of this defined segment cannot name a “purposeful” brand they themselves feel good about. This study defined these “Aspirationals” based on their “love of shopping, desire for responsible consumption, and their trust in brands to act in the best interest of society.” The research concluded that 40 percent of today’s global consumers are “Aspirationals,” a big and powerful target market for the business leaders who are thinking like magicians.19
Because the data in this study is both new and novel, Aspirationals are as yet very much insufficiently studied as well as underserved, and even their marketplace potential is still largely untapped. We know that they are hungry for brands with a strong ethic, or what could be termed a strong “conviction.” Put another way, the Aspirational Consumers seek brands with a higher purpose, brands that know and appreciate what their founders and creators believe, and companies that know how their brands fit into their customers’ lives. The Aspirational Consumers are young, mostly millennial and Gen X populations (think Burning Man). Most live outside the United States, in emerging markets.20
Some of David Morey’s favorite clients, such as Apple, Nike, and The Coca-Cola Company, exemplify “aspirational” brands. Grey Goose Vodka is another example—and perhaps among the most revelatory. We challenge readers to a blind taste test of the three leading vodkas. Good luck distinguishing one from the other. But, of course, chemical substance is not the issue here. It is the look, feel, packaging, imagery, and aspirational fulfillment of Grey Goose that allows it to charge more and lead its marketplace. Arguably, in fact, the higher price contributes to the aspiration. After all, nothing is less worthy of desire than a “bargain brand.”
Like religion, magic often imbues ordinary things, people, events, and environments with magnified significance. The entity in question becomes, under the force of religion, sacred. Under the influence of magic, it becomes magical. Likewise, “aspirational” brands stand for more than what they actually are or do. They execute against a product perception that extends well beyond devices, sneakers, sugar water and brown food coloring, or distilled clear spirits. Among the most potent aspects of managing consumers’ perception of aspirational brands is something we call “image associations.” The world’s greatest magicians, like the world’s best marketers, understand these instinctively. The most effective image associations are distilled through something called the “One Emotion” test. It goes like this: If you had to choose to evoke only a single emotion from your audience—or your customers—what would it be? Here’s what two former David Morey clients chose:
•Focusing on male consumers, BMW chose an emotion and aspirational fulfillment associated with an automobile—e.g., “Pride”… “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”
•Focusing on female consumers, LVMH (LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE), the French-based luxury goods conglomerate, chose pocketbook brand imagery that allows the company to charge what it charges, namely prices that are exponentially higher than the cost of manufacture—e.g., “Richness”… “Exceptional Luxury.”
The greatest magicians align every single detail of their own personal brands by instinct and purpose to connect with the higher aspirations of their audience. For example, our friend David Copperfield, with the obsessiveness of a brilliant marketer, controls every element of his own show, celebrity, and image. Just try taking a selfie with the world’s most famous magician. It won’t happen. Copperfield won’t deny you a photo with him. It just won’t be your selfie. One of his staff or Copperfield himself will take the picture for you and send it along. You will have your souvenir, and Copperfield will have exercised his control over it. Nothing he does happens by accident or passive acquiescence. Like David Copperfield, rising and steadily powerful brands always play offense and never settle for defense. This is a hallmark of what we call “insurgent brands,” and today they are in every marketplace, insurgent hordes that swarm like ants—we do admire ants—around the pedestals on which traditional incumbent brands perch. The insurgent brands keep scrambling, climbing, and fanning out as they climb, until they cover whole product categories—or create entirely new ones. Like magicians, insurgent brands play by a different set of rules than the incumbent market leaders. Today, it is insurgent rules that rule markets.
Getting Ahead
By definition, aspiration focuses on the future. The Rolling Stones owe their creative and commercial success to the fact that Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction. The German Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century understood that all creative energy was in aspiration, not fulfillment. Sehnsucht, they called it—longing, yearning, craving: in other words, aspiring. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ends his epic poem Faust with the line, Das Ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan—“The Eternal Feminine leads us upward.” Thus, the greatest poem by Germany’s greatest poet ends not with a period but with an aspiration—the promise of a future so great as to be eternal precisely because Faust, the archetypal human being, can’t get no satisfaction.
Think now of the great companies and their CEOs and the way that they, at their best, focus on delivering something beyond a product or service to their customers. Apple, Red Bull, Netflix, Spotify, Zappos, Sam Adams, Starbucks, Instagram, Under Armour, Twitter, 5 Hour Energy, Big Ass Fans, and Uber, to name a few, make or sell a variety of products, but all cater to aspiration. The last thing these companies want to do is finally satisfy their customers. Mick can’t get no satisfaction. Faust follows the Eternal Feminine. The Black Eyed Peas on YouTube or iTunes just can’t get enough. CEOs like Iger and Massenet are so good at what they do that they lead their companies ahead of their consumers’ aspirations, violating outworn conventions and models to deliver more and better than their competitors. They think out of the box, like magicians, and are unafraid to imagine how to give people the solutions they want—even if their companies must ultimately plant the Sehnsucht inside their consumers by giving them a hunger they never knew they had. The furthest thing from their minds is satisfying the hunger they create. Why doesn’t the magician reveal the secret of the trick? Because to do so would end the hunger for a solution to the mystery.
Who finally gets satisfaction? Who finally stops yearning? Who finally gets enough? Answer: The incumbent brands and those who lead them. They, the incumbents, are the antithesis of the start-ups and upstarts of David Morey’s first book with Scott Miller, The Underdog Advantage.21 For everything that is stacked against them, the insurgents have all the advantages of underdogs—first and foremost, a lot less to lose and, conversely, a lot more to gain. Insurgents know how their customers think. They understand aspiration far better than the state of indolent satiety known as incumbency. And it is no coincidence that all great magicians are underdogs. They are the ones trapped in the Chinese Water Torture Cell, who are therefore super-powered by the desire to escape, transcend, and save their necks.
We Americans live in a country born of revolution, conceived by underdogs. Insurgency is in our bloodline, and it’s why we all love an underdog—because few of us need to go too far back into our own lineage to find one, whether you are descended from a Pilgrim, an immigrant from a Russian shtetl, or a refugee from the violent instability of—well, of so many places in the world that are not the United States.
Give it some thought, and chances are you will conclude that you’ve been at your best when you’ve thought and fought like an insurgent, an underdog, coming up from behind, a stranger to complacency, acutely on offense, pulling, hauling, yanking your way up; following your dreams, empowering your aspirations—and, in the process, fulfilling the aspirations around you.
Harsh Reality
The great operatic and symphonic conductor Arturo Toscanini recalled in an interview, “When I was a young boy in my native Parma, I heard people from the audience say, ‘Tonight, it’s Rigoletto. Let’s go boo the tenor!’ They went to the performance with this intention already in mind…”22
Face it: A great performer can never afford to phone it in. The most dedicated opera fans, at least at one level, attend to the
