Mar 9, 22 | 13 min read
Reading time: 11 minutes
The dark, rumbling clouds of war are moving rapidly from the east towards European skies, while the corporate debate over brand purpose is reaching new heights: should companies take sides and support Ukraine? Or should they remain silent instead?
Yes. Here we go again. Another post about brand purpose. If brands cannot contribute something positive to the current situation, they should shut up and leave the work to those who can. The debate is raging.
The fact is that the more time passes, the more list of trinidad and tobago consumer email I see this noisy race of brands trying to find or create new socially acceptable and ethically sustainable purposes.
Deepening the discussion
The (unjustified?) stir generated by Peter Field ’s IPA talk on brand purpose at the end of 2021 is a sign of the heated debate currently taking place across most marketing channels.
However, I can't help but smile every time I hear phrases like: “ Our audience needs to understand our brand's new purpose ” or “ It's time to rethink our direction .”
If you didn't have a brand purpose until today, and you still have a successful business, why should you think about a purpose now?
Field’s analysis, which draws on IPA’s effectiveness database and focused primarily on B2C brands, showed that marketing campaigns geared toward a brand purpose were significantly less likely to generate long-term negative business effects compared to traditional purpose-less campaigns.
Field then went back to the data and selected those brand purpose cases that worked best. If these campaigns were targeted at companies without a brand purpose, the study found, they would bring positive results rather than problems in public perception.
As you can imagine, very few were convinced, as defining a clear brand purpose seems like muddy waters for many.
Field says: “What these findings show is that we shouldn’t dismiss brand purpose out of hand. There can be considerable benefits for companies in implementing brand purpose campaigns, both to engage their own employees, stakeholders and investors and to drive customer sales. When done well, when it’s genuine and credible, brand purpose can be very powerful.”
The case of Peter Field's research is just one sign of a much broader conversation and the need to consider a paradigm shift.
Companies that have done business, more or less ethically, with more or less success, over the past decades, are now suddenly discovering that having a brand purpose could help increase their profits, especially within the new generations of consumers (millennials and Generation Z ), who are attracted to brands that put purpose at the heart of their content effort, definitely more than my generation.
Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow and now one of the most influential marketing academics, has criticized the widespread adoption of social purpose , arguing that it could lead to brands becoming too similar and undifferentiated.
So if the marketing community is successful in teaching consumers that they should only buy brands that donate to charity or are considered good for the world, all streams can easily take over in a very undifferentiated world.
Instead, marketers should be more self-confident and believe in the good that marketing does in the world for its own sake without seeking a higher purpose, he argued.
Faced with this difference of opinion, Kate Smith , a strategic marketing consultant, seems to have a fairly coherent answer: “The problem is not the purpose per se. The problem is how the purpose is developed and used. Is it being used to define what the company does and how it does it, or is it being used simply to create an illusion of social responsibility or simply as the basis for a campaign aimed at millennials.”
