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

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. It’s an activity that includes objects (e.g. sneakers, coffee beans, food), other participants (e.g. sneakerheads, menswear forums, friends, a local coffee barista), speci

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.”

Membership activates learning. The first step here is to define the lifestyle area that members can refine, improve upon, and be more informed about.

Not as straightforward as loyalty programs, membership trades on social and cultural capital. Scoring an invite for the Château de Saran, the centerpiece of the Moët Chandon empire, doesn’t have a price: “you cannot pay to come and stay at Saran, that is not the point. You have to be asked,” says Stephane Baschiera, the president and CEO of Moët an

Any aspiration is a narrative: it’s the stories we buy into and the products and experiences we buy to be part of these stories.

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. Thanks to a membership in a community, a hypebeast gets access to new product drops and events. This is the domain of intangibles that most loyalty pr

social shopping means that platforms will bestow the same fate on retailers as they did on publishers. The platforms successfully monetized our attention. They are about to commercialize our social attachments.

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.

More recently, we are witnessing that curators are overtaking influencers as the core vehicle of capturing the cultural mood and starting trends.

Tone of voice is not a brand Being chatty, witty, and approachable only masks the missing cultural link that ensures brand durability. It also masks the missing unique value proposition. GMO brands do not compete on the actual business value, like technical innovation, design, or product quality. Away’s sells Muji knockoffs. Casper’s subway riddles