Interview with Aleksandra Di Gesaro on Why Beautiful Brands Fail to Turn Likes Into Sales
Aleksandra Di Gesaro is a fashion photographer, art director and visual communication strategist with more than fifteen years of experience. In this interview, she explains why a brand can look flawless and still fail to convert likes into sales, and why followers who like a post rarely become customers. She also shares what makes visuals memorable, how smaller businesses can create impact without a large budget, and the mindset shift she believes every founder needs to make to be seen and understood.
Aleksandra Di Gesaro, Fashion Photographer & Visual Strategist
Why can a brand look flawless and still fail to earn trust at first glance?
The problem is that most brands focus on looking polished and beautiful. But trust isn’t built based on whether something is beautiful or not. Without even realizing it, potential buyers ask what the visuals are telling them about the brand.
“Visuals” and “aesthetics” are treated as synonyms, but they do different jobs. Aesthetics is taste: does this look beautiful? Visuals are a communication system: what does this tell a stranger about who you are, whether you can be trusted, and whether you’re meant for them? Most business owners fixate on aesthetics, and that’s why they aren’t converting their audience into buyers.
Many entrepreneurs have followers who like their posts but never buy. What is missing from their visuals?
A like is a very small gesture. It tells you that someone enjoyed the image, and nothing about whether they saw their own life in it. In film, people stay with a story because they recognise the main character’s problem and want to know how it will be solved, and the lead looking good is rarely the reason. Many entrepreneurs, coaches and consultants do the opposite and fill their feeds with themselves: polished portraits, inspiring locations, a beautifully styled desk. Followers admire all of this from a comfortable distance because the person missing from the picture is the follower.
I once audited the profile of a coach who teaches women how to lead in the corporate world and get the promotion they deserve. Almost all of her content showed her sitting alone in her home office. The audience’s reaction was easy to predict: “Nice, but she doesn’t get me.” Yet she had spent years in corporate environments and knew exactly what it means to face an angry boss or to speak up in a meeting. None of that appeared in her images, so potential clients had no reason to believe she understood them.
Your visuals start to sell for you when your audience sees themselves in them, such as in a tense meeting room instead of an empty home office. That is when they trust you, and trust is what makes them buy.
How has working in fashion photography changed the way you think about branding strategy today?
Fashion photography taught me early that a beautiful picture and a picture that converts are two different things. In this industry, an image has a job, which is to sell a product to a specific person, and the results show quickly whether it managed to. Over more than fifteen years, I have seen gorgeous campaigns that changed very little for the brand and simpler ones that sold out, and that made me stop asking how to make something look good. Now I begin with the customer: who they are, what they need to believe before they buy, and how they should feel afterwards. Location, styling and light come only after that. Fashion also taught me to think in systems, since a single image rarely builds a brand. What builds it is how the images work together over time across a website, a feed and a campaign. My analytical side helps here because I look for patterns in what audiences respond to and apply them deliberately, which makes the strategy something I can test and repeat. Fashion simply gave me the best training ground, and the principles apply to any business that needs to build a loyal community and convert likes into sales.
What do founders still misunderstand most about visual identity?
Most founders think of visual identity as a logo, a colour palette and a couple of fonts. Those elements matter, but they are only the surface. Every brand also chooses an aesthetic, whether pleasing, warm, sensual, disruptive or raw, and most make that choice by taste, without asking what the visuals built on it tell potential clients. The result is decoration, empty of meaning. The lighting, the styling, the casting and even the way a product is held all say something about price, values and the person the brand is made for. Visual identity is the system of those decisions, repeated so consistently that people recognise you before they read your name.
The second misunderstanding is where the decisions come from. Founders often choose what they personally find beautiful or copy whatever works for the most successful people in their industry, and then compete with brands that have far bigger budgets. A stronger starting point is the problem you solve and the person who has it. A business coach for exhausted managers, a consultant for family-owned companies and a skincare founder will have very different visual identities if each one starts from the real situation of their client. When the visuals show that situation, people recognise themselves in it, and recognition is what makes a brand feel trustworthy.
Related: What Repeat Customers Really Come Back For (The Visual Identity Lesson Behind a 70% Sales Jump)
Why do so many entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants invest in a professional brand and still look exactly like everyone else in their industry?
Because professional and distinctive are two different things. A founder hires a good photographer, a designer and a copywriter, and each of them does excellent work, but they often follow the visual codes of the industry because those codes feel safe. So we get the same neutral palette, the same smiling headshot against a bright wall and the same laptop on a white desk. Everything is correct, and almost nothing is memorable. People remember specifics: an unusual face, an unexpected setting, a detail that tells them what this person believes or who she works with. Specifics feel risky because they will not appeal to everyone, yet that is exactly why they work, since the right clients feel chosen. When I look at a brand, I ask what its visuals say that nobody else in the same industry could say. If the answer is nothing, then the money has gone into looking credible, and credibility is only the minimum entry ticket.
What visual detail instantly tells you that a brand truly understands its audience?
For me, it is usually the people in the picture and the situation they are in. When I see someone who clearly belongs to the brand’s real audience, shown in an ordinary moment of life or work instead of a perfect pose, I know somebody has looked closely at who they are talking to. Imagine a consultant who works with small manufacturers and shows herself in a workshop with a client instead of in a glass office with a laptop. That one choice tells me she knows their world. The age of the people shown, the setting, the way the clothes or the space look lived in, and an expression that looks real rather than directed all say the same thing. I find it especially powerful when a brand casts someone the industry would not normally choose, such as an older woman in a beauty campaign, because it breaks the pattern we expect and makes us stop scrolling. Details like these cannot be copied from a competitor’s feed because they only come from paying attention to real customers.
How can smaller brands create high-impact visuals without relying on large production budgets?
The real impact comes from clarity, and not from a big budget and a fancy photo studio. Before anyone picks up a camera, I would decide what the image must communicate and to whom. A single clear idea, shot simply, will do far more than a lavish shoot with no point of view. Natural light, a real location and a good phone camera can produce strong work when the concept is sharp. Real clients are often the best asset a small business has. A coach who shares a short, honest story of a client’s turning point, with their permission, builds more credibility than any stock image of a sunrise over a mountain. I would also advise choosing a few visual elements, such as a colour, a type of setting or a way of framing, and repeating them until people recognise you by sight. Consistency builds memory faster than variety does. Finally, imperfection is not always a weakness, because a small, honest flaw can make a brand feel human and therefore more trustworthy than a spotless one.
What role does emotional intelligence play when building a brand people genuinely remember?
It plays a central role because people remember how a brand made them feel long after they have forgotten what it looked like. Emotional intelligence in branding starts with noticing what your audience is actually feeling: their frustrations, their hopes and the things they hesitate to admit. It also shows in how much of yourself you are willing to reveal. Take Sara Blakely and Sneex. People love Sara because she is real, authentic and imperfect, and that is why a founder’s profile so often has more followers and engagement than the brand’s own. Psychology calls this the Pratfall Effect: we tend to like a competent person even more after seeing a small, human flaw. Most professionals are so afraid of looking unprofessional or weak that they remove every trace of humanity from their profiles, and the connection disappears with it. The brands and people we remember let their audience see a real person, with real experience and the occasional imperfection, because that makes others feel understood. A brand that makes people feel understood does not have to work hard to be remembered.
If you could leave founders with one mindset shift about branding and visibility, what would it be?
I would ask them to stop asking how their brand looks and start asking what they want people to understand when they see it. Many founders chase visibility as if it were a numbers game, hoping that more reach will eventually bring more customers. In my experience, being seen by many people who do not understand you is worth much less than being understood by the few who need you. When your visuals say clearly who you are for and what you do for them, the right people stop scrolling and the wrong ones simply pass by, and that is exactly what you want. This also takes some pressure off. You no longer have to appeal to everyone or imitate whoever is currently succeeding in your industry. You can concentrate on the specific person you want to serve and show up for them consistently. Visibility that comes from being understood lasts longer than visibility that comes from being admired.
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