The Business of Aspiration: How Social, Cultural, and Environmental Capital Changes Brands

Cultural, social, and environmental capital rises and falls in value daily. As our values rearrange themselves, so does the business of aspiration.

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.

By their very nature, brands trade in status: they promise us to be younger, more attractive, smarter, happier, more accomplished, richer. For the longest time, brands operated according to Veblen logic that status is linked to wealth and desirability to price. Now we all have the opportunity to flip the script and link worth and values to our busi

Thanks to taste regimes, we get more joy out of the everyday. We also adopt a new mechanism for social distinction and status signaling. A taste regime provides social links and holds a taste community together, and sets apart one taste community from another.

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.

Social. People are not only individuals but also belong to communities and are members of a society. Their behaviors are shaped by those around them and by collective symbols and stories. The new target unit for brands are a community and a society, not an individual. Modern brand strategy aims to address not just “jobs to be done,” but jobs to be

A decade or so ago, brands shifted from increasing value of their products through utility, competitive comparison, and creative advertising to endowing products they made with aesthetic, sustainability credentials, a story of artisanship and provenance, and/or a community in order to give their products identity and singularity. (Virgil Abloh made

There are three implications for brand strategy: Create collections (rather than product ranges). A collection gives identity to everyday products. In the crowded industrial goods landscape, an identity is the key product differentiator: packaging, naming, color palette, signature design details, and product shapes, like the chick-shaped hand sanit

Glossier’s value is not in the sheer scale of its user base, but rather in the interactions within it.