual to a physical description. At some point in history, the combination of youthfulness and ingenuity started to meld together, which might be why both definitions still exist today.
Connecting back to visual cues, the entire group supported the idea that cuteness made us more nurturing and protective when it came to babies. In addition, if something or someone looked innocent or vulnerable, we had the same emotional response and called it cute. There is extensive research around the idea that humans are hard-wired to react to cute things, whether animal or object. Studies have shown, when humans notice something cute, they will instinctually slow down and pay closer attention, which improves their cognition function.
When it came to adult behavior, the ideas were less idealistic. Acting naively cute could be considered attractive to some and highly manipulative to others. In addition, if people or objects were cute enough, bad behavior or ill performance was acceptable, even tolerable. It was clear that most people were willing to make superficial concessions for cuteness, but the group soon realized that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, several examples were brought up that showed how cuteness changed human behavior in a positive way to deal with anger, denial, even fear. One great example was how the City of Greenwich in the UK, stopped violence towards businesses after the August riots in 2011 by painting actual baby’s faces on the shutters of the storefronts. Once the rioters saw the illustrations, the businesses were left untouched.
From social issues to environmental problems, cute can make difficult topics easier to talk about and confront.
So how does all of this make cute more enduring when it comes to creating products and services people want? A big piece of it is the dopamine rush and the sense of pleasure we feel when we see something cute. The manifestation of cute will look slightly different, depending on the culture, but cuteness at its core, is a universal theme. It doesn’t have ethnic or racial biases and unites people under one premise — to nurture, protect, attract, and hold us together as a community. Ultimately, it satiates our deepest desire for family, idealism and tranquility.
Although the word cute carries a lot of baggage and history, the idea itself is powerful. When brands make cute a part of their success criteria and ongoing creative strategy, it increases the positive emotional connection they have with people. Consumer facing brands should consider the impact of embracing this broad, deep-rooted core value shared by all of humanity.
Are you equally obsessed with creating highly emotional connections? Drop me a note at jenny.sauer@lpk.com.
To see the Pinterest board that inspired the conversation, click here.
