The role of imagined community in the global marketplace: an investigation of brand visual aesthetics and diaspora consumer experience
Creators: name: BUSCHGENS, Mark
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350608
subject: Marketing theory

description: The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of imagined communities in the global marketplace by specifically investigating brand visual aesthetics and diasporic consumer experience. Previous literature in marketing has discussed the importance of imagined communities for transnational brands and those targeting ethnic markets. For example, a Singaporean brand can be made to appeal to a larger regional Asian community by downplaying its national Singaporean origins to instead draw on multiple cultural referents from around Asia when building a brand. Employing the 'Middle East' as a research context and limiting the scope to business research, this thesis specifically examines how the Middle East (i.e. Middle Easternness) as a type of imagined community is constructed through the global cultural flow of media (i.e. brand visual aesthetics) and migration (i.e. diaspora consumer experiences). This thesis is structured through addressing four research questions, which together yield separate yet interrelated qualitative studies that help contribute to our understanding of imagined communities in the global marketplace. The first study (RQ1) employs a critical visual analysis to a visual social semiotic approach to better understand the different ways brand visual aesthetics can help to foster transnational imagined community. The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of transnational imagined communities, which compose two overarching dimensions of transnational imagined community, namely temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding. The second study (RQ2) draws upon thirty in-depth interviews with regional (Middle Eastern) diasporic consumers in Australia to examine how their life world and experiences combine to produce a transnational imaginary (Middle Easternness) outside the Middle East. This study finds that consumers of a diverse regional diaspora have the capacity to align with both their national culture and a transnational imaginary, in what is described as a 'commingled-experience'. Five emotions were found to help construct commingled-experiences of a transnational imaginary through three elements of enactment, including atmospherics, understandings and activities. The third study (RQ3) involves a multiple-case study, including in-depth interviews with brand owners to understand how their selection and use of visual aesthetics in branding helps in the construction of imagined communities in the global marketplace. The study found that a brand owner's cultural dispositions and habitus in their decision making helps contribute to the construction of an imagined Middle Eastern identity through three brand visual aesthetic dimensions of autobiography, heritage and aesthetic sensibility. In addition, each dimension was found to be visually represented based on a continuum of incremental and radical innovation in relation to the field of the owner's cultural origin. The fourth study (RQ4) examines how congruence between a brands visual aesthetics and consumers existing structures of feeling can emotionally reinforce a sense of consciousness and belongingness to a transnational imaginary. Through a multiple-case study involving photo-elicitation interviews with consumers, the study helps illustrate the symbolic power of visual aesthetics in brands and provides some strategic guidelines for how imagined communities and worlds should be constructed by brands. The findings for each study build on each other to help collectively contribute to our understanding of the power of imagined communities in the global marketplace.