Final Project Reflection with Reference to Baudrillard's Simulations

Project Reflection

The mental health and wellness brand that I have been developing throughout the past weeks has come to a final product of a pitch presentation marketing my brand Becca through a multitude of mediums and designs, including logo designs, color palettes, sticky note designs, decorative card designs, sticker designs, a web design featuring the design of a blog page, candle packaging designs, and editorial journal designs. 

This collection of media grounds itself upon the values of mindfulness, reflection and productivity. The core values of my brand Becca transcend beyond those and highlight the following as points to consider and pay attention to: Love, Kindness, Mindfulness, Growth, Inner Peace. Overall, this brand development concept seeks to work in favor of those values as it romanticizes the act of self care in ways that facilitates the process of introspection and mental growth. Mindfulness is simulated in a romanticized sense through the affirmative quotes pertinent to its merch designs, making this process become less of an emotional burden, and more of a normalized, likeable habit. 

These concepts coincide with Baudrillard's themes of nostalgia being an "escalation of the true, lived experience" since this term is, in such, described as an romanticized act that distorts its realistic emotional consequence, in this scenario an emotional burden (12). Hence, nostalgia turns an experience into something that rids it of its core of significance and purpose. Yet, in my project this assumes not a negatively distorting meaning but a positively relieving meaning despite its synthetic nature. 

What is at play is "the demiurgic ambition to exorcize the natural substance of a thing in order to substitute a synthetic one" that invents a new substance to look at (Baudrillard 88). And that new substance is good. That new substance that allows consumers of my brand to look at it not through a consumerist, capitalist and inevitably detaching lens but a peaceful, individualistic one that makes them feel significant and cared for. This is at least the final goal and emotional purpose of the brand: to prioritize self care as an romanticized act of love for oneself that is fostered through a sense of community established through its blog page. 

> Pitch Presentation: Slides