The Business of Aspiration

How Social, Cultural, and Environmental Capital Changes Brands

Ana Andjelic

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000201505
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Marketing

The Business of Aspiration is about how consumers' shifting status symbols affect business and brand strategy. These changing status symbols, like taste, aesthetic innovation, curation or environmentalism create the modern aspirational economy.

In the traditional economy, consumers signaled their status through collecting commodities, Instagram followers, airline miles, and busy back-to-back schedules. By contrast, in the aspirational economy, consumers increasingly convey status through collecting knowledge, taste, micro-communities, and influence. This new capital changes the way businesses and entire markets operate, and yet the modern aspirational economy is still an under-explored area in business and culture. The Business of Aspiration changes that.

In this book, marketers will find examples, analyses and tools on how brands can successfully grow in the modern aspirational economy. The Business of Aspiration answers questions like, "what is good for my brand long-term?", "how is this business decision going to impact our culture?" or "what are the main objectives of our growth?" Marketers will learn to shift their brand narrative and competitive strategy, to create and distribute new brand symbols, and to ensure that their brand's products and services create both monetary and social value.

1

To hack growth, brands have to hack culture first

The idea of “hacking” culture is a play on the concept of growth hacking popular among the Silicon Valley startups that we use to point out that success of ideas, brands, and products predominantly depends on the mood of the times. There are two ways to hack culture. First is to root a brand in a subculture or a niche. Second is capturing the zeitgeist, or kuuki wo yomu, a Japanese word used to depict reading the atmosphere. In this chapter, you will find four ways to detect and successfully capitalize on the mood in culture: contradictions, coincidences, inversions, and oddities in the culture; society; business; and consumer behavior.

In early April of 2020, more than 20,000 people signed a petition to name Dr. Anthony Fauci the “Sexiest Man Alive.” The honor is bestowed annually by People magazine, and past honorees include Hollywood stars, musicians, and celebrities like John Legend, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and The Rock. Dr. Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In those days, our heroes were carers and healers: nurses, doctors, drivers, cleaners, postal workers. The invisible, underpaid, taken-for-granted, they came together to protect us from the pandemic. In her Easter speech, the Queen of England expressed her hope that “in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge.”

Tell that to fashion influencer and proto-blogger Arielle Charnas.

We were unprepared for this crisis because our national heroes are soldiers and warriors. Our social heroes are nuclear scientists and tech inventors. Our cultural heroes are influencers and celebrities.

In the past several decades, we moved from “we” to “I”: to Silicon Valley visionaries to Avengers to cult personalities of self-actualization, focused on getting, not giving. “We get one life, so why not milk the shit out of it?” asks Gwyneth Palthrow in her GOOP Netflix trailer.

Our worldly success outbids our desire to be a good person, resulting in fraying of the social fabric of our communities and demise of the traditional institutions that held them together. We put radical individualism ahead of society, and ignored the secondary effects of our choices. This wasn’t hard to do: climate change was something that happened in the future and far away (until it didn’t) and a deadly virus was invisible and foreign (until it wasn’t).

Our job is to make the secondary effects of our choices – what our individual actions do to our communal ties and our environment – visible. Making these further-out effects visible will force us to take them into account.

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences,” says the Thomas theorem. There never was a better time to interpret this deadly global pandemic as an opportunity to reorganize our communities around new influencers, aspirations, social rituals, and habits.

New heroes

“We will succeed,” promised the Queen. “This time we join all nations across the globe in common endeavor. Using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us.” To the Queen and to David Bowie, we can all be heroes, because our individual decisions matter. They impact our self-perception and the way we present ourselves in our interactions. The way we socially label ourselves becomes, in the self-fulfilling prophecy, part of our identity. Our individual decisions also impact others. If we self-quarantine, our neighbors are more likely to do the same. If we wear a protective face mask in the supermarket, we set the example for others. If we stand two meters apart, we signal the necessity of social distancing.

There has been a lot of talk about how social media influencers and celebrities are behaving in this crisis: do we want to hear from them, do we not want to hear from them, and if we hear from them, what they should say? Consensus seems to be, the less, the better. We are not looking for travel inspiration and don’t suffer from FOMO. We are looking for a kindred spirit, shared circumstances, realness.

When it comes to realness, we are looking up to people who are at its forefront. An emergency room physician Darien Sutton is on Instagram, where he shares public health measures and occasionally (and rightfully) calls out irresponsible social media influencers. There are more like him: we now gather around medical influencers, nurse influencers, but also home exercise influencers, meditation influencers, baking influencers.

People also approve of brands and establishments that turn to positive social action. Eleven Madison in New York reopened as a communal kitchen that serves nearly 3,000 meals a day to doctors, nurses, and essential workers throughout the city. Some raise a pint virtually for local bars; others turn their car dealerships into a delivery fleet, or their hotel rooms to medical staff, like Hilton did in partnership with American Express.

Right now, we turned our attention away from brands and influencers promoting consumption toward our own socially responsible behavior and to those enacting social cohesion, responsibility, and compassion. This is a good thing. It expands the playing field of whom and what we want to identify with, and aspire to be and do. It also reorganizes our communities under different personality cults: more generous, pro-social, and giving.

Cult objects

“The city was one’s dining room, living room, and extended home - rather than the apartment, which is just where we went to sleep at night,” writes Elizabeth Currid-Halkett in her book The Sum of Small Things. Even for 2017, when this book was published, this view feels dated: it’s somehow closer to the “Sex and The City” era than to anyone’s actual behavior. Some years before “Coronavirus and The City,” young people came to the conclusion that going out requires “too much effort,” according to the 2018 Mintel report. Instead, they started to invest in plants, cookware, meditation cushions and decorative pillows, candles, and bath bombs. “The Great Indoors” is the title of 2017 sense article, which captured emerging trends like hygge, baths, and spending more time in one’s home. In 2019, author and consultant’s Venkatesh Rao term “domestic cozy” was officially elevated to the level of a coveted lifestyle.

Forget the latest Fendi bag, today’s cult objects are pajamas, home leisure, sourdough bread, a Peloton bike, a yoga mat, a collection of plants. We have already carefully weaved these objects into our social routines and taste regimes, as reflected in the boom of magazines and brands that revere the ordinary and the everyday. “This is the stuff life is made of: sparks of beautiful, ordinary hope,” writes Ruby Tandoh in her April 15, 2020, Eater essay titled “Finding Food Pleasures in a Time of Crisis.”

Today, focus on the ordinary is a matter of survival. By staying at home, we prevent the virus from spreading and thus protect others. By focusing on the everyday, we keep ourselves sane.

Habits become institutions, per sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Any action that’s repeated frequently “becomes cast into a pattern.” Our daily rhythms in isolation – cooking, exercising, working, decorating, celebrating holidays, and even mourning – become rituals of social cohesion. When coronavirus made our social structures collapse, rituals of domesticity is all we’d got.

Consequences are far-reaching. Institutionalized domesticity impacts economy, as it shapes our spending and leisure. Institutionalized social distancing impacts much more. Direct economy – in food, hospitality, entertainment, and culture – emerged from the forced lack of direct social contact, and is bound to stay. On April 6, Quartz reported that Chinese consumers have cut spending on “trivial things.” One of the things that were cut is buying coffee in coffee shops, and instead making it at home. As spending and leisure patterns rearrange themselves, so will the consumer economy. Brands should pay attention to what consumers are doing right now – how they organize their days through rituals and daily rhythms – to get a glimpse of their future behavior.

Days of glory

A social script is the preestablished pattern of behavior that people are expected to follow in specific social situations. Right now, most of our social scripts have been torn apart: we cannot greet each other, celebrate, grieve and bury our dead, or sit by the bedside of our sick.

At the same time, the new social scripts are being formed: checking in on the elderly people and the vulnerable, volunteering, having a better hygiene, being comfortable with telemedicine, working from home, taking care of the homeless. Micro-changes in everyday life are influenced by macro-changes (like this pandemic). Vice versa is also true, and our instinct to imitate and conform changes of both our behavior and the way we view the world is a powerful tool towards more generous, responsible, and compassionate social scripts.

The new narratives are already emerging: the Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson drew her characters socially distancing and helping the vulnerable with their shopping. Culture is ready to gather (virtually) and entertain: TikTok is hosting a free 48-hour livestream festival, and a big number of outlets, from theaters to opera to clubs, are streaming their content directly.

Brands, en masse, started to put forward stories of collective capacity for action and duty to care (for example, see Dove Beauty’s spring 2020 campaign, “Courage is Beautiful,” which depicts male and female nurses and physicians with scars from protective face masks.). By their very nature, brands are uniquely positioned to carry these new narratives out. At the moment, radical individualism is out, social connection is in. Brand focus is not on the end customer, but on the communities they belong to. Just as personas made individual consumers visible, the new brand methodology makes visible consumer communities and their co-dependencies and influences. New focus of engagement plans is not just on the brand actions but on their secondary effects. Pre-pandemic consumer-centric brand strategy is now society-centric strategy.

In the past month, the Western culture has, out of necessity, become more “we” than “I” (with the wellness industry caught in crosshairs). The Queen asked us to put our moral selves ahead of our economic selves. There is a clear aspiration to have a more robust health system and public service, more collective-oriented and equal society, and to course-correct political agendas.

In the meantime, there’s pop culture. Our dress, memes, aesthetic, and language are changing, and not only because of Tiger King. Kanye, ever the innovator, seems to have already adopted the hospital gear aesthetic in the form of his Season 8 boot. Face masks have been hailed as new sneakers, and indeed, streetwear face mask market is lit.

If our lexicon has been full of military metaphors (“take a stab at something,” “attack a problem”), maybe now it will get replaced with the nursing, caring, and healing metaphors. “It took a nuclear disaster to get me to do it,” said one food wholesaler in the middle of the deadly global pandemic to describe his business pivot. We still use phrases like “nuclear” and “WWIII” and root for lone heroes out on mission impossible 19 to save the world.

This crisis is finally forcing us to consider communal heroes, and to celebrate ordinary people who distinguish themselves by going against their social instinct to benefit the community. Hard-won experience, intelligence, and competence are all of a sudden sexy. It better be: what we do now will be evaluated by Greta Thunberg’s generation, and the generations that follow. The value we put forward now are the values that future will rest on.

Brands need to pay attention to who, what, and how consumers celebrate in the modern world. Even before the crisis, and in the relatively stable time of mass media, success of a brand campaign, initiative, or a collaboration was unpredictable. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” a famous advertising industry adage goes.

Thanks to Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest, we are more than ever exposed to one another’s decisions when it comes to what to buy, wear, and like. We are suscept...