The Psychographics of Brandy Melville

   

      The Psychographics of Brandy Melville

Brandy Melville has become a household name for most households with people under the age of 20. Despite this, I have never seen an ad for Brandy clothes. This makes sense, considering that classic advertising, like that of other market-dominating brands like Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Lululemon, etc is the opposite of what appeals to their target audience. Brandy Melville has found its marketing success in psychographics, the study and classification of consumers based on attitudes and aspirations. Brandy Melville has developed the perfect person to fit their store’s image. This imaginary person that acts as the ideal Brandy shopper is just vague enough to entice and appeal to a variety of consumers. This person tends to be a young girl as under the societally accepted heteronormative mindset, masculine-identifying figures aren’t usually respected for wearing the skirts and dresses Brandy sells (which is totally not okay because clothes don’t need to abide by the construct of gender, nor do people). They are ages 11-20ish. They must be middle or upper middle class as the clothes sold are at comparatively higher prices than neighboring clothing providers. They must also be confident enough in their body image to wear all different types of clothes but not too confident to stop being self-aware. They seek to showcase their self and derive some perceived feminine power by reclaiming their self-expression through smaller clothes, but also seek to be accepted by their fellow consumers, united under the high-class club that is the brand name. This can be seen in the incredibly small signs outside of stores, a level of invisibility that leads one to feel like they are in a special club. Another psychographic qualification is that the consumer must be an avid social media user. Part of the reason I am never exposed to Brandy ads is that I don’t have Instagram. In 2014, Bloomberg financial data software company named Brandy “Instagram’s First Retail Success.”

However, while this psychographic persona has been successful for Brandy, business has its challenges and controversies. Brandy’s psychographics tend to exclude consumers with waistlines larger than 25” waist. I am going to be blunt, I disagree with this policy of representing “one size fits most” with models with 22” waists but I also think that it has made Brandy the successful company it is today. Brandy HAS made many consumers feel discontent with their bodies, but it also HAS made many people feel united, special, unique, beautiful, and that too is important.

This blog is a hard one to end without sounding like a jerk to supporters or opponents, so I want to leave with this: Brandy represents the new world of social media psychographics where our every action is used to categorize and segregate us into different types of consumers. We need to understand the way we are expected to interact with our neoliberal economy and question it, our motives, the why and how of what we do. Only by thinking like marketers can we understand our own impulses and seek to make more informed decisions about our brand alignment and use of money.