How brand owners construct imagined worlds with brand visual aesthetics

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.