On Creating Aspirational Products Out of Thin Air

Creating aspiration in your products isn't hard, if you think about how to approach it before going to market.

A view from a section of my run yesterday

This week brings me to Oregon. When I’m on travel, especially in areas I’m not familiar with, I love to go for runs.

Usually when I run, I kill two birds with one stone - I get physical fitness and I can listen to a podcast or audiobook. However, when I’m in areas I don’t call home, running also allows me to intimately see the locale on foot.

So bonus - I get to kill three birds in the same hour.

On yesterdays run, I happened upon an interesting street in a new housing community being built. It was named The Street of Dreams.

The builder did something very smart here. They took the most pristine location in the development, built a nice green space around it, and then dropped the most aspirational version of the housing community in a limited edition manner.

They then pre-sold these houses at about 30-50% more than the average house in the area.

The Street of Dreams

They weren’t any bigger, mind you. They were the same floor plans as the “common” houses. They had more green space, and sat - in full upgraded glory - in a position every other home in the community could see and envy from.

I then mentally broke down the objective of a home builder. Your product is a home - but your reputation is actually judged by one thing:

Home value appreciation.

Building this “Street of Dreams” was genius. Not only did they create an aspirational area of the neighborhood that was marked up and carried all the entitlement of being “the big fish in the small pond” to the would be homebuyers… but it pegged the top tier prices a solid 50% over the normal homes.

This gives all the other homes a lot of room to the upside.

Now…. who would buy a $700,000 home for $1.1M? Apparently everyone. The homes on the “Street of Dreams” are all sold out and moved into.

It didn’t cost the builder much more to accomplish this - the only real cost was the green space built around the lots.

Green space they might have been required to build anyhow - as most cities require a certain percentage of development dedicated to parks and green spaces.

Got me thinking - how many of you build your business around these simple psychological concepts?

Do you have aspirational tiers built into your business offerings?

Do you use those tiers to anchor your core products and give them additional perceived (or even real) value?

The concept of a “Founders Club” is a good sense of this, except the Founders generally pay less, not more.

I haven’t thought of a great execution of this in a gym space yet - but my mind is now tuned into this concept. Time to figure this out…