UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 12Aspiring to Be a Jedi

Aspiration is our hope to obtain something to take our story and bring it to a place we want to be. It shapes the way our pulse moves and how we make decisions. When we make purchases, we are asking ourselves if we want to be associated with these decisions. Are you a Windows or a Mac, for example? On the other side, branding and marketing is about a company making a promise to your customers to meet their expectations.

If a brand fits with our aspirations, we are much more likely to put up with certain disappointments. For example, I just told you the story about Beats by Dr. Dre headphones and how they had me yodeling in Best Buy. Well, a few months after UnJr got his headphones home, they broke. The plastic on one side snapped. Since I'd paid quite a bit, and gone through a book chapter's worth of effort to attain these headphones, I decided to get in touch with the company and find out what we could do. The company was awesome, and the person I spoke to let me know how I could send back in the broken headphones for a new pair, and all before Dr. Dre could make another comeback.

When I was figuring the whole process out, I did a bit of research into the product and it turns out that the headphones break this way often—maybe a little too often considering the price of the things. So the great customer service by them was no doubt needed to keep a lot of parents and trendy kids happy. And that brings us to the big question: Would we buy another ...