The Case for a Better Purpose

Over the last three months, many column centimeters have been invested on articles from industry experts on brand purpose. They can largely be aggregated into three perspectives. ?

Firstly, in an age of distraction and low attention, a strong purpose gets consumers to engage with your brand meaningfully. Obviously, these people are ‘for the motion’. I also suspect they are a community of like-minded people who populate award juries and creative panels. Interestingly, the example most quoted here is of Dove and its purpose around Real Beauty. Most struggle to come up with another example in the same vein. ?

Secondly, are those who claim purpose washing is trying too hard to connect with consumers who have far better things to do. This cohort tends to believe that advertising is dead (long live advertising). They call out such purpose as fake and over-woke. When all the brand’s actions are not aligned to its purpose, it gets trolled instantly.?Imagine 可口可乐公司 talking about climate change and water adversity.

Then there is a counter narrative to this. It comes from people of the first group who largely talk about babies and bathwater. And, this way, a controversy is created to get the brand ‘free’ visibility. The left and the right polarize and calcify in their opinions. Much bandwidth and space are used up. And the subject then suddenly dies from social pages, just as quickly as it was feted and critiqued. In many ways, it feels like movie promotions, specially of the Khan or Johar variety. They start a month before release, reach a crescendo on the Thursday before launch, and end as soon as the first weekend is fried.

If you are wondering what the third perspective is, it is of the poor consumer. He/She remains largely unaffected by it all. If really pushed to have an opinion in some focus groups, they would wonder what the brouhaha was all about. He/She has real world problems, family concerns, money issues, health headaches, relationship worries et al. For them, good advertising is an escape into fantasy, a laugh on everyone’s foibles, a small tear of nostalgia, a real felt emotion. They do not need any brand preaching on how to lead a responsible life, bring up his children right or how to not objectify women (or men, for that matter!).

This dichotomy between what works versus what is dished out is supported by a study on 凯度 ’s LINK database, which shows that the use of humour has been declining steadily while it has been proven to be more often effective, ?

What’s the way out? Is there a possibility that brands can make a meaningful emotional difference in people lives without over-moralizing about it? Can brands connect viscerally with their core audience while impacting the population at large? Should the lesson from the story be left to the receiver of the communication? In some senses, can advertising be twitter-sized movies? (Is that even a right analogy anymore?)

The author believes that it is time to go back to first principles. Good communication is at the intersection of what the product actually does, what the consumer really wants, and what the brand’s inherent attitude is.

Andy Greenaway ’s recent post on brands that Fix me, Flaunt me and For me (which, in turn, comes from the timeless framework of performance risk, social risk and self risk) is a good starting point. It gives a good framework for meaningful engagement that is appropriate to the role that the category, product, or brand plays in the consumer’s lives.

But this also serves as a critical red-line. If the brand works beyond this boundary, the communication feels disconnected, unauthentic and, well, meaningless.

Take the recent cadbury bournvita Forced Packs campaign #faithnotforce that exhorts parents to not force their choices on their children.

Bournvita, a malted milk additive essentially alleviates the performance risk for the mother of her child’s nourishment. When seen from the child’s point of view, it addresses the self-risk of the need to be victorious. These become the default red-lines for the brand’s meaningfulness in people’s lives. When the brand chooses to cross these red lines (Lakshman Rekha, for the Indologists among us), it runs into the no-man’s land of bewilderment and brain fog.

In other words, a brand’s purpose, first and foremost, needs to be true to the brand while making a meaningful connection with its consumer.

Now, how hard can that be? ?Apparently, a lot.