Brand purpose is wishful seeing from marketers who want it to be true
The Choice Factory author Richard Shotton argues that the methodology behind brand purpose is flawed, and is being perpetrated by adlanders who want to feel better about their jobs.
The idea that what we perceive is not an objective reflection of the physical world stretches back to the 1940s and the New Look school of psychology.
Jerome Bruner and Cecile Goodman, psychologists at Harvard University, ran an experiment in 1947 that suggested that what we saw partly reflected our desires.
They showed children five denominations of coins, one at a time. After each one the children had to adjust a projector until the beam of light was the same size as the coin. The experimenters then repeated the process with a separate group of children, but this time using gray cardboard discs the same dimensions as the coins.
The children who had seen the cardboard discs over-estimated the size by a fraction, a mere 1.4% on average. In contrast, those who had seen coins overestimated their size by 27%. The psychologists inferred that the children’s desire for the coins made them loom larger.
In the years since the experiment psychologists have come to accept that people don’t passively record reality. They term the behaviour wishful seeing.
How wishful seeing explains marketing’s infatuation with brand purpose
Wishful seeing has profound implications for the business of advertising. Agencies have been guilty of promoting theories of advertising that they want to be true, rather than ones that actually are true. And there is no better example of this than brand ideals or purpose.
Over the last five years brand purpose, the idea that brands which have a purpose beyond profit outperform those who don’t, has become one of the most widely promoted ideas in advertising. Professor Mark Ritson, the outspoken columnist at Marketing Week, calls it a “discipline shredding claim”.
The evidence supporting brand purpose comes from Grow, a book written by Jim Stengel, ex-CMO of P&G. Stengel came up with this finding after selecting the 50 brands with the highest loyalty or bonding scores from Millward Brown’s 50,000-strong database.
These star performers were termed the Stengel 50. Stengel then searched for a link between the brands. This was found to be a brand ideal – a shared intent by everyone in the business to improve people’s lives.
Next he looked at the chosen brands’ stock value growth between 2000 and 2011. Since the Stengel 50 had grown by 393% compared with a 7% loss for the S&P 500 benchmark, he declared that ideals were driving business success. Ideals supposedly didn’t just drive growth, they led to stratospheric success.
The book has had a tremendous impact.
Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, declared he was “utterly convinced”. Tom Peters, the management guru, was even more impressed, calling the book a “landmark”. Part of its appeal is that it offers a simple recipe for success; an off-the-shelf solution that works regardless of the nuances of the brand or category. That’s an enticing prospect for time-pressed managers grappling with uncertainty. But there’s more to it than that. It also imbues advertising with a moral purpose, an appealing prospect for those hankering for a deeper meaning to their careers.
However, because advertisers fervently hoped that the theory was true, they forgot to check whether it was. They have succumbed to a collective bout of wishful seeing.
Before you search for a purpose for your brand you should scrutinise Stengel’s findings. I propose four tests:
1) Is the data accurate?
A basic requirement is that the data being analysed is accurate. Stengel’s central piece of data is that his 50 stocks rose by 393%. But that’s not quite the case. Some of the companies in question, such as Emirates and Wegmans, are privately held, which means they don’t have a share price.
Nor do other brands in the Stengel 50, like Stonyfield Farm, Innocent or Pampers, have a share price. They are parts of much larger publicly traded companies, respectively Danone, Coca-Cola and P&G. In Stonyfield Farm’s case its 2014 revenues were less than 2% of Danone’s. Can you claim that Danone’s share price rose because 2% of its holdings have a brand ideal?
The gravest flaw though is how Stengel selected the fifty brands. He picked the best performers in Millward Brown’s 50,000-strong database. That’s the top 0.1% of brands. It’s not surprising that those brands performed well in terms of share price. If they hadn’t performed well in the past they wouldn’t be in Millward Brown’s top 0.1% of brands.
Stengel’s finding, if you re-state it at its most basic, is that brands that feature in the top 0.1% of companies have performed well in the stock-market. That’s circular logic.
2) Does the theory predict the future as well as the past?
The true test of a theory is if it accurately predicts the future. With that in mind I examined the share price performance of 26 of Stengel’s companies over the five years up to March 2017.
A mere nine of the 26 companies studied outperformed the S&P 500 benchmark. By chance alone you’d expect half, or 13, of the stocks to exceed that benchmark. This suggests that ideals weren’t the panacea Stengel suggested.
3) Are the brands linked by an ideal?
For the theory to be valid the brands in question must be linked by an ideal. Unfortunately, even this doesn’t seem to be true.
First, the claim that all 50 of the brands exhibit an ideal is suspicious. The reason Stengel claims such widespread uptake of ideals becomes apparent when you examine his definitions. He stretches the term ideal to such an extent that it’s meaningless.
Have a look at his definition for three of the brands:
• Moët & Chandon “exists to transform occasions into celebrations”.
• Mercedes-Benz “exists to epitomise a life of achievement”.
• BlackBerry “exists to connect people with one another and the content that is most important in their lives, anytime, anywhere”.
Notice a problem? These ideals are just category descriptors. They could apply to any champagne, luxury brand or handset provider.
If the term ideal can cover anything, then it’s meaningless.
4) Do brands with ideals out-perform those that don’t?
In order to prove that ideals enable success you must compare successful brands with unsuccessful ones. In particular, you must demonstrate that successful companies are more likely to have taken ideals to their heart. You can’t make sweeping claims by looking at a single group in isolation. Otherwise you might attribute success to an inconsequential factor common to all brands.
Unfortunately, Stengel makes no attempt to determine whether brands outside the top 50 have an absence of ideals. This alone means his case is unproven.
How does Stengel’s theory fare against our tests?
Stengel claims to have found the secret to business growth. If true, he would have fundamentally changed how brands should advertise. But such a sweeping assertion requires robust evidence. As Carl Sagan, the American astronomer argued: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Stengel provides neither ordinary nor extraordinary evidence.
Unfortunately, Stengel’s work has failed all four of the required tests. Stengel has failed to prove that ideals drive superior profits.
But this failure raises another question:
If brand purpose is so flawed, why are marketers keen to adopt it?
Vic Polkinghorne, co-founder and creative director of Sell! Sell!, is one of advertising’s most vocal critics of brand purpose. He suggests its popularity is due to the motivations of marketers rather than what’s beneficial for the brand in question.
According to Polkinghorne: “It comes down to people, because this is a people business. I think it’s about how people view themselves and how they spend their time. [Ad folk] want to feel good about themselves. That’s perfectly understandable. It’s not wrong for people to want to feel good about themselves.
“The problem is that some people don’t feel rewarded by helping a company be more successful at selling products. They therefore look for something more from their work.”
Marketers bought into the ideal mythology because they wanted it to be true.
Richard Shotton is deputy head of evidence at MG OMD and the author of The Choice Factory. This article is an excerpt from his book.
Brilliant! Brands don’t have purposes. These are more appropriately reserved for companies and their employees and stakeholders; and act as a more practical alternative to a vision.
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Entirely so.
We scribble jingles to flog shoe polish.
The rest is self-deception.
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Excellent article. Really well balanced by looking at both sides of the discussion from an objective point of view. Purpose is a marketing tool, and a clever one when well thought through as it can help customers engage with a brand on a level above the intrinsic value or use of the item in question, but on its own, out of context, it’s meaningless. Having a purpose with a bad product and no marketing budget or a bad creative is not going to elevate sales. Neither is not having a purpose when you have an amazing product, great creative and good marketing resources going to hinder sales.
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Always worthwhile pointing out the difference between correlation and causations.
However I still suspect there is something to the idea that brands with a profit only motive will have additional challenges in the future. This is based mostly on these three factors:
-if profit comes first, you eventually do something bad enough to offend most people and get regulated (see Australian banking sector, the).
-Its easier to get customer support and loyalty when your brand is seen to be about something good
-Its hard to retain good staff and or hard to keep staff motivated in a business that doesn’t have a good purpose. (The flip side of this is a brand perceived as being about greed will attract short term employees looking to get rich and get out, which causes problems in the long term)
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Yes, a nice article, brim full of apparent truths and with the appearance of deep analysis. Nothing like an argument against established principals to get the new generation bubbling. The problem is that we must flog stuff, regularly and in impressive numbers. We need to take account of theories and ideas, even ideals, bur we must march on, fight the good fight, and bend the rules.
There used to be an outboard motor called a “British Seagull” it was a thing of simplicity and beauty, and performed as expected, giving many years of service; each unit bore a transfer print “The Best Outboard Motor For The World” I believed it, so did many thousands of others.
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This reads like another binary, all-or-nothing argument, like arguing Byron Sharp is absolutely right or wrong. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, depending on the brand and category. Can and should all brands have a bigger purpose? Probably not. I’m happy with my Four’n’Twenty pie just being a pie thanks. But I’m convinced we do feel emotions (even if tiny) and attach meaning to some brands – and in so doing, they become a part of our personal narratives. A purpose that is relevant to both what the brand does, and what the customer seeks, can be powerful. There is no perfect science to it – we’re dealing with irrational humans and the stories we tell ourselves.
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And then there is Social Purpose. Different from Brand Purpose. Brand Purpose can be a bit vague and lofty at times, as some of the author’s examples show. Social Purpose on the other hand is specific, actionable, unifying and measurable. There are some very strong commercial results coming in from brands using this strategy, including Unilever’s recent results for their Sustainable Living Brands – which are now contributing to over 70% of the company’s overall growth and growing 46% faster than their other brands.
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Yeah-nah. The problem with this view is marketers and advertisers believing that they own purpose – they don’t. Purpose needs to be owned at the board and C-suite level, and before a brand can start to define its purpose, the parent company needs to be crystal clear on its own larger purpose. Also, the definition of purpose used by Stengel and cited by the author of the article is narrow and outdated – the most relevant definition of purpose in the new economy is one that takes into account the needs of a broader group of stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, the community and the environment. Any purpose statement that does not embrace this broader definition around greater impact is antiquated and the business leave itself open to disruption by businesses who actually get it. The issue here in Australia is that most boards and C-suites have done a crap job of prioritising and defining purpose, and so the marketers and brand strategists take it upon themselves to own and define it, and as a result create a chasm between company purpose and brand purpose – in an age of consumer activism (read, not dumb) where the relationship between brand and parent company is easy to uncover, the risk of being revealed as disingenuous and white-washing creates risk of potentially irreparable reputational damage. Some of the global multinationals, like Nike and Unilever, are on the right track and increasingly delivering a coherent relationship between company and brand purpose – most local players need a lot of help to figure it out, and need to get on with it quick-smart. They need to give us a bell…
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I didn’t read the article as a binary argument at all, rather an objective analysis of Stengel’s claim. I don’t read into it any opposition to the notion of ‘brand purpose’, simply that having one is not the fast-lane ticket to success that ‘Grow’ implies.
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