Forget "brand purpose". Try genuine relevance.

I'm a huge fan of Calm.

If you're not familiar, it's a mindfulness app focused on stress relief, relaxation and sleep. I make good use of it often because, well, life.

But they also happen to be one of my favorite marketing brands lately because they just get it.

They've got both B2C and B2B strategies because they're a consumer product but they're also very plugged into programs like employee wellness in the business world. This week, they endeared me to them yet again with this bit of brilliance:

They did this several months ago, too, when Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open.

In an industry replete with lots of fuzzy, fluffy conversations about tenuous concepts like "brand purpose"—which, honestly, are often thin veneers over commercial aims that smack of opportunism—it's refreshing to me to see a brand who simply does meaningful things that align with their values, their products, and their ethos.

It's a fine line. But you can smell the performative stuff when it happens just as much as you can feel the actions that are genuine. Calm consistently shows up as the latter for me, and these days, that's a rarity.

This particular post worked because there's no pitch in sight. There's no forceful, contrived branding. There's simply a statement of values - mental health is health - and a visible action that's both timely and using a platform and audience to perpetuate really positive change (backed with dollars) alongside support of a prominent professional athlete.

And in between their support of athletes prioritizing their mental health, they have a host of really smart content like:

Testimonials:

Educational and helpful articles:

Third-party articles from credible industry sources:

And even small little videos designed to help readers take :30 to breathe and relax:

Let's talk about why it all works.

The headline is that Calm's content, across organic and paid, is all incredibly relevant. And it's elegant in its simplicity.

1. They're not trying to be complicated. They're simply talking about the value of mental health, whether it's for their individual app customers or their enterprise business customers looking to build great employee wellness programs.
2. It's clear and concise. The copywriting is crisp. The design is consistent. The brand is present but not overt.
3. They're in the conversation, not always the center of it. Mental and emotional wellness, including sleep and rest, are core themes of their content, and they find ways to consistently talk about those topics through all of their campaigns and posts. They're not trying to be anything they're not and they're contributing as part of the community.
4. They're in it for the audience. This is the part that so, so many brands get wrong. In the desperation to get "the brand" in there, they talk about themselves incessantly. Calm lets the brand ride shotgun with the helpful, useful and relevant content they post so it's there in your peripheral vision but not the main character in the story.
5. They're worried about quality vs. cadence. There's a consistency to their content and they have paid campaigns running consistently but they're not trying to adhere to some arbitrary "best time to post" schedule or routine cadence. They speak and share when they've got something useful and relevant. Not more, not less.
6. Their product backs it all up. Not to be underestimated here, but their product team can walk the walk that the marketing team talks about. Content and marketing always fall down when promises can't be kept.

I'm such a fan of brands that do fewer things better, and Calm is a really solid example of this for me in a time when so many content programs are dripping with a mix of desperation, self-centeredness and total lack of awareness about what the audience and community actually care about.

Yay for good marketing, more yay for putting mental health in the spotlight, and triple yay for relevance over lofty, esoteric ideas of brand.

I'm a fan. And now I'm off to fire up my app to do a quick afternoon Calm sesh. Because #mentalhealthishealth indeed.