Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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fashion director, or media director. They have plenty of household income to spend on luxury and fashion, and the members of this target audience are not bashful about their own aspirations. They want the best, and they want to get it the way they want to get it—conveniently, at the mere click of a mouse. Net-a-Porter’s website was created with a clear layout resembling any hardcopy fashion magazine. When browsing and scrolling across any of the magazine’s editorial pages, a pop-up window near the user’s mouse curser conveniently enables purchase. Net-a-Porter gives buyers literally no excuses for failing to buy. Fulfillment of aspiration is just a click away.
Over the years, Massenet focused on aspirational consumers like herself, who value time over cash. Her goal was to provide effortless shopping to people who are so busy earning money that they crave the convenience of getting luxury goods with minimal digital effort. Massenet then included the final touch on the packaging itself. An elegantly mysterious black box is delivered to your home—or office—tied up in a bow. Such attention to detail from order to delivery is a signature of the brand. Today, Net-a-Porter’s deliveries make the receiver feel more than anything else valued as a customer. Consumer aspirations are delivered with each purchase.
Net-a-Porter blazed a new path within the retail industry. Massenet created it as the Web’s first one hundred percent shop-able publication. In serving her customers’ aspirations, her goal was to redefine the magazine industry. In the process, however, she ended up redefining the retail industry. Supremely well-executed digital enterprises share with magic the ability to render the universe seamless and frictionless. Physical effort, distance, and time itself are made, in the wave of a wand or the click of a mouse, to disappear.
Indulgence Is Not the Only Aspiration
The aspirational principles of magic readily lend themselves to the entertainment and luxury sectors, but their application is by no means limited to these. Antivirus software is neither entertaining nor luxurious, but in 2010, when David Morey’s client, digital security firm AVG Technologies, sought to create a successful IPO, David drew on his experience as a magician to create a strategy. Common sense tells us that digital security is a consumer need, not a luxury. Magic, however, has more to do with uncommon than common sense, and David therefore decided to focus AVG Technologies not on customer need but on customer aspiration. Consumers aspire to peace of mind in their digital lives. Trapped by Internet threats and the increasingly complicated burden of managing their online worlds, the consumer of 2010 shared the position of those who in the 1920s gaped and cheered as Harry Houdini escaped from handcuffs, strait jackets, and “torture cells.” Modern consumers want the freedom that comes with mastery of life online, so David helped to build a marketing approach that empowered and liberated AVG Technologies to deliver a message not of grim necessity, but of aspiration—more precisely, of aspiration achieved. In the jam-packed digital security sector, AVG Technologies’ 2012 IPO was a homerun.
The Aspirationals
Like magicians, today’s most innovative business leaders are at their best when they transcend and seek to fulfill their customers’ higher aspirations. For example, a first-quarter 2016 study of 21,000 consumers from twenty-one countries showed the power of “Aspirational Consumers” is steadily rising—even if half of this defined segment cannot name a “purposeful” brand they themselves feel good about. This study defined these “Aspirationals” based on their “love of shopping, desire for responsible consumption, and their trust in brands to act in the best interest of society.” The research concluded that 40 percent of today’s global consumers are “Aspirationals,” a big and powerful target market for the business leaders who are thinking like magicians.19
Because the data in this study is both new and novel, Aspirationals are as yet very much insufficiently studied as well as underserved, and even their marketplace potential is still largely untapped. We know that they are hungry for brands with a strong ethic, or what could be termed a strong “conviction.” Put another way, the Aspirational Consumers seek brands with a higher purpose, brands that know and appreciate what their founders and creators believe, and companies that know how their brands fit into their customers’ lives. The Aspirational Consumers are young, mostly millennial and Gen X populations (think Burning Man). Most live outside the United States, in emerging markets.20
Some of David Morey’s favorite clients, such as Apple, Nike, and The Coca-Cola Company, exemplify “aspirational” brands. Grey Goose Vodka is another example—and perhaps among the most revelatory. We challenge readers to a blind taste test of the three leading vodkas. Good luck distinguishing one from the other. But, of course, chemical substance is not the issue here. It is the look, feel, packaging, imagery, and aspirational fulfillment of Grey Goose that allows it to charge more and lead its marketplace. Arguably, in fact, the higher price contributes to the aspiration. After all, nothing is less worthy of desire than a “bargain brand.”
Like religion, magic often imbues ordinary things, people, events, and environments with magnified significance. The entity in question becomes, under the force of religion, sacred. Under the influence of magic, it becomes magical. Likewise, “aspirational” brands stand for more than what they actually are or do. They execute against a product perception that extends well beyond devices, sneakers, sugar water and brown food coloring, or distilled clear spirits. Among the most potent aspects of managing consumers’ perception of aspirational brands is something we call “image associations.” The world’s greatest magicians, like the world’s best marketers, understand these instinctively. The most effective image associations are distilled through something called the “One Emotion” test. It goes like this: If you had to choose to evoke only a single emotion from your audience—or your customers—what would it be? Here’s what two former David Morey clients chose:
•Focusing on male consumers, BMW chose an emotion and aspirational fulfillment associated with an automobile—e.g., “Pride”… “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”
•Focusing on female consumers, LVMH (LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE), the French-based luxury goods conglomerate, chose pocketbook brand imagery that allows the company to charge what it charges, namely prices that are exponentially higher than the cost of manufacture—e.g., “Richness”… “Exceptional Luxury.”
The greatest magicians align every single detail of their own personal brands by instinct and purpose to connect with the higher aspirations of their audience. For example, our friend David Copperfield, with the obsessiveness of a brilliant marketer, controls every element of his own show, celebrity, and image. Just try taking a selfie with the world’s most famous magician. It won’t happen. Copperfield won’t deny you a photo with him. It just won’t be your selfie. One of his staff or Copperfield himself will take the picture for you and send it along. You will have your souvenir, and Copperfield will have exercised his control over it. Nothing he does happens by accident or passive acquiescence. Like David Copperfield, rising and steadily powerful brands always play offense and never settle for defense. This is a hallmark of what we call “insurgent brands,” and today they are in every marketplace, insurgent hordes that swarm like ants—we do admire ants—around the pedestals on which traditional incumbent brands perch. The insurgent brands keep scrambling, climbing, and fanning out as they climb, until they cover whole product categories—or create entirely new ones. Like magicians, insurgent brands play by a different set of rules than the incumbent market leaders. Today, it is insurgent rules that rule markets.
Getting Ahead
By definition, aspiration focuses on the future. The Rolling Stones owe their creative and commercial success to the fact that Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction. The German Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century understood that all creative energy was in aspiration, not fulfillment. Sehnsucht, they called it—longing, yearning, craving: in other words, aspiring. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ends his epic poem Faust with the line, Das Ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan—“The Eternal Feminine leads us upward.” Thus, the greatest poem by Germany’s greatest poet ends not with a period but with an aspiration—the promise of a future so great as to be eternal precisely because Faust, the archetypal human being, can’t get no satisfaction.
Think now of the great companies and their CEOs and the way that they, at their best, focus on delivering