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How brand owners construct imagined worlds with brand visual aesthetics

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I grew up in the Middle East, and my family migrated to Australia in the West, and then at one point my parents started a Lebanese café…I started with a range of spice blends that are very much iconically Lebanese, and they were my mother’s recipes. Really it was more of a hobby project rather than the intention of building a global brand or anything like that. It was just really a way of communicating our heritage… and we’re communicating that this is a Middle Eastern product primarily through design, as in patterns and color.

- Owner, Sami’s Kitchen

Abstract

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 habitus shapes 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. This research contributes to research on brands constructing imagined worlds by helping us better appreciate the role of a brand owner’s cultural origin in designing connections to markets and spaces with visual aesthetics in a brand.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the editor (s) and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. In addition, the authors thank Janneke Blijlevens, Dannie Kjeldgaard and Nico Klenner, who were instrumental in providing insight at various stages of the research.

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  1. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, College of Business, RMIT University, 445 Swanston Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia

    Mark Buschgens, Bernardo Figueiredo & Kaleel Rahman

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Buschgens, M., Figueiredo, B. & Rahman, K. How brand owners construct imagined worlds with brand visual aesthetics. J Brand Manag 27, 266–283 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-019-00178-2

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