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

This modern capital is also rooted in FOMO (fear of missing out) and in being in the know:

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.

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

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

Brands targeting high-net-worth individuals need to reposition around work-of-the-human-hands artistry and excellence versus the wannabe-rich, in-your-face communication codes.

The rich belong to the old industrial economy and to the traditional luxury. They own objects that signify stability, security, and durability (real estate, hard luxury, antiques, high-end wine, collectible art). The core promise of hard luxury is its permanence (“You never really own Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation

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

This is the new backdrop for brand strategy. Radical individualism is out, social connection is in. Brand focus is not on the end customer, but on the communities they belong to. Just as personas made individual consumers visible, the new brand methodology makes visible consumer communities and their co-dependencies and influences. New focus of eng

Knowledge gives products value, and creates a divide between those in the know and those who neither have this Chanel jacket nor know that Vanessa Paradis wore it.