Are you integrating your brand purpose into tangible strategic action?

Your marketing department has, no doubt, done a stellar job of defining your company’s purpose. It’s embodied in a bold, well thought out purpose statement, which illuminates the real societal need you’re going to address with the full might of your business. It’s a source of inspiration for your board and employees, and it’s highly relevant to your brand. It’s woven into your organisation’s marketing and CSR strategies, too.?

That’s a lot of good work done. Now, however, is when the hard part starts. How do you action this purpose beyond the words and the theory? Move it off those presentation and press release pages, and into the situations and communities it’s designed to impact? How do you make that purpose structured, strategic and truly embedded in your core business? Make it last beyond a one-off donation (however large) or short-term social campaign, and deliver quantifiable, lasting and sustainable impact??

Here, we take a look at three ways brands can move from pure purpose to meaningful action —?with case by case examples from our team.?

1. Activate for resonance: use big data to gain specific understanding?

For maximum positive impact, your purpose-led initiative needs to be rooted in maximum relevance — both for your brand and for the communities you’re aiming to reach and benefit.?

Taking a data-driven approach to defining the what, where and how of your purposeful action is a vital start. You’ve defined the issue you’re trying to solve, or need you’re trying to serve, in your purpose statement. Next question: where is most relevant for your brand to focus? And how does this align with your existing or potential markets? The example below takes us through a data-centric process of finding these answers.?

A leading sanitation brand works to close the hygiene gap in high-potential markets?

With the outbreak of Covid-19, this client of ours was highly motivated to deliver its? “health through hygiene” purpose far and wide. Their global structure, urgency and scale ambitions dictated that local country teams would lead execution, but not every market needed the same guidance or support. They turned to our team for data-crunching that would steer their strategy and focus their actions.??

Tapping into global public health and development data sets, we developed a hybrid indicator to quantify the health/hygiene situation across the brand’s potential implementation countries. Then, from multiple internal business metrics, we devised a single indicator to objectively rank markets by the brand’s commercial performance and market opportunity.

Leveraging big data: from global statistics to market-specific business insights?

Combining these two data sets enabled the client to action their purpose strategically. They prioritised budget and roll-out in markets with the greatest health/hygiene needs, in combination with the most significant brand responsibility and commercial opportunity. From big data, to granular insights, to relevant country-level action.?

Purpose to action: mapping health/hygiene needs and commercial opportunity to inform strategic budgeting and roll-out

Thinking long-term, the brand now has a reliable, replicable data-driven methodology enabling it to activate future purpose-led projects with maximum geo-specific resonance.?

2. Join forces with social innovators and entrepreneurs?

From grassroots entrepreneurs to major foundations, social innovators are a vital source of inspiration and collaboration for major brands putting their purpose into action.?

By strategically partnering with impactful innovators working in your purpose area, you’ll have key access to on-the-ground expertise and be encouraged to explore out of your corporate comfort zone. Through establishing strong collaborative foundations with social innovation partners, brands are well set up to implement informed, relevant and sustainable initiatives.?

Short-term, there’s vast potential for quick communications to share your purpose-led actions widely. Innovators and entrepreneurs are used to moving fast —?unlike major charities and foundations, where timeframes are longer and minimum budgets run into the millions.??

Long-term, though, is where we’ve seen significant value and impact. In supporting brands to partner with social movers and shakers, we use bespoke criteria to identify and define worthwhile, mutually beneficial collaborations. Thorough research into brand relevance, operations, sales and finance models, and so on allow us to identify potential lasting partnerships, co-creating value between big brands and social innovators. Moving away from one-off campaigns and short-lived soundbites, towards creating ongoing purpose-led impact.?

A major dairy brand builds brand awareness through the power of kindness?

Initially, our team supported this particular brand to define its purpose: cultivating kindness through its products, in the families and moments in which they were consumed. As we love to do, the Archipel&Co team then rapidly moved from statement to action.?

Identifying parent social media influencers who aligned with the brand’s image, ethos and purpose, we ran a pilot social media initiative showing mothers teaching their kids the value of kindness. Giving these parents a platform to share their stories and voices effectively incentivised them to engage with the dairy brand’s purpose. Overall brand awareness was up, awareness of their purpose was up, and the brand also gained a shedload of quality content in only a few weeks and at a fraction of a usual marketing budget. We’re still working out how to measure kindness’ impact (please share your ideas below!), but, with hundreds of kindness stories shared and many with images or video, our client is building an evidence base for their brand’s impact.

At Archipel&Co, we’re biased towards action across our projects: whenever we’re able to execute and implement, we do, building resonance and generating usable, practical outputs for our clients at every opportunity.

3. Collaborate with research partners who know your target geography?

Multinationals have vast global experience — but sometimes the nuances can get lost in the bigger picture. Specialising in complex, marginalised and emerging markets (where other consultancies are rarely found), the Archipel&Co team is driven to support our clients in reaching, hearing and responding to the high potential of these markets.?

A major haircare brand leverages product loyalty for a feminist initiative in India?

Unclear on why their brand — targeted at professional salons — was underperforming in tier 3 Indian cities, the company got our team on the case. After conducting interviews across the hairdressing spectrum, from informal street barbers to high-end salons, we uncovered a crucial insight.?

The brand had been pouring marketing and training investment into young female hairdressers in these cities, who were apprenticing, building their own “at-home” hairdressing businesses, and eventually opening their own salons. Investing in training had enabled the brand to build loyalty and consistent sales in every other market. So why wasn’t it working as smoothly in this case?

What the brand hadn’t previously appreciated was the ‘career or no career’ inflexion point that these young women’s marriages represented. The vast majority were looking forward to getting married (some sooner than others) and they stated without animosity, that, if their new husband or mother-in-law was against them working, that would be it; they would close their shop. While none of the emerging female hairdressers expressed outrage at this, indeed they all looked forward to getting married, we understood that they were desperate to ensure that the business they had built and their identity as a hairdresser would endure alongside a happy family life.?

Geeta and her team at Premi Hair Dresser, Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, India

So how can a global haircare brand support emerging female entrepreneurs? Alongside the usual away weekends and training courses, they add gender-specific coaching and support for emerging female hairdressers. This enables them to make a convincing pitch to their new husbands and in-laws on exactly why they should continue pursuing their hairdressing profession.?

So, from our rapid ethnographic methodology, we gleaned a key social insight about female entrepreneurship in hairdressing. With that, we designed a gender-specific go-to-market approach to drive both commercial and social impact within our client’s core B2B business.

Moving your major brand from purpose to action: 3 steps to implement now?

1. Make sure your company’s purpose is clearly defined

It should address a real societal need (usually beyond product or service benefits), using methods and in regions that are highly relevant to your brand. Use a data-driven approach to pinpoint your ability to create change where it’s most needed.?

2. Forge long-term, intelligent partnerships that go beyond donations?

Map potential social innovation partners that are working on the key issue your purpose addresses. Partner for short-term agility, flexibility and awareness, but also long-term co-creation for ongoing purposeful impact and value creation.

3. Measure rigorously to learn and improve

Documenting your impact pathway, accurate data-gathering and consistent analysis are vital to communicating, improving and enhancing your company’s impact as you channel purpose into action. We’ll be diving into this in our next article, so stay tuned.?