"Chicken vote purpose": Hellmann's and the purpose debate.

The difficulties of Unilever spark discussions, and I stumbled this week on an article by Mark Ritson on the “purpose debate”: is purpose a better tool to sell more, or should marketers go back to purposeless campaigns?

Fascinating. Not the answer (“it depends”); the question.?

The biggest force on our planet is business (barring gravity, maybe. Elon Musk will tell). We’re dealing with a mass extinction, global warming, and stellar inequalities. Is the question we ought to ask (after watching “Don’t Look Up” at least): “does purpose sell more”? Or rather: “how can we put our business at the service of something even remotely useful, and make it successful enough to be sustainable?”

The article quotes Terry Smith, who mentioned, speaking about Unilever: “A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot: The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913 so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert – salads and sandwiches)”. Nicely put. But since I helped write the purpose of Hellmann’s a few years back, let me comment!

The Hellmann’s purpose job was simple: we got the team to meet some of their consumers in their homes, then gathered in a hotel. We debriefed consumer conversations, explored Hellmann’s history, cooked our own food, ate it with mayonnaise, and brought it all together into a purpose. Here’s what it read, roughly:

?“We’re here to add more joy to food. We take the best ingredient and our expertise to create products that are loved by all.”

If that does not sound like rocket science, it’s because good branding most often is not. In the words of Steve Miles, the guy who made Dove a business success, it’s the job of going back to what once made a brand great; peeling away the “stuff” that’s cluttered it over the years; and reinventing it for a new time.

But once the purpose was written, here’s what the people running Hellmann’s did:

1. They stopped advertising claims like “a spoonful of Hellmann’s has fewer calories than a spoonful of olive oil” and started to consistently talk about the pleasure of food. A billion Euro global business is complex. A purpose makes crystal clear, for hundreds of people in dozens of countries, what your brand is about, and what it’s not. Then they execute the right thing, and that matters.

2. They decided to move to cage-free eggs as ingredients for all of Hellmann's mayonnaise. Because if you are about the best ingredients and positive impact, then you stop buying eggs laid in factories where hens live so packed up that only daily antibiotics keep them alive. That was not easy: cage-free eggs were then 2% of the US egg production. Hellmann’s worked with farmers and animal welfare organizations for 7 years to raise that percentage enough to source 100% cage-free. That changed the face of egg farming... And in the meantime, Hellmann’s sustained its leadership: today people want to know what their food is made of, and “cage-free” says it’s made of good stuff. A good purpose brings a positive impact to the world, and to the business.

?I’ll give Mark Ritson and Terry Smith this: the idea that purpose alone is a silver bullet is a dangerous delusion. The job of marketers in today's world is not to add a purpose to their brands and wait. It’s to engineer brands that make a positive impact and sell.

It’s not easy. So if you're a marketer lost in the “purpose debate”, keep this in mind: chicken vote purpose. The rest of the planet does, too.