An exciting European brokerage was exploring whether or not it should evolve its brand style to appeal to investors with larger amounts of capital to invest. The challenge: approach it from a zero budget mentality, don’t assume you have any illustrators or an agency to bring it to life. Where to start? I began by unpicking the relationship between investable capital and cultural capital.
If someone has more monetary resources available to them to invest, then you can quite rationally infer that they are wealthier than those who only have a little to invest. This logic then extends further: If they’re wealthier, then it’s likelier that they have a good education, or a wealthy upbringing. In essence, they have cultural capital, that is, the means to decode complex socio-cultural information for their own advantage.
This relationship intersects a company’s brand via the Veblen Effect and conspicuous consumption, the idea that people consume goods and services to signal their wealth and status to others. In essence, brands that require cultural capital to appreciate will be attractive to people with large investable wealth because the restrictions created around the accessibility of their interpretation allows that investor the ability to display his or her cultural and material wealth to others.
In layman’s terms this translates to: rich people like sophisticated-looking brands because by using them they show they too are sophisticated, and therefore rich. Needless to say, this approach is the exact antithesis of modern day fintechs like this brokerage is, which generally tend to build bright and fun brands with the aim of being accessible to all, ‘democratising finance for the world’ and such like. So how does one balance these competing extremes, and on a zero budget challenge?
Midjourney. This is a fantastic image A.I. engine and through a considerable amount of trial and error arrived at what seems to be the perfect solution: retro-futurism. This design movement combines elements of nostalgia for old technologies and futuristic concepts in order to create a vision of a future that is influenced by the past. To this base, I split the image into layers and colourised each one in standardised colours, to bring consistency, but also to subvert the nostalgic images into something more modern and fresh at the same time.
The result? Something that is both grounded in history and underlying cultural markers that those with cultural capital can enjoy unpicking, and at the same time bright and not off-putting to those with less cultural or material capital. Sophisticated, yet accessible. Best of all, pretty-much completely free.
