To provide better marketing communication tools for small start-ups in sports/leisure industry, we examined the interaction between customers’ perceived ability and functional/aesthetic message framing. We theorized that customers with high perceived ability will focus more on competitive outcomes, and evaluate the functional message more favorably. Further, customers with low perceived ability will focus more on experiential pleasures, and rate the aesthetic message more positively. From a field experiment using real-world suffers as participants, we found a significant result consistent with the proposed hypotheses. In sports/leisure industry, customers’ perceived ability, although widely used among practitioners, are often viewed as a simple segmentation variable. Our findings provide a valuable managerial insight to start-up managers for developing more customer oriented communication campaign by using the contextual nature of customers’ perceived ability.