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Marketing Canvas - Aspirations
Aspirations in the Marketing Canvas help businesses uncover the deeper, often emotional and social goals that customers strive to fulfill through their product or service. Aspirations move beyond functional needs and focus on the personal growth, societal impact, and environmental contribution that customers seek. Identifying these aspirations enables businesses to create stronger emotional connections and long-term relationships with their audience.
Last edit: 20/10/2024: The final edits focus on reviewing the scoring system and refining the Green Clean example.
In a nutshell
Aspirations in the Marketing Canvas help businesses uncover the deeper, often emotional and social goals that customers strive to fulfill through their product or service. Aspirations move beyond functional needs and focus on the personal growth, societal impact, and environmental contribution that customers seek. Identifying these aspirations enables businesses to create stronger emotional connections and long-term relationships with their audience.
For example, Green Clean customers likely aspire to more than just maintaining a clean home. They may also want to live a healthier life, reduce their environmental footprint, and contribute positively to their community. By understanding these aspirations, Green Clean can better align its marketing and service strategies with the values that resonate most with its customers.
In the Marketing Canvas
The Marketing Canvas is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and non-marketers to build a robust marketing strategy. It consists of six meta-dimensions, each with four sub-dimensions, for a total of 24 sub-dimensions defining your Marketing Strategy. One of these sub-dimensions is ASPIRATIONS, which falls under the CUSTOMER meta-dimension.
Introduction
The Aspirations sub-dimension is part of the Customer category within the Marketing Canvas. It focuses on understanding the personal, societal, and environmental aspirations that customers have when interacting with a product or service. These aspirations often reflect the desire to improve themselves, their community, or the world around them.
While Jobs To Be Done helps identify what customers aim to accomplish in the short term, Aspirations delve into the long-term goals and ideal visions that shape their decisions.
The importance of defining Marketing aspirations
Aspirations are the personal dreams, social causes, and environmental goals that drive customers' choices. They represent the deeper values and long-term visions customers hold for themselves and the world. Unlike functional needs, aspirations are often intangible but highly influential in shaping behavior.
For example, Green Clean’s customers may aspire to:
Improve their health by maintaining a safe, non-toxic home environment.
Support environmental sustainability by reducing waste and using eco-friendly products.
Be role models in their community by setting a positive example of environmental responsibility.
These aspirations connect to broader societal and environmental movements, giving brands like Green Clean a pathway to build meaningful connections with their customers.
Aspirations: an in-depth perspective
Customers often seek products or services that align with their broader goals for personal growth, societal impact, or environmental contribution. They look for solutions that help them achieve not only immediate functional needs but also their vision for a better self or a better world.
For example, customers using Green Clean might aspire to:
Live more sustainably by choosing eco-friendly products that align with their environmental values.
Contribute positively to society by promoting sustainability and setting an example for others, reflecting their societal values.
Improve their personal well-being by creating a healthy, toxin-free living space, aligned with their personal values.
Understanding these deeper aspirations helps businesses tailor their marketing and offerings to align with the customer’s long-term goals.
How the Marketing Canvas aligns aspirations and strategy
To effectively connect with customer aspirations, businesses need to focus on the emotional, societal, and environmental goals of their target audience. Understanding aspirations allows companies to align their strategies with their customers' vision for the future, building loyalty and fostering deeper relationships.
Questions to consider:
What personal aspirations do your customers have that align with their values?
How does your product or service help them contribute to society or the environment?
How can your marketing reflect their vision for personal growth or impact on the world?
Aspirationals are defined by their love of shopping, desire for responsible consumption, and their trust in brands to act in the best interest of society [1]
Examples
Example 1: Patagonia
Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has an audience whose aspirations go beyond just having quality outdoor clothing. Their customers aspire to protect the environment, which is why Patagonia's commitment to sustainability, ethical sourcing, and environmental activism resonates with them. Patagonia's alignment with these aspirations has helped them cultivate a highly loyal customer base.
Example 2: Tesla
Tesla's customers are not just buying a car; they are buying into a vision of a sustainable, technologically advanced future. Customers' aspirations here include reducing their carbon footprint, being part of cutting-edge technology, and the status associated with owning a Tesla. Elon Musk understood these aspirations and built Tesla's brand around them.
Example 3: Dove
Dove, a personal care brand, understood that their customers aspired to real, authentic beauty rather than the unattainable standards often portrayed in the media. Their "Real Beauty" campaign resonated deeply with customers worldwide, helping the brand build a strong emotional connection with its audience.
Statements for self-assessment
For a comprehensive evaluation of your understanding and application of the Aspirations concept, rate your agreement with the following statements on a scale from -3 (completely disagree) to +3 (completely agree):
You have clearly identified consumers' aspirations for improving themselves (personal values).
You have clearly identified consumers' aspirations for improving the world around them (societal values).
You have clearly identified consumers' aspirations for improving the world around them (environmental values).
Interpretation of the scores
Negative scores (-1 to -3): A negative score suggests that you disagree or strongly disagree with the statement, meaning you lack a solid understanding of your customers' aspirations, whether they are personal, societal, or environmental. This could result in your marketing and offerings being out of sync with the emotional and values-driven goals of your audience, weakening brand loyalty and connection.
A score of zero (0): A neutral score reflects uncertainty or only a surface-level understanding of your customers’ aspirations. You may recognize that aspirations exist but do not fully grasp how these emotional, societal, or environmental goals influence customer behavior. Further exploration is needed to deepen your understanding of their long-term aspirations.
Positive scores (+1 to +3): Positive scores indicate agreement with the statements, meaning you have a strong understanding of your customers' personal, societal, and environmental aspirations. You recognize how these aspirations shape decision-making and can align your product and marketing strategies with their broader goals. This deeper understanding helps you build a stronger emotional connection with your customers and reinforce their loyalty to your brand.
Case study: Green Clean's aspirations
Misaligned understanding (-3, -2, -1): Green Clean focuses only on functional needs (cleaning services) and does not recognize its customers' aspirations for personal, societal, or environmental improvement. By ignoring these deeper aspirations, Green Clean risks losing customers who value sustainability and seek brands that reflect their broader goals for positive change.
Surface understanding (0): Green Clean acknowledges that its customers have aspirations, such as wanting eco-friendly products, but it does not fully understand the emotional significance behind these aspirations. The company might see environmental responsibility as a secondary factor, without realizing how central it is to the customer's personal, societal, and environmental values. This limits their ability to connect deeply with their customers.
Deep understanding (+1, +2, +3): Green Clean fully understands its customers' aspirations for personal well-being, societal contribution, and environmental responsibility. The company aligns its services and marketing strategies with these aspirations by offering eco-friendly solutions, promoting sustainability, and helping customers achieve their vision for a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. This deep understanding strengthens the emotional bond between Green Clean and its customers, making the brand a trusted partner in their long-term journey.
Sources
https://blog.globalwebindex.com/trends/why-aspirational-consumers-matter/
Report: https://globescan.com/five-human-aspirations-and-the-future-of-brands/
"Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" by Simon Sinek
"Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen" by Donald Miller
More on the Marketing Canvas
Growth in a Digital World
By 2020 every business will become a digital predator or digital prey — which will your company evolve into? 5 attitudes you should have if you want to create growth in a this new digital world.
“By 2020 every business will become a digital predator or digital prey — which will your company evolve into?”
If you are reading this article, you might probably be interested in growing your business. While the question is easy to ask (I remember financial controllers asking me to find extra 3% revenue growth while my corporate building had been attacked by 2000 people and we suffered 50M$ damage), the answer is certainly not so obvious these days!
What growth means?
Before defining the solution, we need to understand the problem. If you want more revenue, you need to play with the following parameters of your revenue equation:
- More paid users than today with same number of transactions: you should have more clients on a yearly basis buying your product and services than last year. It can come from the market (population is growing, available market is important) and/or from your commercial actions (acquisition and retention).
- More transactions than today with same number of users: these clients should spend more on average for each commercial transactions they do with you. This can come from either (1) more products purchased during the transaction (e.g. menu versus separated items) and/or (2) an higher price paid for these products (discounted brand versus premium brand). Usually it comes from your commercial activity (stimulation).
- A positive mix of users and/or transactions: Usually the reality sits in a positive mix between users and transactions (we called it elasticity).
At the end, the combination between users and transactions should generate an higher revenue. This is the only way for generating growth. The last 20 years, we were palying with these combination by IMPROVING our commercial processes (doing better) or EXTENDING it (doing more). It did work primarily because population was growing, people economic power was growing and products were not fully available everywhere. Those days are unfortunately gone.
The thesis I am submitting to you is that for the next decade, it is not sufficient and we can only survive as a company if we CHANGE our commercial processes (new business model). Let's find out if my thesis is right.
Insight 1 - Consumers are Changing
People are changing and I am quite optimistic wth this trend. We can see this as a DES-INDUSTRIALISATION of their consumption habits.
They want abundance but they care about waste. They want you to be genuinely true. They want you to be closer. They want all options. And finally, they want you to positvely contribute to their life and world.
Insight 2 - Your World is Changing
In these days, the old habit of looking at what happened last year and extrapolating commercial figures from these data might not work because we are living in a turbulent period. If you are still doubting that we are living in a turbulent period, I really invite you to read Jeremy Rifkin on the Third Industrial Revolution.
The last century, 12,5% of economical growth can only explained by labour performance and machine capital. The rest (87.5%) was a mystery and commonly referred as "the mesure of our ignorance". After 25 years of investigations, a number of analysts concluded that economic growth could be explained by 3 factors: labour performance, machine capital and energy use. During the last 100 years, we have created economic growth thanks to the combination of electricity grid, telecommunications network, road system and fossil fuel energies. Maybe a little bit simplistic, but I would say: WE CREATED GROWTH BY BURNING THE PLANET.
The fantastic news is that we are entering in a third industrial revolution. This revolution is driven by free energy, automated transportation, internet and dematerialisation.
Insight 3 - You have new competitors
Insight 4 - How will you play the game?
5 Attitudes for creating Growth in a Digital World
If you are not taking this digital revolution seriously (dematerialisation, collaboration, distributed capitalism), you will be most probably a digital prey in the coming years.
As the attention of people is shrinking (we are in an Attention Economy), it is fundamental that you are clear about why people would buy and stay with you (What is your purpose? What job to be done are you in? How do you monetise your activities?).
People and companies are expecting you to be generous because we are in the OUTCOME ECONOMY era where you should help people save time and effort in their daily lives.
Peter Drucker rightly said: "Culture eats strategy at breakfast". It means that even if you have the smartest strategy, you will only be successful if you have the right people and culture for delivering it.
Remember the S-Curve! What you do today, will only generate real results in 2 to 3 years. Start early when you still have time to do it because it is much more difficult when you are running out of cash or profit.