What’s an aspirational brand?

It must be made up of intangibles.

What’s a brand? Is it not simply the name of a company?

Yet company doesn’t sound ephemeral enough. How can a company be aspirational?

A brand can though, can’t it?

At least that’s what the marketers will tell you.

And you’ll see them trying to make this true everywhere you look in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Companies, through the veil of brands, trying desperately to convince passers-by that they’re not buying a thing. They’re actually buying a “lifestyle” or “experience”.

Buy this thing and become part of the “family”. Whatever that means. This advertising tries to exploit humanity’s primal need to be part of a group.

It’s awful.

Yet who questions it?

Not the people buying the brands sold by the companies.

Why do they do this?

Do they really believe the markup between what something cost to make and what it is sold for is justified by the brand’s “intangibles”?

Maybe not. Yet it seems like even if they don’t truly believe it, they choose to believe it instead.

Sheep live in flocks and flocks needs shepherds. The companies gladly shepherd these willing flocks from one aspiration to the next, to feed an insatiable hunger that no amount of grazing on over-priced consumer products can satisfy.

And this fuels the shepherds’ never ending quest for growth. That’s a story for another time.

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