As competition becomes fiercer, as private labels compete on quality, as incremental innovation becomes less discernable to consumers, the need to make brands relevant to the individual is more critical than ever. But who is the individual? And do individuals exist in large enough numbers to push a brand forward? That is the critical question facing every brand today, and a question answered by Aspirational Targets.
Aspirational Targets
Contrary to the entire premise of mass marketing, consumers today are motivated by brands that set them apart from the masses.
Consumers increasingly rely on brands to shape them as individuals. But interestingly, consumers aren’t choosing brands that fit who they are today. They’re choosing brands that shape who they want to be. It’s their aspirations that drive them, and defining these aspirations is the purpose of Aspirational Targets.
The Fallacy of Consumer Understanding
Brands pursue all manner and levels of consumer understanding, and the question is often asked, “How much deeper can we go?” But depth is not the issue here. It’s direction.
Research is intended to help brands understand who their consumers are, what they do and what’s important to them. But what this research is really defining is the status quo, exploring all the reasons, patterns, habits and needs that define consumers as they are today.
And that presents a problem, because consumers are not content with every aspects of who they are at any given moment. It’s their aspirations that give them purpose, create anticipation and generate desire. Aspiration is the true motivator of human behavior, it comes from our drive to constantly shape and re-shape ourselves, to reach for more fulfilling experiences, a simpler life, to become better parents, friends, employees, enthusiasts, good stewards of our planet. We get excited, pay attention, become fixated and filled with initiative when we identify brands that move us toward these aspirations.
It’s important for marketers to understand that as consumers, we constantly surround ourselves with things that define who we want to be, both consciously and more often than not, unconsciously.
True brand innovation comes from leading consumers, not following them. Inspirational Design Targeting is the catalyst for defining and understanding common aspirations among consumer targets.
It is also the catalyst that turns low involvement products into high involvement brands.
What is an Aspirational Design?
Inspirational Design Targeting is the practice of creating robust aspirational personas to inspire and guide the creation of consumer experiences. They are not a substitute for traditional models of Strategic Targets and Prime Prospects, but rather an extension of this work. Aspirational Targets are the embodiment of the desires of different lifestyles that make up your consumer targets. Often this means an Aspirational Target is identified on the fringe of current targets.
Consumers vs. Aspirational Targets
Focusing brand efforts on an Aspirational Target forces development of an elevated brand experience. The process uncovers many lifestyle needs and desires unmet by broad, mass brands. Aspirational Targets present your brand with a unifying challenge. “How do we create a brand and experience so tied to a consumer group’s unique lifestyles that it begins to define them?” Rising to this challenge allows your team to go beyond the work of today and into the work of tomorrow. The work of creating a brand people love, not just trust.
A well-created Consumer Aspirational Target can act as a guiding force in commercial innovation, development of new products/platforms, channel strategy and media plans. They can be leveraged to discover entirely new opportunities and previously unimagined connections with consumer lifestyles.
Why do the work?
An Aspirational Target is the culmination of powerful insights from existing research, observation and gut-level intuitive understanding of the consumer. We look through a much broader lens, looking far beyond a brand’s own category, defining and envisioning unique connections between the consumer and the products they surround themselves with. Gathering these insights provides us with the ground work to identify and establish connections between our brand and the life of our consumer. This is the key to discovering opportunities to relate to consumers in a genuine and emotional way.
What is the work?
Grounding Research
Inspirational Design Targeting begins with grounding research to understand the landscape as it exists today. We examine the category and the brand’s placement in that category, but we extend our research beyond the category as well. Beginning with today’s target, we include broader consumer and social influences and trends as well as specific consumer insights in this work.
Integrating Research to Develop Target Platforms
HyperQuake integrates this grounding research to develop a series of platforms for the creation of polarizing Aspirational Targets. Developing an Aspirational Target is about making choices. Culling through data and consciously creating targets that have ability to inspire specific choices. In this stage the team must accept and agree that these targets will by their nature not represent all the data, and they can only provide value when they offer a specific point of view for the brand to explore.
Review/Align/Develop
Evolving Target Platforms into actual Aspirational Targets involves using informed intuition combined with consumer research and category understanding to construct a model of each Inspirational design target. These contain enough detail to convey a robust understanding of the target’s lifestyle, exploring beliefs, values and motives. Understanding an Aspirational Target’s choices out-of-category are often to key to discovering in-category opportunities.
Bring to Life
When an Aspirational Target has been properly identified and developed, it is ripe with possibilities. Making the possibilities discoverable for the extended team becomes the next priority for the work. Bringing an Aspirational Target to life in an immersive and expressive way is the key to broad understanding. Talking about her choices is valuable, but seeing her choices in context is invaluable. Having an immersive representation of your Aspirational Target and her lifestyle (including artifacts) creates opportunities for gut level concept “testing”. Does this product look like it fits in her lifestyle mix? Are we offering benefits that stand up to the products she surrounds herself with? Are we differentiating ourselves from competition in a way that is meaningful to her? Do her out-of-category motivations reveal a new way to reach her in-category?
Educate
Having an Aspirational Target display integrated in your workspace will naturally generate curiosity and interest, but we need to convert that interest into education, understanding and action. This happens when the creators of the work actively evangelize the story of the Aspirational Target to their teammates, co-workers and external partners. The real goal of Aspirational Targets is to provide teams with a unifying story to tell, a passionate and specific mission to create a brand that is truly meaningful to their target.