Resumen de Marketing function and form: How functionalist and experiential architectures affect corporate brand personality
Ursula Raffel, Bernd H. Schmitt, Anton Meyer
How are the designs of corporate buildings used to create meaning and project a corporate image and personality? We distinguish functionalist architecture (�form follows function�), which focuses on the primary, utilitarian function of a building, from experiential architecture (�from function to form�), which uses the form of a building to communicate symbolically about the organization. A large-scale quantitative study including 150 buildings shows that four architectural design types (�solid,� �balanced,� �expressive,� and �disruptive� designs, emerging from a mix of functionalist and experiential architectures, lead to distinct corporate brand personalities (e.g., competence for functionalist architecture and excitement for experiential architecture). We validate these findings in a qualitative study and discuss how this research contributes toward the development of a consumer-oriented design theory.
