The use and abuse of brand purpose

A personal point of view here.

A client of mine once said to me, in an unguarded moment, “You don’t just join a brand team, you join a political party.” 

This insight contrasts with what those of us who are comfortable with corporate life most enjoy about it. Compared to single-owner businesses, corporate organizations excel in having clear-cut boundaries and rules, favoring facts over opinions and staying open-minded about how to achieve growth. 

But – and this is what made my friend’s observation so interesting – there are certain unstated rules and unexamined biases. If you don’t subscribe to these, you’re in danger of being someone who doesn’t “get it.” You don’t want that to happen to you so you might need to show that you “get it” by proposing things that your critical intelligence tells you aren’t really true. But, at least, now, you’re “part of the team.”

Don’t pretend you haven’t done this at least once in your career. I certainly have. Hey, I wanted to belong to my team and share the values. But I also know from experience that teams that do this over and over, become victims of their own “confirmation bias.” Brands that talk to themselves will eventually become tired or irrelevant or even ridiculous (as we’ll see in a minute). 

When I first started working in advertising, no one talked about brand purpose. The closest you would come to that would be a mission and vision statement or words to that effect. The brand ambition tended to be a fusion of a commercial objective and a positioning statement wrapped in lofty strategic language. 

Then Simon Sinek happened. “People want to know the “why” before they care about the “what” and the “how,”he famously said. This was etched into the consciousness of the global marketing community.

Right on the heels of that, the former CMO of P&G, Jim Stengel, came out with GROW: How the World’s Top Brands Grow with Brand Ideals. Forget that some of the proof Stengel offered that adopting a brand purpose always leads to growth doesn’t stand up to a careful analysis (link). He too etched the thought into the consciousness of the global marketing community that a modern brand is one with a purpose that transcends its category but is relevant to it.

I do believe that brands that place a human purpose at the center of their strategic framework increase their chances of being relevant for the simple reason that it forces everyone involved to use a compelling human insight to drive their inspiration.

But it can easily all go off the rails – mostly, I think, because of the professional self-esteem issue that underlies the entire marketing industry.

On the one hand, for those with low empathy, there’s a sense that all advertising is just fluff and pixie dust. (It isn’t.) On the other hand, for those with high empathy, there’s a sense that all advertising is self-serving, annoying and obnoxious and that the world would be a better place if big brands with big budgets would spend their money on trying to improve the world rather than endlessly repeating how much better their product is. 

And supposedly Jim Stengel proved that brands that focus on a higher purpose end up in a better place financially than those who don’t (though he actually didn’t). What Stengel did prove is that brands that adopt a simple human purpose have a much greater chance of being relevant.

But where it goes off the rails is when brands confuse having a human purpose with “making the world a better place” (which used to be called “cause marketing”). Not every brand can be a Patagonia. Not every brand should even try.

“We’re not just a business. We’re making the world a better place.” 

In Silicon Valley, this kind of statement has become so trite that it’s now an abiding source of comedy. When the creator of Beavis and Butthead, Mike Judge, decided to create a comedy about modern-day Silicon Valley, a delicious HBO show by the same name, he went to live there for a year and spent time in the belly of the beast carefully researching his show so that it would have the ring of truth. It’s a great one to watch because it’s really an ethnography disguised as a comedy. Check out this clip from the show that shows how, at TechCrunch, every new start-up is going to “disrupt” in order to “make the world a better place.” Watch it, laugh, and enjoy the inoculation it will give you against the malady of overweening brand purpose statements.

In the world of fast-moving consumer goods brand teams, another wonderful nugget of comedy for you. In February 2017, the comedy writing team at Saturday Night Live no doubt included a former ad agency copywriter who had observed first hand how the corporate obsession with high-minded brand purpose had made them lose all sight of common sense. In this hilarious sketch, the brand team on Cheetos are conducting a creative shoot-out between two ad agencies. One of the agencies is “stuck.” They keep on serving up fun, good-natured ads that stress how tasty a snack Cheetos is. But the other agency is really connecting with the brand team. They clearly see how Cheetos can play a role in the Great Wokening with ideas like this:

“We open on a little immigrant girl. She’s dusty. She’s tired. She’s come a long way. She looks up and she sees: a wall.  How will she get over it? A boy appears on top of it. He throws down a rope. The rope is made of American flags. The girl climbs the rope. She sees her new country for the first time and she cries. Hard cut: Cheetos.” 

The agency with the outlandish expression of Brand Purpose is applauded and the agency that just wants to sell a tasty snack is made to feel as pointless and irrelevant as yesterday’s news.

What’s uncanny about this bit of comedy is that Cheetos is owned by Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo and, two months later, PepsiCo actually aired the following commercial:

We see a group of people protesting an oppressive police action, much like Black Lives Matter. We see a fashion model doing a shoot whose eye is caught by one of the protestors. She leaves the shoot, joins the guy and joins the march. We see the riot police intimidating the protestors. The fashion model sees a cooler full of soda cans. She pulls out one and offers it to one of the policemen on the front lines. He accepts it and smiles. The tension is beginning to dissolve. Hard cut: Pepsi.

This was so bad, so delusional, so tone deaf that it brought PepsiCo to its knees and they had to issue an apology for having made this monstrosity of woke brand purpose run amok.

“It’s not just a business, it’s a political party,” as my client once observed.

This contrasts with one of the great winners at the Cannes Lions this year: American burger chain Wendy’s.

Wendy’s has done a superb job of bringing a clever and likeable smart-alec tone and execution to all of its marketing communication, particularly the brilliant use of social media to make one simple point: their food is fresh and their burgers are never frozen. No grandiose social purpose (even though Wendy’s has an impressive program of sustainable practices), just “we make a better burger and we make it fun to find about it.” They in fact have a purpose and they’re clear about it but they don’t pretend to be making the world a better place. 

I’d put Hendrick’s Gin in the same positive use of brand purpose without the pretension to “making the world a better place.” Hendrick’s Gin just keeps growing year in year out and is one of the most valuable gin brands in the world. It does so with a “delightfully different” product, packaging, activation and communication.  Everything about it announces its purpose to celebrate and cultivate delightful different products, people and experiences. You won’t make the world a better place by selecting Hendrick’s. But you will feel a little more “delightfully different.”

Or Red Bull. How is that mega brand making the world a better place? It isn’t – certainly not by any standard of “woke” consciousness. But, yeah, it’s got purpose. It’s here to energize us all. And it “gives wings” to everything it touches.

Or Fusion 5 gum. Or Walker’s chips. Or BrewDog. The list goes on. It’s a long one. It’s full of great brands. But none of them are even remotely making the world a better place.

So what does this mean for your brand?

1)   Understand that having a brand purpose is different and distinct from “making the world a better place.” 

2)   Don’t seek to win points for the simple fact that you have a brand purpose (everyone does now). Figure out instead how to use your brand purpose to make communication people care about and to propose products people want to buy.