An aspirational brand is a term in consumer
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
for a
brand
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create an ...
or
product
Product may refer to:
Business
* Product (business), an item that serves as a solution to a specific consumer problem.
* Product (project management), a deliverable or set of deliverables that contribute to a business solution
Mathematics
* Produ ...
which a large segment of its exposure audience wishes to own, but for economic reasons cannot. Because the desire for aspirational goods is relative to the consumer's purchasing power, an aspirational brand may be a
luxury good
In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending. Luxury goods are in contrast t ...
if the person desires it, or it may simply be any product whether luxury or not if a consumer has less spending money.
The premise of this type of marketing is that purchase decisions are made at an
emotional level, to enhance
self-concept
In the psychology of self, one's self-concept (also called self-construction, self-identity, self-perspective or self-structure) is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question ''"Who am I? ...
.
Target audience
A defining feature of an aspirational product is that its target customer base cannot easily afford to purchase it, but may be able to purchase it with sacrifice or at some point in the future.
This part of the exposure audience is referred to as the aspirational audience, whereas the part of the exposure audience that already can afford the product is called the consumption audience. Consumption audience and aspirational audience together form the aspirational product's
target audience
A target audience is the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message catered specifically to said intended audience. In marketing and advertising, it is a particular group of consumer within the predetermined ...
, which typically represents 30%-60% of the exposure audience - see
Audience measurement
Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Somet ...
.
Weak aspirational brands have target audiences that are almost as large as their exposure audiences (e.g.
MP3 player
A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...
brands), and are thus slowly becoming
commodity
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
The price of a comm ...
brands (whose consumption audiences coincide with their exposure audiences, thereby lacking an aspiring audience).
Pricing
As a general rule, an aspirational brand and its products can command
premium pricing
Premium pricing (also called image pricing or prestige pricing) is the practice of keeping the price of one of the products or service artificially high in order to encourage favorable perceptions among buyers, based solely on the price. Premium re ...
in the marketplace over a commodity brand.
This ability can to a large extent be explained by the consumer's need for
conspicuous consumption
In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen co ...
for which he is willing to pay a
Price premium. The smaller the size of the product's target audience compared to the exposure audience, the more the product satisfies this need, and the higher the premium that such a consumer is prepared to pay.
To keep the premium level of a brand high, the consumption portion of the audience should not exceed 30% of the aspirational audience.
Aspirational brand strategy
Aspirational brand strategies are employed to re-position a brand within a marketplace.
The idea is that brand can lead organizational change and lead consumer opinion about a brand. Aspirational brand strategies are used when the current image of the brand is either negative or no longer relevant to the company.
Companies have to take great care in employing an aspirational brand strategy.
The company needs to be structured around truly delivering on the promise and must have employees who understand the brand goals and actively and daily work to achieve them. BP learned the dangers of aspirational branding during the summer of 2010 during the
BP/Deepwater Oil Spill disaster. As the articl
BP: Disingenuously Brandingexplains, the aspiration of the company to be environmentally friendly and "Beyond Petroleum" backfired in a big way.
One study examined interaction with brands on Facebook, and noted that user interaction in that platform with brands in general and asprirational brands specifically did not match marketplace purchasing behavior in an obvious way.
References
External links
* http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/365730/marketing/27284/Consumer-goods-marketing
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Brand management
Types of branding
Pricing