The Purpose of Purpose: Summing Up
Well, I’ve spent a month writing on this topic and I probably could go on. But I’ll sum things up a bit more concisely than the meandering thinkenings of the last four weeks.
What’s the problem I was addressing in the first place?
I think there is a lot of confusion among marketers and junior strategists about “brand purpose” for a few reasons.
Brand strategy is often being done by filling in the sections of templates, often inherited, with no real underlying understanding of how brands work.
There is a popular notion that customers primarily “buy your why”, and so “brand purpose” is perceived as dominantly important to brand marketing.
There is another popular notion that customers (these days) prefer brands which are perceived as nobly making the world a better place, and so “brand purpose” also gets more narrowly defined as “social or environmental cause”.
Many marketing professionals feel slightly icky about their job and leap at the chance to believe that their job can be mostly about saving the world.
So “brand purpose” is both perceived as very important and also experienced as being confusing and uncertain. The result is often anxiety for marketers blagging their way through brand strategies or – for true believers – highly confident marketers selling the dream. The first question was: are there agreed definitions for these terms?
Varying definitions – descriptive and prescriptive.
Definitions of “purpose” vary and it’s useful to recognise two different things that the same term is being used for.
Firstly, the non-financial reason a company exists. That is, what is the company for, besides generating a profit for its owners? This would be a fact about the company, something to be discovered, and probably driven by the intent of the company’s founders.
This is the definition of Jim Collins and Simon Sinek. While Collins focused on the usefulness of identifying a company’s purpose for unifying and inspiring the internal team, Sinek went further and talked about its purported usefulness in marketing to customers. Jim Collins asserted that such a purpose should remain the same for at least 100 years.
It’s worth noting that it’s debatable whether or not such a thing even exists – that all businesses are there to make money, they make that money in a particular way, and if a better way to make money was worth the cost of switching to, they’d do that. (After all, the largest advertising company in the world is called Wire & Plastic Products.)
Secondly, the prescribed brand marketing tool. That is, what the purpose should be to make a brand effective in the market. This is a strategic choice based on facts about customers (what do they care about?), competitors (how can we stand out from them?) and the company (what can we deliver on?) And it is typically articulated poetically and emotively.
In other words, it’s extremely similar to a combination of positioning (based on the three C’s) and the benefit ladder (elevating from functional to emotional promises). So similar, in fact, that I would argue that they’re indistinguishable – doing one should do the other. In this case, purpose is the result of strategic thinking, rather than an input.
This is the definition of Special Group and any others who prescribe brand purposes. Special asks, “What is the role we want to play in people’s lives?” Different way of asking the same thing. In contrast to company purpose above, this definition of brand purpose would evolve over time as customers, competitors and company capabilities shift.
But does purpose work?
It turns out that this isn’t a simple question, because we have multiple definitions of purpose and multiple explanations for how it might impact commercial success.
Does descriptive “company purpose” work?
The question is meaningless. The effectiveness of any decision or objective is evaluated in reference to its parent objective. The highest-order objective has no further parent objective. If the highest purpose of a business is to make money, we can’t ask “is making money effective or ineffective?” The same goes for, say, Disney’s “to create happiness for people of all ages”. Is it good or bad? The question is meaningless – good or bad at what?
Okay, does articulating the descriptive “company purpose” work?
Wow, great question. Very clever. Yeah, I think it does. Clarifying the company purpose, putting it in words that are simple, memorable and inspiring, making some kind of sense of every job in the company is good for the team. The old story applies here, about JFK asking a janitor at NASA what he was doing and the janitor saying, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” So the articulation of the company purpose is useful, even if the company purpose can’t be described as useful or not.
And in fairness to Simon Sinek, a lot of what he talks about is around inspiring and leading a team.
So how about for brand marketing. Does our brand purpose make people buy our products over competitors because they like us or believe in our purpose?
I think overwhelmingly this is not the effect that “brand purpose” has.
Simon Sinek says, “The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.” This is nonsense, and I’ve seen primary research refute it repeatedly. I should explain.
If it were true that customers chose brands based on aligned values and aligned purposes, you would expect psychographics in market research to vary among the purchasers of different brands. That is, you’d expect certain kinds of people to prefer one brand over another, where those psychographics relate to the brand purpose/values rather than the differentiated needs/offerings of the different segments/brands. And so you’d expect those trends to be most visible on the psychographics of highly commoditised categories, where really the only difference between one product/service and another is brand (or price).
I look forward to seeing research that shows differently, but I’ve seen market research including psychographics for multiple consumer goods and utility categories (about as commoditised as you can get) and every time the average psychographic profile of each brand’s buyers roughly matched the average psychographic profile of the market as a whole. The profiles skewed a bit for very small brands (few buyers), but among any brands with at least 10% market share, it didn’t matter if they were the zany wildcard brand, the category leader brand, the eco sustainable brand or the customer-centric challenger brand, the kinds of buyers of the brand were the kinds of buyers of the category.
To put this another way, if you’re the eco-sustainable brand1 in your category and you have 20% of the market, all the research I’ve been involved in suggests that your 20% of customers won’t be much more eco-conscious than the other 80% of customers who buy from your competitors, if at all.
What the fuck – is there no point in brand purpose at all?
Well, here’s the thing. As I’ve said, it’s more important that a brand is than what a brand is. (Not that the “what” is unimportant.) And essential to establishing a brand in your audience’s mind is consistency. And consistency is actually pretty tricky to do when so many hands are touching the brand and your audience really only occasionally notices a fraction of your branding activity for a few seconds at a time.
Because of all that, a clear coherent consistent idea of the brand in the minds of everyone who is working on building that brand is useful for maintaining consistency, and so it is useful for establishing the brand in the audience’s minds, and so it is useful for setting the stage for attaching useful associations to that brand idea. It’s also been suggested to me that a sense of the brand as an agent with clear intentions helps trigger natural social needs for establishing trust. And an articulated brand purpose is useful for all of this.
That clear coherent consistent idea of the brand is necessary but not sufficient for effective brand marketing. On top, or alongside, of “that” the brand is – we have all of the jobs of driving the right associations with category entry points, user and usage imagery, points of difference, points of parity, etc. Brand purpose alone can’t tick all of those boxes, though of course it would likely be foolish to choose a brand purpose that makes those desired associations more difficult to build. (e.g., a pet-ownership-related purpose for a pet-food brand would be a better choice than a pet-food brand dedicated to the demilitarisation of space).
In my hypothetical above, where you’re the only eco-sustainability brand in the category, just because your buyers are no more eco-conscious than your competitors’ buyers, doesn’t mean your efforts establishing that brand idea were wasted. Those efforts were just as effective in driving purchase among non-eco-conscious customers as they were among eco-conscious customers. With less consistency, you would have attracted fewer buyers of both sorts.
So what is your actual advice on using brand purpose?
Separately, consider identifying a company purpose for internal cohesion and motivation. Articulate it clearly. Consider it for dual use as external brand purpose, but don’t feel constrained to use it if it’s not right depending on the following points. They’re two different jobs.
The content of a prescriptive brand purpose should be basically a combination of a benefit ladder (emotive over functional, or at least outcome over features) and your competitive positioning (based on company, customer and competitors).
Besides this alignment with positioning and not making it difficult in future to build desired associations, it doesn’t really matter what the content of the brand purpose is.
But it matters very much what the form of the brand purpose is. That is, it must be simple and clear. Just because it should be emotive, doesn’t mean it should be vague and lofty. Its role is to aid coherence and consistency. Consider that your goal is for customers to be able to fill in the blank: “Oh, that brand is the one that __________________.” So your marketers, agency creatives, PR team, etc., all need to share that understanding first. Also, it doesn’t need to be emotive, but it should on some level be a promise.
If something else in your brand strategy is already doing this job (for example, some tailoring of a “brand archetype”), then consider forgoing a “brand purpose” entirely to avoid the risk of confusing both team and customers. Less is more. And, for the record, the above criticisms of how “brand purpose” affects customers is just as applicable to “brand archetypes”.
Okay. That’s enough on brand purpose now. Got some great suggestions from readers on LinkedIn of some other topics to cover next.
That is, a brand whose purpose is around eco-sustainability, but in a commoditised category with little actual differentiation in products. With actual differentiation in products (e.g., being the only brand in a category offering biodegradable packaging), you are likely to attract an outsized number of customers who care about the environment – though perhaps not as many as you’d expect.