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

The keywords are not necessarily prestige and exclusivity but identity and belonging.Membership is micro. To prevent reverse network effects and maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio, brands often focus on specific customer sub-segments and overdeliver for them. This works particularly well for brands that sell easily commodified products. For exam... See more

In the absence of religion and other community belonging, consumers yearn to find the brands they can use as signals for identity curation and kinship – signaling to other Glossier or Stanley cup girls that no actually, we’re the same. Brands do this signaling implicitly (owning Aesop hand soap reveals something about you - well-to-do, metropolitan... See more

Think about the brands you actually care about, not just the ones that dominate your feed, but the ones that have longevity. If you dig under the hood, the best of them don't necessarily begin with product, marketing hacks, or whatever the latest "community-building" playbook dictates. Instead, they start with perspective. The founder's introspecti... See more