The Business of Aspiration

Highlights

• Modern aspiration economy is anchored not in accumulation and display of possessions or even experiences, but of social capital, environmental credits, and cultural savviness (Currid-Halkett, 2017; Eckhardt, 2020).
• Desirability of something is today decoupled from its price, and its access is decoupled from wealth. Instead, it’s coupled with social capital, environmental creds, cultural savviness, a story, belonging, and its transformative potential to make us better humans.
  • Tags: [[culture]] [[ecommerce]] [[positioning]] [[retail]] [[marketing]]
• 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.
• 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.
• Glossier succeeded because it recognized that women enjoy sharing their beauty preferences, it and gave them the tools to create content that enabled conversations around it. Glossier’s value is not in the sheer scale of its user base, but rather in the interactions within it.
• The main lesson is that wide awareness doesn’t mean conversion and that seeing the fast user growth doesn’t mean profitability. To hack growth, startups have to “hack” culture first.
• The dynamics of how trends are created and how they spread shifted from brands, media, and retailers pushing ideas to mass market, to the Internet networks of niches and taste communities.
• As sociologist Duncan Watts notes in his research on social influence (2007), if a society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one – and if it isn’t ready, then almost no one can.
  • Tags: [[sociology]]
• In the modern aspiration economy, taste is not given. It’s not a passive play of social differentiation. It’s an activity that is continuously developed, cultivated, and refined.
• We are attention-seeking creatures, and when we go out, we “perform” for others, per sociologist Erving Goffman, and this performance gives “meaning to ourselves, to others, and to our situation.”
• The future is hidden in our present: in what we value, who we gather around and pay attention to, what we support, and what we rally against.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]] [[decision-making]] [[favorite]]
• Originally coined by futurist Paul Saffo (2012), contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences are indicators that change is ahead.
• Consumers want choice, but in order to navigate it, they rely on others and so end up enjoying the same fashion trends, movies, diets, and songs.
• In the inversion of aspiration, influencers were caught in crosshairs. If they behaved like everyone else, they were everyone else; if they behaved differently, they were called out for it.
  • Tags: [[influencers]] [[marketing]]
• Oddities are out-of-ordinary occurrences that make us search beneath the surface or a trend or pattern.
  • Tags: [[marketing]]
• Coincidences are about simultaneous appearance of distant and unrelated trends or patterns.
  • Tags: [[marketing]] [[culture]]
• Make social currency an inherent part of your business plan. Social activity in a market accumulates social capital.
  • Tags: [[purpose]] [[branding]] [[marketing]]
• Mega-influencers have reach, just like mass media. The best way for marketers to use them is for awareness, with cost per mille as the core metric, and to accept that they will not know which part of their budget is wasted.
• Some of the biggest brands in the world that are viewed as tremendously successful by most of the usual metrics still struggle with community-building or maintaining a legitimate connection with their customers.
• Chinese super apps like Little Red Book and WeChat’s Good Product Circle have already turned Chinese collective review power into an integral part of their shopping experience.
  • Tags: [[retail]] [[social-shopping]] [[ecommerce]] [[social-proof]]
• Social commerce emphasizes individual taste and style savviness over brands: we are buying someone’s look, not a particular brand within it.
  • Tags: [[retail]] [[culture]] [[social-media]] [[ecommerce]]
• Marketing and promotional machinery will move toward product seeding across social shopping communities, monitoring the emerging best-sellers and amplifying the best performing product styling. This monitor-and-optimize, product-centric model is the opposite of brand-centric communication; it is also the opposite of the current influencer marketing model.
  • Tags: [[influencers]] [[marketing]] [[social-shopping]]
• In the social commerce context, products make influencers, not the other way around.
• social commerce extends product life cycle nearly indefinitely, as the same product can be resold and prosperously revived in many different styling iterations.
  • Tags: [[social-media]] [[retail]] [[marketing]]
• if people now cultivate their own personalities in order to sell products and build a community, brands need to figure out what it is that they are doing.
• It is a fertile social context, and not any particular influencer or a celebrity, that starts a trend.
• Modern aspiration is not about having money to buy things, but having the taste to know what to buy.
• Tsundoku is a Japanese word for the uncomfortable feeling of having too many books to read.
• Knowing where to go and what to do is the currency that, in the modern aspiration economy, makes curators more important than influencers.
• Curation gives even mundane objects value by connecting them with a point of view, heritage, a subculture, or purpose that makes them stand out in the vortex of speed, superficiality, and newness.
• For a brand, curation can retain an audience and attract the new one that hasn’t considered a brand before. It can attract a collaborator or start a brand partnership. It can increase product value and protect pricing.
  • Tags: [[curation]] [[marketing]] [[retail]]
• Curation, by default, creates stories. Stories boost the relevance and significance of a product or a brand.
• TikTok effectively wipes out social status as the influencer market’s capital and taste as its currency. It creates the radically new kind of market where we equal our own taste profiles.
• Think about your brand in plural. Just as my Netflix isn’t your Netflix, my pair of Off-White sneakers is not your pair of Off-White sneakers.
• Today, we are going through the imagined community renaissance. Modern brands stepped in as the social constructs of belonging, and as the links between culture and psychology left vacant by traditional institutions of social cohesion.
• Second, a carefully cultivated online persona is today the social norm. Having an uncultivated one is a way of conveying social distinction.
  • Tags: [[culture]]
• Both mechanisms, of social classification and social cohesion, also explain why, in the modern aspiration economy, brand affinity is created not economically, but socially – and why best loyalty programs treat their customers as community members.
• The irony of most of today’s loyalty programs is that they aren’t about loyalty at all. They have more to do with economic calculation and gain management than with the true affinity for a brand.
• True loyalty is emotional and irrational, and often at odds with our survival instinct.
• In the modern aspiration economy, consumers are fans, influencers, hobbyists, environmentalists, and collectors. Membership programs are designed for them.
• The keyword here is not necessarily prestige and exclusivity, but identity and belonging. There’s a pure pleasure in the intimacy of consuming together, along with enjoying status within a community.
• Groups that activate a mentorship among their members offer a direct and clear value that makes the members stick and grows over time.
• Originally coined by authors Zeynep Arsel and Jonathan Bean (2012), a taste regime defines how consumers create routines and meaning around objects.
  • Tags: [[sociology]] [[retail]]
• Trade in exchange value, not in use value. Use value is defined by a product’s functionality. Exchange value is defined by a product’s social appeal.
• Today’s VC time horizons do not allow for the next generation of Coke legends; instead, they churn Coke Lifes.
• The key here is for brands to stop thinking about their community just as top-of-the-funnel tactic, and instead consider it as a long-term, bottom-of-the-funnel strategy (bonding, advocacy, loyalty).
  • Tags: [[ecommerce]] [[marketing]] [[community]] [[retail]]
• Along with intangibles like access, experiences, and knowledge, the modern aspiration economy also created a cultural class unto its own.
• All brands have to add responsibility, generosity, and social improvement to both their products and their actions.