Membership is also a vehicle of the modern aspiration economy. It represents a shift from doing things for the benefit of others (conspicuous consumption), to a value model where we invest in things that benefit ourselves: access, knowledge, information, experience, privacy, belonging, self-actualization.

Originally created by companies to give selling a face and a human emotion, brands are getting killed by their own customers. People are increasingly more likely to build their own brand – and develop their own products, services, and experiences – than to endorse or be sponsored by someone else’s.

Knowing where to go and what to do is the currency that, in the modern aspiration economy, makes curators more important than influencers.

Membership recognizes that a brand’s consumers are not a monolithic group, but a network of subgroups and niches. A good membership program’s unique value proposition, messaging, benefits, and how they are conveyed through look, feel, and tone of voice are tailored to each of these subgroups and niches.

Thanks to the Internet, products across categories are now more susceptible to trends than to individual preferences. It’s easy to blame algorithms for the sameness of our taste choices, but the real culprit is us. Humans use social signals to quickly orient themselves in the world. On a daily basis, we actively classify one another by lifestyle,

and acting differently, and force businesses to address problems in new ways. In the process, a business may stumble upon a great new idea, discover an unexpected revenue stream, take a risk it was too cautious to consider before, or find a way to be closer to the community it serves.

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.

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

Heritage, ritual, and tradition. The common perception is that a brand with a link to heritage and craft almost immediately achieves a veneer of rarity. This mechanism is often used in retrofit manner, with brands (and entire regions) clamoring to emphasize their provenance and heritage. Brand founders are often elevated to the level of artists. A