Is Brand Purpose Just Marketing B.S.?
While brand purpose might be in fashion, is now the right time for one?
A brand purpose is designed to act as your internal “beacon”; it helps you carve out a place that’s bigger than the product or services you provide. It’s there to help attract consumers (after it’s been translated), retain and recruit workers, and inform your path forward. It does all this by identifying your brand’s core competency and aligning it with a consumer goal or aspiration.
That’s all very well and good if you live in a normal world-but things aren’t exactly normal right now, and high-minded ideals don’t fit so nicely with the current realities.
Disruption is an over-used term, but it’s certainly a reality that our economic system is being disrupted when you consider the lack of wage growth, the rise of the 1%, record levels of poverty, the decline of the Middle Class and the transformation of the labor force.
So, back to this purpose thing for a second. We have brands and corporations talking about or wanting to talk about purpose, while at the same time there’s continued economic turmoil.
The two things can’t be poles apart. They have to be related-there must be something companies feel it in the air, or more likely hear in focus groups. And they’ve learned they have to show sensitivity, or risk being seen as out-of-touch- especially with Millennials.
They have also seen data, (see chart at left from Havas) that shows the rise of consumer interest in causes, caring and meaningfulness and the current disconnect that many brands now have with their customers.
Purpose is a way to try to resolve these issues.
BUT, there are four problems with the way purpose is currently being used:
- Companies are trying to FIND a purpose, which is somewhat un-natural- if it’s something the company has to search to find, most of the time it’s not truly intrinsic to its DNA.
- They’re just translating their purpose and using it to highlight their communication.
- They aren’t making enough of a commitment to support the purpose.
- Even if some causes are supported, they can seem non-urgent, trivial or remote when compared to some of the larger issues the country faces.
The Uber debacle last November is the tale of the age/moment and represents what happens when the rampant edge of disruptive capitalism runs free. In the relentless race to win at scale, nothing is going to stop a company like Uber. Without this drive at its heart, how else could you grow a company so fast? How could you do it without an army of employee evangelists who’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid” and are prepared to do anything in order to ensure no barriers get in the way of progress?
What’s driving those employees on? Is it the nobility of the brand purpose of “better transportation for all”, or the promise of employee stock options?
These pressures can only accelerate when you have a band of serious investors demanding double-digit growth. So while everyone is up in arms about the company’s behavior and while it can’t be tolerated, it can be explained.
Could Uber ever be a company with a warm and fuzzy purpose? And even if it had one, or values like Enron did, would it be able to live up to them?
Over at MIT, studies by Brynjolfsson and McAfee show how technology is the culprit behind workforce disruption; it has kept productivity high at the expense of income.
“It’s a startling assertion because it threatens the faith that many economists place in technological progress. Brynjolfsson and McAfee still believe that technology boosts productivity and makes societies wealthier, but they think that it can also have a dark side: technological progress is eliminating the need for many types of jobs and leaving the typical worker worse off than before. Brynjolfsson can point to a second chart indicating that median income is failing to rise even as the gross domestic product soars. “It’s the great paradox of our era,” he says. “Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.”
The impact of this can be seen in communities throughout the country and was eloquently brought home by Michael Andrews, who recently wrote about events in his hometown of Needles, California in the New Enquiry.
“The early signs of decay in Needles became a full-blown crisis after the financial collapse of 2008. Along with many smaller businesses, two of the larger employers in Needles — the Ford and Chevy dealerships — closed. Several motels around town also closed, ushering in an era of dilapidated buildings and barren lots. In May 2008, a local city council member who was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times described downtown Needles in startling, if tasteless, terms: “It’s like little Hiroshima. It’s HiroNeedles.” As the Great Recession set in, unemployment in Needles reached a peak of 14.8 percent in July 2010.”
In the context of the times we live in, it’s very hard for any quoted company that wears a purpose on its sleeve to place a hand on its heart and say that its purpose is being fulfilled or that it’s even relevant to today’s critical issues.
Purposes themselves are often giant abstractions; they take a brand or a company and find a way to attach it to something much bigger.
Done wrong, it could mean a cheese cracker maker ends up with a brand purpose like “Creators of a new ways to live more naturally.” The brand’s advisors tell the marketing team they need to walk the walk, so they sponsor trails and triathlons and believe that the job is done. Problems then start when food health advocates uncover problems with the cracker’s ingredients that don’t quite live up to the brand’s purpose; the company is forced to defend itself, and then the board soon starts questioning the rationale for the purpose.
Some of the world’s oldest companies were founded by people who possessed a desire to change the world for the better and felt sense of social responsibility toward the communities they served. Many created company towns and looked after workers for life. These weren’t typical corporations- companies like Cadbury’s, Steinway & Sons, Hershey’s and Kellogg’s were exceptions to the rule.
For the vast majority, the profit motive has been the guide (with the best marker being the stock price) and that doesn’t always fit well with high-minded values.
The challenge today is that more companies and brands want to have a purpose (for the reasons described earlier) when it was never really in their DNA in the first place, and at a time when it’s tough to have one that you can live up to.
Companies like Unilever have looked ahead and built its purpose around sustainability, because there are certainly critical issues that need solving. But how enlightened can his thinking may be if it turns a blind eye to the current hardships of its future customer base?
Right now we are in a spiral where worried and nervous consumers aren’t spending consistently across the board and many corporations are announcing cost-cutting plans at a time when the economy is supposedly growing.
Companies want to drive labor costs down by increasing automation (Amazon wants 10,000 robots in place by the end of the year, up from the 1,400 in May 2014) and drive ever-greater efficiencies.
While news reports translate these developments into lost jobs, the ripple effects (as mentioned earlier in the town of Needles) are seismic.
We certainly live in interesting times, where winners have the chance to gain handsomely and losers can easily disappear almost overnight.
Companies know success can be fleeting and that history counts for nothing. The most enlightened are behaving like they urgently have to find their future now and are investing to get there.
Take Google, which today is known for its search engine-but in the future it intends to be recognized as a life sciences company and many other thing.
“In a secret facility on Google’s campus, a team of elite scientists are working on Page’s most ambitious bet yet: He intends for the company to rewrite the rules of modern medicine. From the outside, the research center looks like any other building in the Googleplex. (Before being allowed in, a visitor had to promise not to reveal its location.) Inside, it’s a different world. Lab coats and protective eyewear are required. A series of labs spread across two floors are packed with equipment — beakers and pipettes, a mass spectrometer, centrifuges, a programmable array microscope, a 3-D printer. More than 100 scientists work side by side, including oncologists, cardiologists, biochemists, cell biologists, immunologists, optical physicists, and experts in nuclear magnetic resonance, as well as software engineers. For the past year they’ve been joining at a rate of two to four every week from places such as Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Genentech. Fortune Magazine- Profile on Larry Page- November 2014
Google is very fortunate; it has lots of capital to place very large bets on its future. It’s in a position where it can credibly frame a new purpose, but as Larry Page admits, they know the old one isn’t big enough.
Only those with capital, and who are flexible and visionary enough, will be able to steer their companies forward to a viable future. It’s turbocharged corporate Darwinism in action, and in its wake will be a whole sector of workers who will basically exit the economic system as they’re forced to find alternatives.
Interestingly, the current economic realities are a big part of the untold story of Airbnb. While much has been made of the brand’s unique experience and ability to help Millennials find habitation in cool neighborhoods, the brand’s success has been driven by the fortysomething hosts who want and need additional sources of income, which is not such a bad thing to be providing right now.
Faced with such dramatic disruption, it’s understandable that purpose is highly desired-but the reality is that even in the best of circumstances most purposes can never be fully realized and the times we are living in are making that goal even tougher to achieve.
What good is a brand purpose if there isn’t a vibrant consumer base to buy your products and services in the first place?
Purpose, therefore, could be in danger of becoming something of a marketing fad for all the reasons outlined above.
There are many purpose-practicing and purpose-capable companies who have had it their in their DNA from the start, and it always comes from the vision of the founder. One standout is- Starbucks, which believes in training/educating its workers and in trying to find solutions to youth unemployment. There are others like Tom’s, Whole Foods, New Belgium Brewing, Patagonia and Warby-Parker-that have a genuine and dedicated focus on social and environmental issues.
Back in 2010, Levi’s was getting attention for its efforts in the town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a former small steel town that had never fully recovered from the industry’s collapse.
When one of Levi’s senior executives met the charismatic mayor of the town, he decided to do something and created a specific effort connected to the brand’s “Go Forth” campaign.
“Fetterman says it’s still an open-ended question as to how much total assistance Braddock will net from the Levi’s deal. For now, the town has its new playground, funding for its library and its massive new community center.
“It’s a space that didn’t exist in town before Levi’s came in,” Fetterman says. “The level of services it’s going to provide for the next 30 or 40 years — that’s invaluable and priceless.”
“I think that this kind of private philanthropy — I’d like to see it continue,” he says. “It really does deliver benefit in a way that government assistance and foundation assistance can’t.” Levi’s Gives Struggling Town Cinderella Treatment- NPR-October 3rd, 2010
While purpose is supposed to be enduring, Levi’s discovered it was hard to help put Braddock back on its feet and the effort created too many difficult questions, so it moved on.
Today, Levi’s is running a campaign about “Living in Levi’s”, one that probably won’t be talked about as much, but it certainly won’t be forcing the company into making promises that it can’t keep.
To conclude, a brand purpose can’t just be a bolted-on, abstracted, short-cut to the moral and emotional high ground, it needs to be real and relevant to today’s issues. While its translation might get you noticed, without a foundation of support to underpin your purpose you simply won’t be doing enough to demonstrate the connection consumers demand.
It’s therefore critical to think very carefully on the journey to your brand’s purpose and and try to ask yourself these five questions during the process.
- Is the purpose you’ve uncovered true to the founding DNA of the company?
- Do you have the exclusive right to own this purpose over other competitive players in your space?
- Can the purpose be focused so to it’s relevant to issues that the country faces domestically, right now?
- What actions are you prepared to take to support the causes behind the purpose?
- Are you prepared to stand up for your purpose when the critics come after you?
If you can’t answer “Yes” to all five of the questions above, you probably shouldn’t be embarking on your purpose journey, because if you do your brand purpose might end up being just more marketing B.S.
