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.
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.
Entirely so.
We scribble jingles to flog shoe polish.
The rest is self-deception.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…