Hoping to do business in Asia ex-India ex-China | Advantage zyaada
July 12, 2010 Leave a Comment
A succinct view and even a make-do definition of branding and marketing esp. in’Retail Lifestyle’ segments..From a fellow Power 150 blogger, in Kuala Lumpur
Aspirational heritage to go with aspirational clothes to go with aspirational gadgets to go with aspirational toilet paper … and yet nine times out of ten, the only justification the company has to explain their ‘aspirational’ label is they charge a .X. of money for the product.
Yep … like ‘luxury’, the marketing community have completely .X. and simplified the meaning of the word ‘aspirational’ to try and make themselves feel better about what they do while making the masses feel worse.
I have nothing against aspirational products … just like I understand there is [sometimes] a commercial benefit to communicating a lifestyle image that your audience finds attractive and desirable … but more often that not, there is no depth of exploration of this view, it’s executed as a simple “this costs a lot of money and so you will obviously want it” tone and manner and that just annoys the .X. out of me.
..
The best bit was that our work didn’t just make these people – viewed as some of the lowest valued individuals on the economic scale – feel great about themselves, but it made people who were much, much, much more fortunate than them actually aspire to be more like these truck drivers.
Not obviously interms of economic circumstances, but interms of their honour, values and beliefs. Infact when the head of the oil company saw it – a man who has more money than Sorrell – he allegedly said,
“I hope I’m like that man”.
How amazing is that eh?
A billionaire Texan saw the values of a poor Phillipino truck driver as something he wished he had. We didn’t focus on what they had on the outside, we talked about what they had on the inside and those were way more aspirational than a new BMW 5 series, a sailboat or a .X. gold Rolex.
Which leads back to my point.
The mannequin in the picture above is – to my eyes – hideous …
This is not because it’s Eurasian … but because it’s a really badly designed Eurasian mannequin.
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