Number 33: Winter 2006
Aspirational Marketing
by Jerry Welsh
Editor's comment: Marketing has tended to look at consumers' needs and desires but with less focus on their values. However, as conspicuous consumption becomes less popular, there needs to be a different way to market goods and services based on what consumers are really looking for.
The proverbial Law of Diminishing Returns is gnawing away at the effectiveness of conventional, traditional marketing practice, with consumer fatigue and cynicism greeting the ever-proliferating array of consumer financial benefits and prize-laden promotions. And with consumer attitudinal surveys showing the regard in which managers of large American businesses is held hovering around the level of respect generally reserved for criminals, it may be time for a fundamental reassessment of marketing practices, from advertising, sponsorship, to promotion. American business badly needs to re-establish its respectable credentials with the consuming public.
The generic problems with much of current marketing practice are two: first, many marketing initiatives are inspired and fed by ineffective research in which the wrong questions are asked, yielding answers that are either clearly wrong or, at best, irrelevant to deep-seated, (perhaps even latent), consumer needs. Second, much of what marketers do now is based on logic and traditional notions of business common sense, producing marketing initiatives that are reasonable on their face, but are tired and ineffective as motivators of desirable consumer behavior and attitudes. Consumer purchases without a transcendent connection to an aspirational brand are losses waiting to happen, just as soon as a better deal comes along.
What we may need is a healthy dose of risk-taking in marketing practice, where the illogical heart takes precedence over the logical head. What I advocate is Aspirational Marketing, which I define as an intuition-driven effort to appeal to, and bond with, consumers’ altruistic impulses rather than marketing programs which pander to consumers’ short-term economic interests. An effective appeal to consumers’ most altruistic impulses can be good business as well. For example, I believe that premium pricing in the modern world can sooner be defended by businesses doing good for consumers in their individual emotional and practical worlds than it can be supported by periodic price cuts and promotional giveaways.
The ultimate consumer benefit, I believe, is to be inspired and helped by a company’s public-spirited way of doing business, by a company’s commitment to making each person’s -- and, therefore, the community’s -- life better.
I’m not only addressing the need for companies to give a portion of their profits away, either through their foundations or as Cause-related Marketing, but I am advocating something much more. Aspirational Marketing goes well beyond this well-known charity. For example, a commitment by a company to making its consumers smarter about their purchases and their consumption habits is marketing and promotional money well spent; it’s money, if allocated creatively, that will yield a hefty return on the investment for the sponsoring company.
Event Marketing, among the fastest growing marketing areas, that says “thank you” to one’s consumers and “I want your life to be better” while it engages and entertains, need not also put instant money in consumers’ pockets. It can, however, put loyalty to the sponsoring brand in their hearts. And that persistent loyalty can be a sustainable, positive differentiator among competing products and services, building patronage for one’s business even while competitors may offer a better financial deal.
The best “deal” in this modern, complex world, I think, is one which lays a preferential claim to improving a consumer’s hoped-for daily life and belief system, either a lifestyle and belief system that currently exists, or ones that can be addressed and nurtured with marketing imagination and an unshakable commitment by a business to make each consumer’s daily world a little better. After all, nothing good ever happens anywhere until somebody believes something aspirational.
I believe that the two aspirational benefits for many American consumers in the 18-50 age group will be to be smarter about choices in their lives and smarter about caring for the lives of their families (not just more clever about their purchases. Second, I believe that many consumers are restlessly dissatisfied with the values inherent in conspicuous consumption; they somehow want to give something of value back to the community beyond the interests of their immediate family. To be sure, some consumers will always go for the price break or for the financial or service benefit; but I would argue that this paradigm is not the dominant behavior consumers want to exhibit. We as marketers need to rely on, and tap into, the innate propensity of ordinary people to believe in something transcending their immediate short-term interests, to take a chance for something morally good. In general, I have always held that relying on the innate good nature of ordinary people may sometimes disappoint, but it is seldom a long-term mistake.
There is a very practical reason that companies ought to be in the business of educating consumers, making them smarter about their life choices. That reason is the Internet and its power to inform and educate. We marketers must realize that access to the Internet empowers consumers to be much better informed and educated and, in general, much smarter about their choices. For the first time in history, ordinary people have at their fingertips all the information they need, so their tendency will be not to rely on business to inform them of their best interests. We in business must make certain that we become a reliable source of good information for consumers; not to do so will mean losing standing and legitimacy in consumers’ eyes.
Consider this: arguably, a cancer patient with the help of the Internet can be as knowledgeable about the disease and its treatment as is an ordinary doctor who is not an oncologist. Companies must use their Web sites as well as all other aspects of their marketing and public relations to keep pace with the internet’s ability to educate, to inform, and to empower. Not to keep pace with this new standard of available information is to risk falling into the category of just another commercial brand, just another offer failing to be state of the art insofar as service to the consumer is concerned.
It is hardly surprising that good marketing might be seen to be produced counter intuitively, for many other aspects of business certainly have been shown to be. Was it not counterintuitive to believe, as Fred Smith of Federal Express believed, that it could be reasonable and profitable to fly a package from Chicago to New York by bringing it first down south to Memphis? Wasn’t Sam Walton’s notion foolish that stores in the hinterlands beyond the suburbs could one day dominate the retail industry? Unreasonable and counterintuitive, both notions were, no doubt. Both worked, however.
So it is with Aspirational Marketing. We have to abandon the notion that in modern society we can always determine consumer attitudes and behaviors empirically. There is a dimension to consumers’ evolving values and feelings which we have to periodically intuit, not trying to identify these values only by statistically projectable research. Marketers must not be afraid to take business risks based on intuition alone.
And which businesses in America need some form of this Aspirational Marketing? To cite but two examples: pharmaceuticals (people do not understand the issues and costs of the medicine pipeline, or the extraordinary financial burden of clinical trials, or the massive research costs inherent in the business, and resultant pricing issues that follow) and in financial services (where the fine print of agreements often prompts many consumers to doubt the basic good intentions of companies in this category).
And what company in my experience best understands counterintuitive, Aspirational Marketing? Take Whole Foods as an example. Whether educating consumers about the source and nature of the fish they eat through in-store seminars, for example, and giving away a portion of their profits periodically for community betterment, Whole Foods defies conventional business logic simply by giving and giving and growing and growing. And their stock price ascends like a rocket. How’s that for a formula? Their pricing is premium; but if you go into the store on Union Square in Manhattan at 6 pm, you’ll think that you are in Grand Central Station. Such is their popularity. Whole Foods loyalists rush to pay a premium to shop there and to be associated with that brand. Whole Foods has it right.
So it may come down to this: intuition in Marketing is sometimes more important than knowledge gleaned from research; serendipitous discovery is more important than facts obtained from science. What we marketers need is courageous intuition and a vision for what human betterment can be brought about by our actions. Then we need to mobilize the will and courage to make that vision real.
My conclusion is that we marketers need to be less knowledgeable in a conventional sense, and altogether smarter in the larger sense of being in tune with consumer values through the creative anticipation of what consumers might be feeling. It hardly behooves us to be right in some traditional, secure way and to be wrong ultimately about what consumers want and need. After all, our challenge is to give the people not only what they now are accustomed to want, but what they truly want and deeply need.
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© Jerry Welsh / Through the Loop Consulting Ltd 1998-2006