Week Four Assignment: The Impact of Design, Aesthetics, and Branding

                First of all, I love the topic of aesthetics and the psychology of consumers. I love to observe what makes customers excited about a product and I love to observe how companies make an efficient approach to attracting customers. I feel this is essential for the survival of a brand, it's what gets the customers attention and what gets customers buying. Like bees looking for the biggest, brightest flower in the field; bees are like consumers, they see the flower and it looks good to them,so they dive in.
             
                 I've mentioned this brand in previous blogs and I am going to bring this brand up again, the best example of how design and aesthetics affect who buys their product is Bella Dona LA. I don't have any intentions on promoting this brand in any of my blogs, but I do feel they are so popular because of their aesthetics. Breaking down again on what this company is, it is a clothing brand. This clothing brand focuses mainly on the lowrider culture and Chicanx (non gender conforming Mexican Americans for those who are unfamiliar with term) themed clothing. In all of their Instagram posts the aesthetic highlights everyday life in the "hood", showing pictures of brown women modeling in front of a lowrider,eating out with friends or having a day at the beach.The color schemes presented are bright and usually filled with pastel colors like baby blue or a rosy pink with dashes of gold. Often their posts tend to bring back older traditions of Chicano culture and fashion and this appeals to many who find their work familiar because this is how many of us grew up as Chicanos. From personal experience I was attracted to this brand because I noticed how my lifestyle was so similar to the lifestyle being presented. It also attracts those who are barely finding out about Chicano culture and they fall in love with it. For example this brand sells worldwide and many people from Japan buy their clothing because Chicano culture in Japan is becoming a booming trend. Aesthetics are the reason trends start up and become all the rage, people love how it looks and they want to look like that too.
              The topic of aesthetics always amazes me because I feel sometimes it can be problematic when you look deeper into it. Of course the colors and the quality of the picture or webpage can grab a persons attention, but is the product good? This is where we almost become like slaves to the machine because we are so attracted to the looks of things; we often don't take second thought to where these things come from, how they are made and who makes them. There are many great examples to this and I feel like the Supreme brand fits perfectly into this subject. Now I don't mean to bash at anyone persons' view to this brand but to me it is way too expensive for what it is. A simple white t-shirt from this brand with its logo is $75, I can get the exact same thing made at a small whole in the wall t-shirt stand for literally a third of that price. It's expensive but still people buy it, and why do we buy it? We buy it because of the aesthetics; it's simple, it's clean, it's trendy and the logo looks cool, therefore it is a successful clothing company all thanks to its aesthetics.

             Overall, painting a pretty picture for people can cause us to feel a wide spectrum of emotions. People often don't think about the origins or the quality of a product,but they'll buy it because it came in a pretty package. It causes us to impulse buy, follow the trends, and it has the power to categorize people, or send out a message to certain audiences. It is in our nature to want pretty things;when picking fruit we always choose the one that may be the biggest, the brightest or the best looking because we believe it'll be the tastiest. Utilizing the power of aesthetics and proper branding can bring a business great success if used wisely.