Obsess over your brand conviction, not brand purpose
Leo Burnett’s Daniel Pankraz is tired of brands believing their customers care about a high and mighty brand purpose. Instead, they should try dialling their goals down to something more achievable.
We’ve well and truly been in the purposeful brands era these past five plus years, but how many brands truly have a higher order brand purpose that gets activated in an authentic way across all internal and external touchpoints?
I can think of a handful of brands, and most of them play in the social impact space. The reality is most people just don’t give a crap about brands, and we often overestimate our roles in their lives.
We’re now seeing so many esoteric and vacuous brand purpose statements, which often only serve to make a marketer feel like they’re doing something more meaningful.
Convoluted waffle.
Good planning take complex ideas and simplifies. Bad planning does the opposite.
Coke is a an interesting example which you obviously don’t like but what would you suggest is a better one (for coke specifically)
Can’t they anchor their core brand ‘conviction’ on reducing bottles in the world right?
Brand purpose seems to get a constant kicking due to misinterpretation of how it should be used and some laughable examples that always get referenced.
If a purpose statement – or a positioning statement, brand proposition or brand conviction statement for that matter – is concocted to be esoteric and vacuous, it will end up being esoteric and vacuous! If you set a purpose statement at 10,000 ft, it will do the same good work as your 10,000 ft brand conviction platform. If you set it higher, it will probably look like nonsense.
I reckon for each of the conviction examples you’ve shown, a simple bit of wordsmithing could turn each into a perfectly viable purpose statement or brand proposition.
Airbnb
Letting people see the world from the inside out
Tesla
Moving us towards a forever future.
Nike
Pushing the boundaries of everyday endeavour
Patagonia
Fighting for the world
Samsung
Progress through protest.
This is what was written about purpose 9 years ago but with conviction inserted where purpose used to be. It’s a piece of guff and the examples given would be easily substituted as purpose statements in any deck. How about taking what the thing does or how it helps and tell people about it in as entertaining way as possible. This industry is falling over itself to rewrite very simple things as complex. Ive been inside consulting firms and even they don’t make baseless jargon flips like this.
First-class satire. Nearly fell for it.
The real brand purpose of all large companies is exactly the same.
We were created to: Enrich the founder.
And now we’re passionate about: Shareholder value.
A guiding principle is a nice idea. But most purpose statements don’t guide anything. They simply justify existing commercial objectives.
Nike: We’d like to transition from sportswear to casualwear.
So we believe if you have a body, you’re an athlete.
AirBNB: We’d like to rent out other people’s houses.
So we believe that travel is better when you experience it as an insider.
Tesla: We’d like to sell batteries and electric cars.
So we believe the world needs to transition to sustainable energy.
Samsung: We’d like to people to upgrade their gadgets.
So we believe meaningful progress comes from daring to defy barriers.
Well said. I agree with you, however does your explanation assume that you are trying to bring a consumer from outside of the category, into the consideration set?
E.g. I was originally in the market for hotel, but AirBNB sold me on the benefits of experiencing travel as an insider.
If the consumer is already sold on the idea of home-sharing, (or sportswear, new gadgets, sustainable energy) then a purpose such as this is no longer required… Instead, you need to sell them on why YOUR brand is the best home-sharing company. To do that, a brand needs a distinctive angle in to rally their communications around. And that’s where purpose comes in.
Well said. I agree with you, however does your explanation assume that you are trying to bring a consumer from outside of the category, into the consideration set?
E.g. I was originally in the market for hotel, but AirBNB sold me on the benefits of experiencing travel as an insider.
If the consumer is already sold on the idea of home-sharing, (or sportswear, new gadgets, sustainable energy) then a purpose such as this is no longer required… Instead, you need to sell them on why YOUR brand is the best home-sharing company. To do that, a brand needs a distinctive angle in to rally their communications around. And that’s where purpose comes in.
“Brilliant coffee experience”? I just want a coffee. It tasing nice and not taking too long to make is the minimum and maximum expectation.
So if you put “brand conviction” into action what would you call that?