How brand owners help construct imagined worlds with brand visual aesthetics

What is it about?

This paper examines how culturally displaced brand owners help construct imagined worlds with their selection and use of brand visual aesthetics (BVA). Using the theoretical lens of habitus, we focus on the role of owners’ design-related decisions in this process and use brand owners of Middle Eastern origin as the research context. Through a multiple-case study with five distinct small-to-medium-sized enterprises in Australia, our research finds how cultural dispositions can shape an owner’s selection and use of BVA to help construct an imagined Middle Eastern identity through dimensions of autobiography, heritage, and aesthetic sensibility. These BVA dimensions are represented on a continuum of incremental and radical innovation in relation to the owner’s cultural origin.

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Why is it important?

This research contributes to research on brands constructing imagined worlds by helping managers better appreciate the role of a brand owner’s cultural origin in designing connections to markets and spaces with the use of cultural visual aesthetics in a brand. Brand owners of small-to-medium enterprises make most of the decisions when designing a brand, so it is important to know how their cultural dispositions can work as a point of competitive advantage.

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