I was listening to the Off the Grid podcast today on lunch break (highly recommended if you have a love/hate relationship with social media), and the host introduced me to an idea I was unfamiliar with, the Insta-bae business.
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The concept of Insta-bae came from Japan back in 2017 and means “something that would look good on Instagram”, which articles suggest would translate literally as “to shine” but the verb 映える also means to look attractive. Either way, file under things that could be said of Mamoru Miyano (iykyk).
The episode goes into the traps that people can fall into if they try to build a business for the ‘gram, that is using the influencer model, but its scope did not extend far enough to cover the difference between building a brand aesthetic and having an insta-bae business, so I’m here filling the gaps.
What is a brand aesthetic?
First things first, a brand aesthetic is the combination of “colour, scale, balance, shape, movement, pattern, and visual weight which demonstrates the tone, mood, style, and personality of your brand”, and in the case of a personal brand even things like your mannerism and expressions when you appear on photo or video.
One of the most instagrammable areas in London is the bit of the King’s Road past the old Town Hall where you have the Ivy for the seasonal floral backgrounds, or the bright pink façade of Peggy Porschen. Both establishments have clear, recognisable brand aesthetics, but you’d be hard pressed to accuse them of being insta-bae businesses.
What makes a business insta-bae?
Amelia’s suggestion on the podcast is that a business is insta-bae when the preoccupation of the business model is to look good on Instagram, and success is measured in vanity metrics. I recommend you go and listen to the episode to get more clarity on that point.
What I want to stress is that having a business that looks good on Instagram does not necessarily equate to what she means by insta-bae business if you built the business to have a strong foundation. There is a difference between having an aesthetically pleasing branding, and the old “looking good on paper” like the power couple that looks stunning all smiles at parties but you know they fight a lot and are cheating on each other.
And as she rightly points out, vanity metrics are not always useless metrics. They are, however, marketing metrics, and not what we should judge the business by. We can judge the other metrics in correlation, but it’s the financial metrics that count.
The experience economy
In 1998, the theory of the experience economy started to gain traction in business circles as American consultants Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argued that a marketable experience occurs “when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event . . . ”, as discussed in a Financial Times article on Insta-bae.
For brick and mortar businesses having the consideration of what the customer experience looks and feels like not only in the moment (good atmosphere, good products, etc) but also as online capital seems a lot easier to grasp than for service and product-based ones.
Although brands like Glossier have successfully capitalised on User Generated Content (UGG) long before everyone else had jumped on the bandwagon. It’s easy to see how brands that fit in with the lifestyle aesthetic of their customers can access marketing avenues without paying extra for them, just by investing in their products and the way they are packaged.
In reality, while it may be subtle to think of an experience when we think of a personal brand or service-based brand at stages of the client journey other than receiving the service, whenever we interact with a brand we are having an experience of it.
The brand experience
The word experience means “observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected one,” from the Latin ex-perientia, the suffix to mean “out of” and peritus, from per-, to try or risk.
If you have been in my world before, especially through my podcast, you know I am a language nerd that did classics in high school and never wastes a chance to show that to people so that her parents may one day stop to moan about how much her education cost.
You are having an experience of my brand as you read this very article, since it was written by me sitting at a messy table overlooking a signed photobook of a Visual Kei artist and not by ChatGPT. So far you can tell I have a self-deprecatory sense of humour, a love of pretty things, and the bad habit of writing blog posts on the fly instead of batch-creating content like everyone says is best practice, since the episode that inspired this came out on the day this post is going live.
Honestly there’s more I could say about the blogging schedule, but that’s outside the scope of this post.
Your brand aesthetic matters
There are two reasons why I specialise in personal branding photography as one of the things that I do.
- I spent over 10 years of my life trying to gain my parents’ approval by having “a real job” so now I have an expertise in branding and marketing and using it as part of my photography business allows me to create a narrative where that becomes useful experience and not a waste of my 20s because nobody thought my visionary teenage self could make it as a photographer .
- I have a passion for seeing people who don’t fit in with societal expectations succeed, especially other women, and marketing is one of the key pillars of business because if nobody knows your amazing stuff is there nobody can appreciate it. So it’s a no-brainer for me that since I have the aforementioned expertise I share it with the world so that I can help others live a life they don’t want to escape from.
Because I am a very visual person whose three favourite novels are The Picture of Dorian Gray, Brideshead Revisited, and Sense and Sensibility, of all the facets of marketing that I am technically qualified to consult about, brand aesthetics and visual brand storytelling are the two I chose because it’d be pointless if I helped others build their perfect business only for me not to jump out of bed with excitement about going to work in mine. And I have a Capricorn stellium, it shocks people but I legit looove to work.
Anyway, ADHD brain going off a tangent. Sorry. Your aesthetics matter not just because I say so so I can plug my services using psychological tactics to make you feel like you need something you don’t. Here’s the data.
Input Bias
In 2008 book on behavioural economics Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduced the idea of choice architecture based on how people’s decisions can be influenced by how choices are presented to them.
One bias that can be leveraged when presenting a choice is the so-called input bias, which means that we tend to value things more when we perceive them to have been the result of more effort.
And, you probably guessed it, one way in which we make such decisions is through the unconscious inputs of visual cues. We’re all familiar with the idea that we make a first impression of a person within less than 10 seconds of first seeing them. The brain works the same way with brands.
Websites with great imagery get 94% more views. 68% of Brits admit that aesthetics encourage the purchase of a product or service from a website. If you think it’s frivolous to think about your brand aesthetics you may be leaving money on the table.
Costly signalling
Costly signalling is a bias that is, in some ways, linked to the input bias, as carefully curated and professionally made websites etc do take time. However, it’s more specifically about how “the meaning and significance attached to something is in direct proportion to the expense with which it is communicated”, as defined by Rory Sutherland, author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense.
One thing that the team at Tonic Site Shop are great at, other than banter on Threads and chaotic good newsletters, is making it more accessible to have a designer-made website for a fraction of the cost. All the testimonials they showcase report impressive results just from having one of their templates. That’s costly signalling in action (and if you want in on it, you can grab your own template for 15% off with my affiliate code at the link above. Just use alexisneve at checkout).
The Mere Exposure Effect
If you’ve ever heard that you need consistency (in brand identity, how and when you show up online, the topics you talk about etc) to build trust, this is one of the cognitive biases behind it.
This bias is about our tendency to develop a preference for something we are familiar with. For example, I would not consciously define myself as someone who likes neutral colours, however a lot of brands I follow online and buy from have a neutral palette. Coaches whose branding is bright and bold feel a little jarring and not for me because I’m so used to the algorithm pushing a more muted aesthetic on my feed.
And it’s not an unfair assessment, since I probably would say my aesthetic is the art in the game Nil Admirari No Tenbin. I just tend to think of it more for the blacks because it’s a dark fantasy, but there’s a lot of beige in Taisho-era clothes and interiors that’s reflected in the game’s aesthetic. But I love a good red heel and accents, and a lot of the more earthy tones in the brands of people I like would not immediately scream “me” to anyone who knows me. The familiarity, though, makes me feel good about them.
How to craft your brand aesthetic without the Insta-bae traps
If you are now convinced that your brand aesthetic is a powerful marketing asset to add to your business, there are ways in which you can prioritise building one without falling into the Insta-bae traps that Amelia talked about on the podcast.
First of all, remember that it is a marketing asset, and a marketing strategy is not the business. It’s what promotes the business. You need to build the business on the right foundations first.
Vanity metrics such as likes and followers are not bad per se, but they need to be contextualised with stronger ones: are they translating into clicks through to your website? Email sign-ups if you have an email list? Enquiries? Purchases?
Social media, blogs, podcasts etc are the top of your marketing funnel, where you raise brand awareness and, hopefully, build credibility as an expert (yes, you can be an expert at something without being stuffy, using jargon, and even while making jokes about voice actors. If you don’t want to take my word for it, take Dr Michelle Mazur’s).
If you are taking your first steps in building your brand aesthetics, you might find value in my 3-part series on visual brand storytelling. It’s helpful even if you are not going to use social media as part of your toolbox, since your website is the digital equivalent of a shop front.
And if you are still at the first stages of building a business on the right foundations, I have a list of recommendations on Bookshop.org (where I’m an affiliate, as it allows you to support independent bookshops while shopping online).
