Be Careful What You Wish For: The Role of Aspiration in Brand Promise

Aspiration governs much of human behavior. This is especially true of the buying habits of consumers in post-industrial service economies and even true, to a lesser extent, to those in developing countries as well. The challenge for brand managers is to address those aspirations without sacrificing basic qualities so that the brand itself becomes aspirational, thereby weakening the attraction of its adherents.

Laurence Vincent explains in the Siegel+Gale blog:

"This is part one in a series excerpted by permission of the publisher from the forthcoming Brand Real: How Smart Companies Live Their Brand Promise and Inspire Fierce Customer Loyalty by Laurence Vincent © 2012 Laurence Vincent, AMACOM books.

Aspiration can be a dangerous bedfellow, especially when it's a mask for insecurity. That's not to say that brands shouldn't dream big. Some of the best brands have grand aspirations. Microsoft became Microsoft by rallying people behind the goal of putting a PC on every desktop. But aspirations become a challenge when they are untethered by strategic decisions or when they are declared reactively to competitive advances.

Brands succeed by making tough choices. The brands we most admire typically do a few things extraordinarily well, while doing everything else average or downright poorly. Apple ignores product features that competitors would deem critical to success. Early versions of the MacBook had deplorable battery life. The iOS operating system doesn't run Flash. And who can forget Steve Jobs telling us to hold our iPhone differently because of a design flaw in the exterior antenna. But it's hard to find someone who'll tell you that the Apple brand doesn't fulfill its promise. Apple carefully chooses the value it will deliver, and it also chooses what it's willing to sacrifice to deliver that value.

When brands fail to make tough choices they often fall into the kitchen sink trap. They claim to deliver any value that can conceivably appeal to the broadest possible audience, leading to an experience that is guaranteed to either miss expectations or excel at mediocrity. Consider the following promise statement for GoogSoft, a fictitious software company:

GoogSoft develops high quality, affordable, scalable and innovative technologies that enable people to be more productive, creative and connected when they are using the internet through solutions that are the most intuitive, feature-robust, and completely customizable in the industry.

Close your eyes and ask yourself what sticks. Maybe it was the affordable part, or the creative benefit, or the completely customizable solution. You remember one part of this promise, and I remember something else. If we polled hundreds of people and asked them what they remember, we'd end up with the statistical average for blandness. Look at the chart in Figure 1. Imagine it came from an EyeOpener™ study we commissioned for GoogSoft. It shows how different brand attributes correlate to brand preference in GoogSoft's category. GoogSoft delivers on the attributes to the right. Fortunately, those attributes matter to our target audience. The attributes to the left, on the other hand, are equally important attributes that are owned by competitors like MicroGoog.

It may frustrate you that a competitor owns certain attributes, but it's folly to add these attributes to your promise and declare them "aspirational targets" if you aren't prepared to make some choices. To add those attributes, you must be prepared to sacrifice some of what you own today. Why? Because, as your mother told you, you can't have everything. Every dollar you invest to lift one of the laggards is a dollar you can't spend to sustain your leaders. Unless your resources are unlimited, if you decide that the future lies to the left, you must be prepared to gain it by ceding attributes that lie to the right. The left is aspiration, the right is reality. You can decide your future is more closely aligned with aspirational goals, but you must choose what realities might foot the bill, because you can seldom own it all.

It's not just budget realities that make this rule so valid. It's also the mind of your target audience. As you layer on attributes you'd like to own, you muddy brand perception about what is already known about you. Each thread of value-producing behavior you promise to deliver winds up in a complex ball of yarn that makes you vulnerable to attack by more focused brands employing simpler promises.

Choices are the essence of strategy. Aspiration is a powerful motivator, but it should only be included in brand strategy when it is balanced by deliberate investment decisions and a focused commitment to align the value of the aspiration to the essence of the brand experience