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May 09, 2006
Aspirational Brands
Many product and corporate brands are essentially functional. They connect you in reasonable ways with the product or the brand, not making huge claims to truth, not shifting the conversation too far away from the product or company to something larger, but instead, relying on your experience of the brand to connect you to your warm feelings about the company or the product.
Think of Campbell's soup, for example, and you probably imagine the look and feel of the can, the red of the label, the handwritten product name, and perhaps the taste of your favorite soup. It would make Campbell's very happy, of course, if you also thought of Mother and home--and reflected on the rest of their non-soup brand porfolio--but the reality for most of us is that it took Andy Warhol to elevate the more fundamental brand elements to an artistic statement.
Other brands are aspirational. They try to make a connection between product features and functions and elevated states of alignment between the consumer and larger life goals. Because they’re selling the sizzle, not the steak, aspirational brands have a harder chasm to close--I call this distance between steak and sizzle the aspiration gap--but when it works, because they connect the consumer to how the consumer wants to feel, these brands are on fire.
Think, for example, of Nike. You don’t have to be an athlete to be in the company of athletes. “Just do it,” just get out there and try, and you’ll find your own inner athlete. That’s an incredibly powerful message for both seasoned athletes and aspiring athletes--and one that Nike’s extended into a great lifestyle franchise. (Check out Nike Lab for this franchise in action.)
Or think of the dancing silhouettes that connect you to the promise of passion unleashed by Apple’s iPod. They’re avatars of your own subliminal passion, of course, as the TV ads so cleverly illustrate. (Apple's new campaign goes even farther in the personification of Apple's brand essence. More about that in a later post.)
Making the connection between the employment and product position is fairly straightforward when you're working with a functional brand positioning, but if you agree with my view that the internal brand must compliment the external position, how do you position an aspirational brand?
Clearly, the first question is how does the core brand promise relate to the status of the workforce? If your brand is Saturn, for example, and you've built it around fair treatment of both your customers and your workforce, any work will start with soul-searching by operations and sales leadership on to what extent the workforce can "live the brand" and deliver on it at the same time.
But if your brand is an aspirational lifestyle brand--a brand like Nike, Kaiser Permanente, Safeway, Visa, etc. that strives to deliver on a promise of how it makes you (the consumer) feel about yourself when you interact with the brand, the challenge is different. And if your brand is highly energizing, if it seeks to give your target customers a shot of adrenaline to the heart, chances are good that your prospective workforce will show up wanting that, too.
The question for you is not "can you deliver on that promise?"--it's should you? And the answer is a simple "no."
Remember, if your brand is aspirational, its...aspirational. It makes your target feel a certain way about themselves that links them to what they aspire to be. But while there can be a small amount of aspiration in your workforce--most everyone aspires to better pay, more success, the next rung on the career ladder--unless you are NASA and the job is the next mission to the moon, the working life of your workforce is probably quite quotidian. And if the job won't pay off on the promise of the brand, the workforce you've worked hard to attract will head for the exit as soon as the honeymoon's over.
Solving this is actually quite easy: it comes down to truth in advertising. While your product brand can make aspirational claims to truth, your recruitment advertising and your internal messaging shouldn't. Instead, if you're blessed with the kind of brand that people flock to, if your primary challenge is admitting only the right kind of talent, if your brand leads your prospects to imagine that working for you will be something that it isn't, your challenge is to paint your prospective workforce a realistic picture of themselves in the real job they're looking at and allow them to select in--or out--on the basis of fit. How you do this will vary by job type, job level and location--and ideally should be based on solid research--but how you do it is less important than just doing it.
Posted by davidkippen at May 9, 2006 04:37 PM