This is the third article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages without manipulation. Each piece shows you successful ways to communicate that respect customers, build trust, and create long-term value that grows your business. Prior articles in the series include:

• Part 1: Replace Fear with Value

• Part 2: Balance Emotional and Functional Benefits

• Part 4: Taking Accountability Beyond Words

PART 3: Shift from Aspirational to Achievable Marketing

Effective marketing that influences viewers can, on a larger scale, influence culture. Therefore, the way we communicate—the words we use, the images we select, the values we implicitly or explicitly endorse—all have more power than we realize to shape cultural norms.  That influence can be positive or negative, giving us the opportunity—and responsibility—to consider how our messaging negatively impacts the individual and our culture.  

Most marketing insights research focuses on identifying customers' needs and wants. In this article series, I have argued that our messages should address a meaningful customer need that is specific and solvable. I have intentionally avoided the language of “wants” because there are two types: those which can be satisfied and those which cannot. I find it less critical to distinguish between whether a specific, solvable solution is needed versus wanted (I might not need a fancy dinner, but I want to experience a unique, memorable occasion) and more critical to distinguish between what a brand can deliver on vs. what it can’t.

Marketing messages that target desires that can never be fully satisfied are commonly referred to as “Aspirational Marketing.” The aim is to tap into customers’ deep desires and longing, rather than their current realities, to create an emotional connection with the brand. However, marketing that appeals to image, power, beauty, and wealth takes advantage of the most vulnerable and insatiable aspects of human desire, creating a never-ending hamster wheel of longing for a reality that’s never achievable.

 Because this strategy has become so pervasive, it’s worth examining its impacts. Let’s dive deeper.

The Problem with Aspirational Marketing

 Most aspirational marketing emphasizes the importance of wealth, possessions, physical beauty, and external perception. Research shows that this type of marketing:

• Increases feelings of negative body image and contributes to eating disorders

• Encourages materialism and materialistic values, which has been shown to produce more negative emotions, lower self-esteem, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and even poorer physical health

• Prioritizes external appearances over internal traits, which can reduce happiness, and increase anxiety and depression (Kasser, Tim. The High Price of Materialism. MIT Press, 2002) 

Even if a person does not suffer from these specific emotions or compulsions, we are all exposed to a daily onslaught of messages that create an image- and consumption-focused culture. We have come to accept, mostly without question, that what we buy determines who we are. That it is normal to endlessly desire more: more power, more money, more youth, more admiration from others.  

All this communication encourages us to buy more to satisfy our insatiable desires. By appealing to and reinforcing those desires, aspirational marketing creates unrealistic standards that we aspire to. When we cannot achieve these standards, we experience lower self-esteem and discontent with our current situation. As a result, we further overconsume, which creates clutter in our lives and disaster for our planet.

How Did We Get Here?

Our current “more” culture has not always been. During the US Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s and early 1900s, advertising was not yet an industry, and most product messages were entirely focused on functional needs and product benefits. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, now known as the father of PR and notably the nephew of Sigmund Freud, introduced a new method of portraying products as a means to fulfill consumers’ subconscious desires. With A-list clients like P&G and General Electric, Bernays popularized this approach and it began to spread.

Around the same time after WWI, corporations and banks were concerned that the economy would stop growing unless people bought more goods. Lehman Brothers executive Paul Mazur wrote, “The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than by needs. And man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.” (Mazur, Paul. American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences. 1928)

The confluence of these ideas gave rise to what has become our modern consumerist culture. Harnessing human desires that can never be fully realized—being admired, desired, wealthy, or powerful—creates seemingly endless opportunities to create demand for one’s products and services.

Here are a few examples of this approach—you will recognize that these themes remain pervasive today:

As consumers, our choices and decisions naturally reinforce or shift how we perceive ourselves. A brand that sells sporting goods inherently instills in its buyers a sense of being active and sporty. But there is a difference between portraying who your customer is, and showing them who they want to be, particularly when who they want to be is out of reach.

Why Aspirational Marketing Might Be Less Effective Than We Think

While we may concede that there are repercussions for an image and materialistic-focused culture, the reality is that most brands pursue this approach because they think it is effective. One branding company describes the intent this way: “Establishing your brand and product by marketing a lifestyle is something that customers are much more responsive too [sic]. Products that sell a lifestyle create an aspirational feeling, leading customers to think [my emphasis added] that this item will help them achieve a better quality of living, or grasp the kind of lifestyle that they’re striving for.”

But recent research shows that aspirational marketing might not be as effective as once thought.  “This form of advertising builds on the principle of cognitive consistency theory, which claims that a fit between one’s self-concept and an identity-enhancing brand or product category leads to greater attraction,” writes Kenneth Dahl in his article, “Why Aspirational Marketing Fails 9 times out of 10.”   

Research published in Journal of Consumer Psychology shows that if there is too significant a gap in an ad between a customer’s present-day reality and the aspirational life portrayed, it can result in negative emotions due to a loss of self-esteem, and these feelings can become associated with the advertised brand. Researchers concluded that the use of idealized “actors or spokespeople in the message, in order to convey the aspirational nature of the product, has damaging effects on the target market response.”

Additionally, the slowing growth of the luxury market in the US and Europe (combined with macroeconomic factors) may point to the idea that selling aspiration alone is insufficient. Pamela Danziger writes in Forbes, quoting a luxury expert, “We need to reinterpret luxury from labels and conspicuous consumption to a quest for goods and services that are personal, authentic, and unique. Many successful companies are returning to this definition.” Danziger adds, “The opportunity is to return to the key pillars of luxury – quality, craftsmanship, design, attention to detail, uniqueness, and authenticity.”

The Solution: Achievable Marketing

So what is the alternative? Simply stated, it’s portraying what’s possible. It’s communicating how your product or service will realistically impact customers’ lives. It’s showing what’s achievable.  

Let’s explore a couple of examples of brands that have moved from aspirational to achievable marketing.  

Retouching advertising, a common industry practice particularly for beauty products, can be both misleading and, in some cases, culturally harmful. With help from a professional photographer and lighting, not only is a beautiful, thin model typically featured—which is sufficiently out of reach for most of us—but standard practice is to edit photos to remove blemishes, wrinkles of fat, stray hairs, and discoloration—portraying the ultimate perfection.

The consequences of decades of this kind of marketing are eating disorders and women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies. In 2004, Dove researched the self-perceptions of beauty among women and girls and found that only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful.  

While many brands may find it difficult to move away from the “ideal,” fearing loss of sales, Dove serves as a strong example that questioning the norm can build the business. On the heels of its 2004 study, Dove launched the Campaign for Real Beauty, featuring non-models of various sizes and shapes, showing their imperfections. In the first 10 years of the campaign, the brand grew revenue from $2.5 billion to $4 billion, representing a ~12% compound annual growth rate.  

In 2018, CVS launched a program to inform shoppers whether the beauty imagery in stores had been digitally altered. According to Elena Folks, executive vice president of CVS Health and president of CVS Pharmacy, “80 percent of women feel worse about themselves after looking at beauty ads, and 42 percent of girls in grades one through three want to be thinner.” CVS’s initiative was designed to be transparent about the use of retouching and to avoid it as much as possible. Because most images in CVS stores are produced not by CVS but by beauty companies, the influence of CVS’s policy extended beyond its own walls and required all beauty brands to comply with retouching disclosures.

Many other brands such as Target, Aerie, and Modcloth have made the leap to the “no retouching,” featuring models of all shapes and sizes. They understand that using average-sized models may result in more sales than if they used size 0 models, as represented in this University of Kent study. 

How to Restructure your Message

Brands that strive for authenticity and offering genuine value should consider whether they are taking advantage of aspirations that can never be satisfied, and whether they may actually be reinforcing and strengthening insecurities. 

 If you found yourself answering “yes” to the questions on the left side of the chart, and answering “no” to questions on the right, here are some approaches to restructure your communication:  

1) Avoid appealing to sources of insecurity: Check if your emotional benefit is focused on image, wealth, status, admiration, power, or idealized beauty. These innate desires can be easily manipulated and a brand can never completely deliver on them.

 2) Portray an achievable scenario: Research shows that advertising is more effective when the customer can relate to it, so try to represent your customer as you craft your communication. Consider that aspirational marketing is not always identified by the central message but is often the result of how we wrap our message with casting, locations, props, and retouching. Here are a few suggestions:

• Cast everyday people

• Show everyday situations/homes

• Represent your customers as they are today or a realistic portrayal of what they could achieve vs. something they could never be

 3) Acknowledge customer identity through action vs. association: Brands communicate their own identity, beliefs, and values, naturally attracting customers with a like focus. However, we want to avoid building our brand on an identity that we simply give our customers by association, as it can be both ingenuine and short-lived. We can do this by reinforcing positive identity through the experience of using your product or service, rather than an identity acquired simply by buying or owning anything with your brand’s name on it.

 4) Affirm your customers: Watch out for scenarios that invite comparisons and contribute to feelings of inadequacy. If the gap between your target customer and the ideal you’ve created is insurmountable, the response may be feelings of unworthiness, resulting in negative brand associations. Find ways to reinforce a positive self-image through an encouraging tone of voice and relatable insights.

 5) Focus on craftsmanship and quality over image: Some products and services have premium prices because they are of higher quality, manufactured with fine craftsmanship and design, or offer more comprehensive service. These attributes can stand alone and don’t need to be associated with exclusivity or image; they can simply be appreciated on their own merit. Consider focusing on how your customer enjoys the intrinsic benefits of the product or service rather than a perceived external benefit resulting from social perception.

 What’s so hard about avoiding aspirational marketing is that deep down, our customers always want more. We all want more; people can easily be prompted to feel discontent. If our job is to generate sales, and therefore “create demand,” all we need is to stimulate the desire for status, beauty, or wealth. But if we remember that our brand messages can either enhance or reject those innate feelings of discontent we all experience, then we have the power to fight the cultural narrative of consumption as the path to contentment. The irony is that it just might be a better way to grow the business too.

Stay Tuned for Next Month’s Article!