Marketing function and form: How functionalist and experiential architectures affect corporate brand personality

Abstract

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.