he met the eyes of each executive. “The magic,” he said, is out there. Our job is to find it.”
Successful magicians possess the knowledge and skills of their craft, but they know that the “magic” is not theirs at all. It belongs to their audience. Some call it a capacity for wonder and astonishment. We call it aspiration. Without aspiration, there is no magic because there is no motive for magic. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Doubtless, he was inspired in this thought by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, of whom he was a great admirer. “Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion,” Hegel wrote. We believe this declaration can support at least two more variations: “Nothing great was ever achieved without aspiration” and “Nothing great was ever achieved without magic.”
At Disney, Bob Iger has consistently defined himself as an executive who leads people to discover and act upon their aspirations, which if they are thinking like magicians, are parallel to and even coincide with the aspirations of their customers. Through this approach, Iger did a brilliant job of restoring the company’s relationship with young families and moms and resetting its relationship with teens and tweens. The aspiration he expressed for Disney was as iconic as Mickey’s ears: “We will define family fun everywhere in the world.”
The Non-Miracle of Net-a-Porter
Magic looks miraculous. It isn’t. And Bob Iger worked no miracles at Disney. Yes, the company was in trouble when he took it over, but let us acknowledge that when Iger took the helm, the Disney organization already had a formidable brand. The good news is that any company—anyone in business—can learn to create brands that not only imagine consumer aspirations, but imagine those aspirations achieved.
Consider the story of Net-a-Porter, a London-based high-fashion retailer founded in 2000 by Natalie Massenet. She pioneered the Web as a platform on which consumers could achieve their most fashionable aspirations. Born Natalie Rooney in Los Angeles to an American journalist/film publicist father and a British model for Chanel mother, Massenet spent her early childhood in Paris. She grew up in close contact with the fashion industry and became a fashion journalist for Women’s Wear Daily and Tatler. This experience not only gave her a unique perspective on the fashion industry, it also inspired her to develop the concept of a magazine-format website capable of converting readers into consumers with a mouse click on clothing items they encountered while browsing. In 2000, this concept was met with a great deal of skepticism, but Massenet was convinced of the power of the concept: a magazine platform that created interest and functioned as a retail store, providing the means of instantly acting on interest. Massenet was among the early generation of e-retailers who recognized the magic of the digital platform, which could variously anticipate, create, and shape consumer aspiration while enabling the effortless transformation of aspiration into reality.
The naysayers notwithstanding, Massenet launched her company from a flat in Chelsea, London. Remember, this was 2000, a year in which “dot-coms” were being lavishly overvalued and recklessly overfunded. Often, what they promised far exceeded the state of Internet technology at the time, and many dot-coms turned into dot-bombs. Massenet walked straight into this situation with Net-a-Porter. Not only were overly hyped dot-coms imploding all around her, the concept of selling exclusively online was almost unimaginable. Most computer users were still literally dialing into this thing called the World Wide Web. Designers as well as investors were justifiably wary of putting merchandise, money, and reputation into an enterprise that lacked the brick-and-mortar presence of a Saks Fifth Avenue or Barneys. Whenever Massenet tried to pitch her business ideas, there was always the same question: “But where is the actual store located?”
Her persistence, however, paid off. In 2001, she persuaded up-and-coming new designer Roland Mouret to sell his first collection on her site. That was sufficient to overcome inertia, and by 2004, Net-a-Porter was turning a profit. A fashion discount site, The Outnet, followed in 2009, and Massenet sold Net-a-Porter to the Swiss-based luxury goods holding company Richemont in 2010, remaining as the company’s executive chairman as well as a prime investor. Today, Net-a-Porter grabs the attention of over five million women a month, who read, browse, and shop the latest runway looks from the season’s most sought-after collections. Not only does Net-a-Porter act as an online retailer, it also presents the latest fashion news, trend reports, and style advice to women around the world. Endorsements from celebrities like Victoria Beckham (in WWD, April 18, 2012) further strengthen its appeal: “I do like using style apps on my iPad and I also like to shop online. I love Net-a-Porter in particular. Being a working mum with four children, having the ability to shop online
is wonderful.”
The average Net-a-Porter customer is a thirty-three-year old female who is affluent and accomplished. Typical customers hold such positions as CEO, senior executive, attorney, fashion director, or media director. They have plenty of household income to spend on luxury and fashion, and the members of this target audience are not bashful about their own aspirations. They want the best, and they want to get it the way they want to get it—conveniently, at the mere click of a mouse. Net-a-Porter’s website was created with a clear layout resembling any hardcopy fashion magazine. When browsing and scrolling across any of the magazine’s editorial pages, a pop-up window near the user’s mouse curser conveniently enables purchase. Net-a-Porter gives buyers literally no excuses for failing to buy. Fulfillment of aspiration is just a click away.
Over the years, Massenet focused on aspirational consumers like herself, who value time over cash. Her goal was to provide effortless shopping to people who are so busy earning money that they crave the convenience of getting luxury goods with minimal digital effort. Massenet then included the final touch on the packaging itself. An elegantly mysterious black box is delivered to your home—or office—tied up in a bow. Such attention to detail from order to delivery is a signature of the brand. Today, Net-a-Porter’s deliveries make the receiver feel more than anything else valued as a customer. Consumer aspirations are delivered with each purchase.
Net-a-Porter blazed a new path within the retail industry. Massenet created it as the Web’s first one hundred percent shop-able publication. In serving her customers’ aspirations, her goal was to redefine the magazine industry. In the process, however, she ended up redefining the retail industry. Supremely well-executed digital enterprises share with magic the ability to render the universe seamless and frictionless. Physical effort, distance, and time itself are made, in the wave of a wand or the click of a mouse, to disappear.
Indulgence Is Not the Only Aspiration
The aspirational principles of magic readily lend themselves to the entertainment and luxury sectors, but their application is by no means limited to these. Antivirus software is neither entertaining nor luxurious, but in 2010, when David Morey’s client, digital security firm AVG Technologies, sought to create a successful IPO, David drew on his experience as a magician to create a strategy. Common sense tells us that digital security is a consumer need, not a luxury. Magic, however, has more to do with uncommon than common sense, and David therefore decided to focus AVG Technologies not on customer need but on customer aspiration. Consumers aspire to peace of mind in their digital lives. Trapped by Internet threats and the increasingly complicated burden of managing their online worlds, the consumer of 2010 shared the position of those who in the 1920s gaped and cheered as Harry Houdini escaped from handcuffs, strait jackets, and “torture cells.” Modern consumers want the freedom that comes with mastery of life online, so David helped to build a marketing approach that empowered and liberated AVG Technologies to deliver a message not of grim necessity, but of aspiration—more precisely, of aspiration achieved. In the jam-packed digital security sector, AVG Technologies’ 2012 IPO was a homerun.
The Aspirationals
Like magicians, today’s most innovative business leaders are at their best when they transcend and seek to fulfill their customers’ higher aspirations.
