When aesthetic pays a return?

Nobody dislike beauty, however what I felt interesting is how and when to active 'beauty' this benefit as leading advantage in you product development investment basket, coz the return seems varied.

Sony recent Bravia LED campaign could be the first example deserved to talk about, which takes 'aesthetic-leading benefit' in a smart way. If you only look at the headline - 'color like no others', I would feel they are taking risk of making aesthetic as leading benefit in a category still valued on technology equity, however the creative execution takes a big role that brought out the leading benefit so vividly and impressively, besides, a smart approach of delivering 'better color contrast' functionality same time. Although now I still couldn't see colour is a key factor in LED purchasing, the potential is there to be created. Then, gradually the category's benefit landscape would be enlarged, that's how creativity pays a big role in a new benefit's return.

However in some other developed technology items such as cell-phone, aesthetic has already been included as hygiene… You can still claim on the colour or design mix as the driven benefit as many do. But make sure it's cutting edge and shocking cool, otherwise hard to be sufficient to stand out from thousands of products offering 'total value package', recent Samsung SGH-J608 print ad missed the point by single-way claiming color as the driving benefit. Certainly the product is 'cool ocean blue' - beautiful and different, however the total offer is relatively weak by having this single benefit driven, besides the execution is normal, at this case I would doubt the return of the resources behind such benefit 'investment' ( or is it the reason they price the item less than 2K..comparably low within Samsung’s portfolio )