What brand identity are they giving off?
Sabrina Carpenter’s identity is more girly incorporating lots of pink, red, and things that are associated with kisses. This gives the illusion that she's more of a feminine artist with her over the top outfits (sexy) throughout different media products, it builds an image that she's a global style icon as most of her outfits go viral on the internet. Especially in her albums and instagram she has built an identity with the colour blue, where we can see her most popular album ‘short and sweet’ uses a blue backdrop and another album called ‘espresso’ using a light blue backdrop it allows audiences to associate the colour blue with Sabrina almost making it her trademark. Furthermore, other mise en scene elements such as Sabrina's hair, makeup and outfit has been kept constant throughout her whole music career as shes known to use glowy makeup with lots of blush, iconic blonde volumized blowout which shows audiences that this is her brand image and it has been kept the same throughout her new albums.
What is their personality?
Sabrina Carpenter builds an empowered yet mischievous feminity by incorporating glittery outfits in soft pastels and romantic cuts with strong stage presence. In other pictures, her poses and expressions centre on female agency within the music industry, and challenge the notion of passive female representation. Another thing is that, Sabrina Carpenter curates a carefully crafted image embodying her youthful charm, fashion-forward style, and playful personality on Instagram. Her feed, a combination of editorial-quality shots and casual behind-the-scenes moments, has a funny and relatable energy that is still elevated. She often taps into nostalgic aesthetics, Y2K-inspired dress and pastel color palettes, which gives her a visually signature pop aesthetic. Her engagement strategies include: behind-the-scenes or personal stuff that gives fans a connection, touch of humor and self-awareness in captions that complements her relatable persona. Additionally, for music video persona, Sabrina combines playful with edgier tendencies. In Feather, for instance, she utilizes bold, pastel visuals crafting a persona who is both untroubled and in complete possession of herself. Likewise, in Nonsense she leans into a flirty, cheeky vibe, doubling down on her brand as playful, fearless and confident. What we can learn from her branding is that her brand lives in a space between femininity and confidence, where cute aesthetic finds a home with playful lyricism and audacious storytelling. cinematic storytelling, she aligns cohesive themes through her music videos and across her social media to maintain brand consistency. As well as, her activeness on Instagram through fun comments, personalized posts and such allows her to engage with fans on a personal level.
What image are they creating for themselves, how?
Three things that are associated heavily with Sabrina Carpenter’s image are cheeky, flirty, and vintage. Firstly, Sabrina Carpenter creates an image that is associated with vintage, old Hollywood, and retro style conforming to the traditional conventions of women. Her reel persona relates to Hollywood glamour from her social media marketing, concerts, and outfits as her inspiration mainly comes from the 50s-60s aesthetic. Her advertising and social media presences mainly consists of fonts and typefaces from 50s-60s newspaper or movie poster and VHS overlays. Her iconic look showcases her vintage-inspired attire and channels old Hollywood pop icons such as Marilyn Monroe which we can see that she was represented through the bold, red lipstick and blonde curly hair. Second, her flirtatious image is conveyed through meanings and themes of her songs, exploring mature themes of love. Moreover, this could be a development from her image as a Nickelodeon child star into a mature pop icon. Her outfits and make-up looks bring up a very feminine look on her concerts, interviews, social media presence, and many more. Lastly, her image as a pop icon is cheeky as her persona reflects how she is a very friendly artist from increasing engagement and connections with her fans. She is very easy-going as reflected on social media. Moreover, the usage of colorful clothes at her concert may connote playfulness.
How do they speak to their fans?
Through her music videos, she uses narratives that connect to her female audiences more such as love, being hung up on a guy or even showcasing men treating women like a princess in her “espresso” album. It allows audiences to connect more with the artist as they will believe it will resonate with their real experiences or desires in life. While in social media, she uploads many stories of her fans reacting or lip-syncing to her new albums indicating that she watches the content her fans post, making audiences feel a deeper connection with the artist. And in order to keep her audience interested in her next shows or concerts she creates a certain element of surprise her audiences look forward to in each show. In this case her outfit that she's wearing for each show is different depending on which city she's performing at, with a towel covering the outfit until she shows the grand reveal before starting her first song. With each performance that she showcases the song “Juno” she adds a certain pose with the saying “have you ever tried this one” making audiences wonder what pose she's going to do in her next show, keeping audiences at their feet as they want to know what other surprises she has set in place for them. She also uses a lot of informal writing with emoticons such as “neowww” & “thank you :’)”. By speaking informally she gives her fans a sense of familiarity as she also directly consumes and replies to content her fans make, fostering a bond with the artist and audience.
What visuals link all of the media products together?
In her media products multiple elements are used to create an identity specifically towards the artist. One of the most obvious is her choice of colour, pose, clothing and typography. These 4 elements are used throughout all her products: social media, music video, album, interview, concerts. In her music videos she mostly uses a vintage tone colour, fonts from the 50s that are in newspapers or movie posters with her pose being mostly flirty and showy and this is used throughout all her media products as it keeps her identity consistent allowing audiences to easily recognise her. It creates a feeling of nostalgia as she incorporates both modern trends with old Hollywood glamour but it mostly shows heavy emphasis on old fashion trend such as her 90’s hair blowout making audiences feels amused of how Sabrina is trying to bring back past trends while incorporating her own unique ideas such as personal kiss marks and letters in her digipak giving a sense of personal touch to her audience, connoting a flirty, bold and sexy demeanor of the artist. As she constantly pushes this idea her audience already recognise this to be Sabrina’s style as an artist because all her products theme flow well with one another as she mixes both 90’s and modern styles together creating her iconic PERSONA. In addition to that her over the top looks can be seen from her mise-en-scene such as her makeup and outfits that stays the same in all her concerts, interviews, and music videos. She uses clothing that is sleeveless that mostly shows her shoulders and legs indicating the sexy vibe she's aiming for, while her hair is always kept the same, an iconic 90’s volumized blowout with bangs. It leaves an impression that Sabrina is the “IT” girl always looking on point fully dressed to any event, allowing audiences to focus on the fact that Sabrina is someone they get inspired by. All these repeatedly used elements altogether shows her audience that she's building a brand identity that stands out as someone that is confident, indicating her being the “IT girl” of her generation making her stand out more than other artist.
How could this artist influence you?
Sabrina Carpenter is one of our main inspirations for our branding as her consistency in upholding her image is top-notch. Carpenter’s identity as a former childhood Nickelodeon star was immediately unrecognised as her brand identity changed completely which was due to the consistency of building up a new image. We want to follow a great consistency in building our star’s brand in order to convey a clear interpretation of our star’s person by using a certain theme and color to uphold in every social media presence. Carpenter’s old Hollywood aesthetic had been consistently used in her music videos, social media campaigns, and concerts. We need to create a certain theme to follow for our star so posts and social media presence could follow and maintain this image. Moreover, Sabrina Carpenter is very feminine which we may tell from the symbolic usage of red lipstick and kiss marks. We are, especially, inspired by the kiss marks which are vital for her image and creates a symbol to represent who she is as a pop artist. We want to incorporate this element in our braiding as our target demographics are similar to Sabrina Carpenter’s.
Self Reflection: I actually spent a lot of this in this specific blogpost, even though we did it as a team I blanked out many times when thinking about the branding of our inspired artist Sabrina Carpenter. It was because she evolved so much over the years, from her whole marketing to overall branding as an artist it happened almost like overnight which I taught to be so inspiring because in the end it worked she became a global sensation again after her days in Nickelodeon. I enjoyed collecting all her media products since it fit our star's (Cinta) persona so much. I learned that mixing two era's can work so well for targeting female young adult demographics as it keeps them engaged with both modern and vintage era giving a sense of realism yet inspiring touch. Although the writing took forever, this helped my group understand how we want to brand our artists media products to fit her persona as we know were going for a more feminine and IT girl vibe which Sabrina Carpenter is portraying.
