In defence of brand purpose (sort of).

I’ve already lost a lot of you and I haven’t even said anything yet.

That’s how strongly people in strategy feel about the words “brand purpose”. How the hell did we get here, and why are we still talking about this?

Well, I’m going to try and unpack what I think brand purpose is, what it isn’t, who can use it, and why the intentions behind it are still important and worth thinking about.

First off, I think it’s good to work through a few key definitions. They may not necessarily be the exact same words used by others, but this is how I see the differences between them.

Definitions.

Brand: What people associate with your business.

This is something built over decades. It’s your accumulated legacy of associations. It’s all of your distinctive assets (logos, colours, shapes of your products, etc), all the associations from your campaigns and ads, and essentially, all the stuff people can actively remember about you.

It’s what people say about your brand, not what you say about your brand.

Yuval Noah Harri describes cooperations as “inter-subjective realities”. That’s the same as nations or religions. They aren’t real. They don’t exist. We just all agree they do.

Brands too are inter-subjective realities. They are the things we all agree they are.

It’s worth remembering this, as changing what people agree upon is a monumental and time consuming process.

Brand promise: What a business promises to do/deliver for their customers.

This about answering the needs of customers. It’s functional. A business makes, delivers or produces things. Their promise is simply a commitment to do that thing really well.

Promises can be transformational, as they can be adopted throughout a business. But let’s be clear, the promise is to the customer. It’s not bigger than that. It’s about the customer’s expectations of the thing they’re buying and that thing matching or exceeding their expectations. That means the product works really well. The experience of the product is brilliant. The customer service around the product is fantastic. But that’s about it. It is the relationship between the thing that’s sold and the people that buy the thing, and no more than that.

For example, Avis transformed their business through the promise “We try harder”. That began as an ad, but was later adopted throughout the business, raising overall standards in what they did and delivered for their customers. What’s interesting about the Avis case study, and why it’s often referenced by people in our industry, is that it came from us. An ad transformed a business. That’s worth remembering when we look at the problems and origins of brand purpose.

[Company] vision: The ideal future state your business wants to accomplish.

The imagined future you are working towards. This is a holistic goal that the whole business will work towards. It mobilises the people working for the business. However, again, the distinction I will make here, is that this vision isn’t for the betterment of humanity. It is for the betterment of the business and its customers.

In simple terms, if they achieve this goal, then they will be rewarded with commercial success. Purpose is different, as it is not a guarantee of commercial success. Every business can have a vision, but very few can have a purpose. I’ll explain why later.

Here are a few examples. Notice how they all benefit the company and their customers, and not necessarily the planet or humanity in a loftier, existential sense. They also feel tangible and like something the business could feasibly aim for over time.

Microsoft: A computer on every desk and in every home.

Linkedin: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.

Every business can have a vision that can unify everything they do and say. It’s a more helpful aspirational tool than a brand purpose, as 99% of businesses can have a vision, whereas a tiny amount of businesses can actually say they have a brand purpose. More on that later.

[Company] mission: How you will accomplish the ideal future state expressed in the [company] vision.

A mission is practical. Think about it from a military perspective. Missions are accomplished when the goals are achieved. This is the same for businesses. It is really the things you need to do in order to achieve your vision. As the mission is more tied to the vision, it is also more rooted in the relationship between the business and their customers, and not, as with the purpose, between the business and humanity or the planet as a whole.

Here are a few examples:

American Express: We work hard every day to make American Express the world's most respected service brand.

Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Brand purpose: What a business does for humanity.

Yikes. That’s pretty lofty. How the fuck do they do that?

Brands with a purpose are actively on a mission to improve things for the planet and the people in it. Their reason for being is reflected in their products, and how they do business. This isn’t just about a few social responsibility initiatives or the CSR budget. It is the idea that the core reason for be being, or why the business was founded is somehow geared towards bettering the world.

The conflation of “brand” and “purpose” is critical here. It is all of the associations of your brand and what you are known for, reflecting the intentionality of your desire to do good for the world.

This is a more lofty interpretation of more rational definitions such as [company] vision or mission. However, I think we should keep purpose separate from these statements, as brand purpose has been conflated with the desire to do good, and in order to maintain clarity between the different arguments, we need it to only mean one thing.

There aren’t very many businesses that actually meet this criteria, and as a result, there are a hell of a lot more brands who fake brand purpose, which I’ll come on to later.

Emotional advertising: Advertising that elicits an emotional response from the audience.

This is a bit broad, isn’t it? What do we mean by “emotional”?

Well, it can make you laugh or it can make you cry. But, most importantly, it makes you feel something. As Dan Wieden said, “just move me, man.” This is the essence of what we mean by “emotional advertising”. It moves people in some way.

The problem with the word “emotional” is that it seems to have been replaced recently by “it makes you cry.” This is wrong. Emotional responses span a spectrum of emotions, but due to the success of the first John Lewis Christmas ads, the industry seems to have adopted a more singular approach to emotional advertising, and now favour sad slow piano music, or softly sung cover songs, all of which are designed to make the audience feel a lump in their throat.

How unoriginal.

Problems.

A lot of the problems we have in the industry come from us conflating these definitions, implanting our own biases on the work, and putting what we know works behind what we wish worked. There are four main areas that I have pulled out for the purposes of this article, but I’m sure there are a many other factors that have resulted in our current usage of brand purpose.

1. Barely any businesses actually have a brand purpose.

Let’s be realistic. Businesses exist to make money and to grow. They’re governed by the basic rule of “more must be better”. Their leadership is bonused on growth (typically via share price as a proxy), and they stand for little else other than to make everyone involved more money.

Almost none of them set out to make the world a better place.

There are, however, brands that were founded on strong principles that we can argue constitute a brand purpose.

For example, Toms, Patagonia or Ben and Jerry’s. What is critical with these businesses is that they were all founded by people with their own personal purpose. Their own personal desire to do good in the world. Environmentalists, mainly.

As such, the way these businesses operate, and how they do the thing they do, has always been governed by a holistic vision of doing the right thing. People naturally admire this viewpoint, because it fits with their own political views, and appears set against their fears for the wider world.

But again, not every business has a visionary founder. Nor do they have a current CEO who wants to change the world for the better, especially when doing anything other than pursuing short-term profit, will affect their bonus package.

This raises the natural question, “who can advertise their brand purpose?”

In my view, brand purpose advertising should be reserved only for brands who actually have one! I know, crazy right?

If your business was founded with the intention of bettering humanity, and that has shaped everything you do, from your products, to how you serve your customers, through to how you talk about yourself, then yes, you probably have a brand purpose. All of the associations people have your brand will reflect this intentionality within your business. It will be what you’re known for.

Remember, brands are the accumulation of these associations, so if people agree upon you existing for the betterment of humanity, then you are one of the very few brands in existence that has a true brand purpose.

If however, you are a brand whose associations aren’t attached to bettering humanity, then you don’t have a brand purpose.

You can attempt to change everything you do and how you do it for the betterment of humanity, but people know about you for other things. You’ve accrued decades of associations for being something else and existing for other reasons. And it will take decades more of consistent wholesale changes for you to address this, which will likely span multiple generations.

A few emotional ads aren’t going to cut it, and as we will talk about later, they will only sacrifice the commercial gains which are rooted in what you’re actually known for, in the short-term.

2. Liberal-leaning confirmation bias is clouding our industry's strategic clarity.

We are starting to see one theme emerging here, and it often shows up in research that supports the use of brand purpose in advertising.

“People want to buy from brands that reflect their world view.”

— Basically every audience trend report at the moment, especially anything with the term 'Millennials' in it

You will see statements like this a lot in our industry. Why is that?

Well, part of it is we are leading the answer. Culture has undoubtedly shifted towards solving the various crises facing our species. We have been bombarded with threats of environmental catastrophe for decades, and as such, we go looking for those fears and the solutions to them, in the customer research we conduct.

When prompted, people will always say they believe in brands that have a purpose, or reflect their ideals. But saying isn’t doing.

In the same way brands say one thing and do another, people also say they love brands who fight climate change, but they’ll generally buy based on price or availability. That won’t always be the case for everyone, but it is for the most part.

A brand’s purpose is not a major driver of purchase. Products that are more readily available, more readily remembered, and are cheaper or easier to buy, will always come out on top. This is a critical argument against brand purpose being used in advertising, for the simple reason that brand purpose advertising isn’t effective in driving commercial results.

We already know how brands grow and what kind of advertising leads to business growth. We’ve spent plenty of time figuring that out, and have more than enough evidence to support our well-established rulebooks. The Long and the Short Of It and How Brands Grow are probably the two most referenced in this respect. Not to mention the countless thought leaders we’ve heard rant about this subject on multiple occasions.

So, why is it that we are going up against proven truths about how and why people buy things?

It’s my view that this is largely driven by confirmation bias. We are an industry largely populated by left-leaning liberal individuals. People whose values and ideals are largely centred around caring for those around them and the world we inhabit.

Well, that just sounds awful. How dare these people care about things?

The cost of caring about things, is we find ourselves at war with our lived reality. We are generating demand for businesses that are destroying the planet. The machine of consumerism that we are driving is the root cause of the thing we are most scared of. Some of us feel like we’ve become willing participants in mass genocide. Especially, when we try and explain what we do to our friends and family, who kindly remind us of how many orang-utans are mutilated by palm oil workers every year.

We crave what Neil Gibb describes as a “deeper connection” with what we are doing. It’s the desire to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of personal purpose, and the feeling we are participating in something larger than ourselves. I would say that everyone naturally desires these things. They make you feel like you’re actually doing something worth while. Without these things, we feel lost and powerless.

And as such, it’s a hard place to inhabit. A powerless hell.

Our remedy for this situation is to implant our ideologies within our work, and go about reshaping how brands talk about themselves in the hope that it will bring about more systemic change. We’ve invented the idea of brand purpose as the catch-all solve for our own guilt.

And who can blame us? People in advertising have long felt the frustration of being able to change what brands say, but not what they do. We’ve certainly made more inroads towards changing aspects of how businesses operate, and increasingly find ourselves at the big table, but generally speaking, we have been unable to affect real change.

3. We don't want to wait for things to change, especially when the consequences of inaction are terrifying to us.

Change is depressingly slow.

We aren’t wired for waiting. And while we feel complicit in the changes we are witnessing in the world, or the lack of change we see towards a more ideal world, we feel helpless, and reach for quick solutions.

The trouble is that businesses that have become successful, have well-established, complex systems that often span geography, culture, language and a myriad of interdependent webs. These highly efficient mechanisms of commerce have taken decades to perfect. Changing them for the benefit of a higher order thought process will be met immediately with resistance.

Put simply, any change will likely be costly. Not just in terms of money, but more critically, in terms of time. And the longer something takes to change, the more costly it is perceived to be. The effort required for change is magnified over the axis of time, creating not only short-term resistance, but long-term pressure that will mount against those seeking to make change.

A CEO will favour stability over the chaos and uncertainty that change brings. This is as much about managing internal perceptions of stable leadership for their shareholders, as it is about external perceptions of “doing the right thing” from a PR perspective.

As such, our industry attempts to force change through the aspects of businesses that we feel we have the greatest control over. Communications.

I think this has been exemplified best through Nike’s advertising over the last 10 years. They’ve sought to stand by the black community with their support of the Black Lives Matter movement, meanwhile they are still led by a predominantly white board of directors. They’ve sought to create the impression they are doing good for people, meanwhile their shoes are made in sweatshops.

This has led to them becoming something of a cliche of a brand who overreaches with short-term advertising promises, while failing to change adequately as a business in order to live up to them.

You may argue that this doesn’t matter as long as they are still commercially successful, their shareholders are happy, and their board and CEO still receive their bonuses. I’ll leave that judgment up to you, but I certainly know how I feel about it.

There’s also the second economic argument that comes up in conversations of doing the right thing, which is essentially a reframing of the largely disproven notion of ‘trickle down’ economics. “If you want to do good, you have to do well.”

This suggests that businesses can only make changes for good, only when they’ve achieved surplus commercial success. This is an argument for philanthropy, which stands in the way of any form of systematic change. It assumes that the world can only do good things if it can afford them, and only if there’s money left over to do so. I can certainly understand why this kind of argument will enrage most people with left-leaning liberal ideals. It basically says “join the back of the line”.

This is where a lot of conflict happens within conversations about brand purpose. The truth of the matter is, there has to be commercial sacrifice in order to achieve outcomes that are better for the world.

It’s cheaper to use palm oil. It’s cheaper to place your workforce in developing countries. It’s cheaper to use coal for energy production. Cost saving practices are the easiest way to inflate share price and unlock leadership bonus packages.

It’s naive to suggest otherwise, so we need to separate brand purpose from conversations about commercial effectiveness, and measure the choices to do the right thing, differently.

However, there’s a clear distinction here between doing the right thing, and communicating that you’re doing the right thing. It’s important to separate these two things, as advertising communication is about effectiveness, not doing the right thing. Sorry about that.

4. We've taken to selling through more emotional advertising, and some of us seem to think that brand purpose offers a shortcut to deeper emotional connections.

We know emotional advertising works.

We’ve probably read enough IPA or WARC papers on this to agree upon it now. But as I suggested earlier, the idea of simply making people emotional is not the answer. Truly effective emotional advertising joins the heart and the head. It is the why and the what.

I would argue the over emphasis on finding a brand’s why (Simon Sinek), regardless of what that actually solves or gives people in return, is why so much so-called emotional advertising has become utterly meaningless. It isn’t enough to just move people. There has to be clear connection between the emotion being communicated and the customer’s needs. There has to be a because. A reason to believe. A pay-off.

Yes, we are in the business of storytelling, but a very specific kind of storytelling. We are essentially just providing reasons why someone should buy something. And in order for them to connect their emotions to a purchase decision, we need to provide the rationale for buying.

Brands that don’t actually have a purpose have used ‘brand purpose style advertising’ to artificially create this because pay-off. But as I mentioned before with Nike, this can fall flat. This scene from HBO’s TV show Euphoria puts this into perspective perfectly.

If mainstream culture is reflecting these perceptions to huge audiences, then you have to assume that the desired associations brands like Nike are artificially attempting to accrue with their brand purpose work, are also likely to be failing badly.

So, where does this leave us?

Brands should continue to transform for the betterment of humanity.

Just because they don’t have the right to communicate a brand purpose, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t endeavour to create one. If brands continue their transformation for the betterment of humanity, and communicate the changes they make appropriately, then they may over time build the brand associations required to talk about having a brand purpose. However, as I mentioned earlier, this will take decades, span generations, and won’t be measured as a commercial success. They will do it, because they have to do it for the sake of the world.

Brands founded on a purpose should continue to talk about it.

Brands that were founded around a purpose should continue to communicate it, whilst satisfying consumer needs and soaking up new customers through category entry points. And finally, the term “brand purpose” should be only reserved for businesses that meet these requirements.

The advertising industry needs to double down on what we know how to do well: creating effective advertising.

Within our industry, we should refocus our efforts on producing effective work that emotionally resonates with people, while satisfying their needs. We should still be good at what we do, regardless of our own personal ideologies.

Those of us that need to affect greater change within businesses, should consider a change of focus.

For those of us still struggling with our place within all of this, should consider a path that allows them to be in a position to affect change. Many in the industry are already spinning off sustainability consultancies, giving them the opportunity to get stuck in with the hard work of convincing CEOs and boardrooms to change their businesses for the better. Alternatively, we could go work for companies with visionary CEOs who have founded their business with a true brand purpose.

There aren’t many of those jobs out there currently, so perhaps, we can go create a few more of them?