IN DEFENSE OF BRAND PURPOSE

BRAND PURPOSE DOES HAVE A PURPOSE. WHAT IS ESSENTIAL OF COURSE IS THAT IT ACTUALLY IS THE BRAND'S PURPOSE

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Trust your instincts. In my last article I reviewed Nick Asbury’s definitive masterpiece on Brand Purpose – The Road to Hell. As I explained in my review, I had always in the past felt in the minority questioning the concept of Brand Purpose. I couldn’t ever jump on the wagon. It felt like a dogma to me, and the more I thought about it, also intellectually unsound. But Brand Purpose rolled on largely unquestioned, with due deference paid across press and social media to its high priests like Alan Jope at Unilever.

INSINCERITY & HYPOCRISY

But I felt that insincerity and hypocrisy haunted the subject. In the Road to Hell, Nick not only verifies that Brand Purpose does not pass the sniff test, he brilliantly demonstrated the essential paradox. You can do commerce and you can do good. You can do good commerce. And you can do good in your life. But the moment that you claim that your commerce is only there to do good, you are admitting to an irresolvable tension within your brand or business. Perhaps if the purpose crowd had simply adopted the Hippocratic oath “First do no harm” rather than indulge in a decade of idealistic and onanistic group-think about marketing people doing good (rather than doing marketing), the whole nonsense would have never got to the crazy state it did. The ultimate proof of his hypothesis is Patagonia. No one else has successfully gone Full Patagonia. So far they are a one-off. By transferring all the stock of the company to a trust and a collective. Patagonia is no longer really a business. At a stroke this exposed the flip-flopping of the big houses of brands (P&G’s Pritchard flipping from the need for purpose to ‘profit first, purpose second’, and Unilever’s massive u-turn on brand purpose as announced by their latest CEO Hein Schumacher on the subject) - that irresolvable tension.

PHILANTHROPY OR SHOWBOATING POLITICS

I’m not sure that Nick has left me enough room to write a book about this, but there were for me two unturned stones left. One I already pointed out in my book review was that Brand Purpose wasn’t just characterised by do-goodery, but ‘progressive’ (this is the polite word for it) do-goodery. For many marketing folk, it was no good attaching your brand to some obscure and unfashionable charity and claiming ‘purpose’. What was paramount was that your marketing peers understood you were investing your employer’s or client’s marketing funds in a right-on cause – like BLM, climate ‘justice’, or ‘LBGTQ+ equity’. Outside the marketing bubble our own consumer research showed that these are also divisive causes, not viewed in the same way by the mainstream majority as they are by marketing folk. Thus brand purpose also came with a (progressive) political bias.

BUT BRAND PURPOSE ISN’T DEAD

However, now I’m going to praise Caesar as well as help bury him. I am going to make out a case in favour of brand purpose or at least a form of brand purpose.

Pull has been helping – typically medium-sized brands – develop brand strategy and progress their brands throughout the Purpose decade. This provided an interesting dilemma for us. Is there really anything in Brand Purpose?  How should we react to Brand Purpose in our client brand strategy work? Most of our client work starts with consumer research. On the back of this we formulate a Brand Blueprint™. This provides a consensus on the most foundational elements of a brand: Vision, Mission, Personality, Narrative etc.  In no case that I can recall did a  client  ask for us to help them develop a Brand Purpose in terms of what developed in this period to be the definition. “We need to find a way to support a number of progressive causes as following the CSG/DEI ideology.” This alone emphasises a key point about Brand Purpose: It is largely the domain of big brands and businesses. Without the luxury of monopolistic positions and help from political friends demonstrated so well by big tech in particular, these smaller businesses are more preoccupied with the need to actually sell their products and services.

WE TROD A DIFFERENT PATH ON PURPOSE

I am a little ashamed to admit though that for a while we used the famous Simon Sinek ‘Start with Why’ Ted Talk clip to start on the subject of what we largely called Brand Mission in client brand workshops. Like Nick I eventually felt that although Sinek’s delivery is compelling, the ‘Start with Why’ rhetoric didn’t really stand very much scrutiny. So can brand purpose ever offer brand managers anything?

THE ANSWER IS YES. BECAUSE YOUR BRAND OR BUSINESS CAN HAVE PURPOSE BEYOND JUST MAKING MONEY

Throughout the purpose decade we asked clients the same questions when discussing their brand’s mission (and we will continue ‘post purpose’): What do you want your brand to bring to the world? What do you want it to achieve beyond making money? Most businesses are started by highly driven and passionate people. In my experience these people do have a mission that others can relate to and can make a reason to believe – or even a reason to buy. I have never met a business owner who has said: “No we’re just in it to make money.”

So here are two case studies. The point they illustrate is that there are businesses that are driven by a ‘higher purpose’ than just making money. This is of course a long way from claiming that the purpose of your mayonnaise is ‘reducing waste’. Unlike that claim, it should be heartfelt and authentic. Not window dressing (no pun intended).

At Pull, when working on client’s brand, we often talk about ‘Uncovering core positive truths’ about a brand. This is also a long way from attaching an unconnected but fashionable cause to your brand and describing it as your brand purpose. The products you produce are designed to effect a value exchange with your customers. It is not difficult to see that a business might do well to express what they do as something that is good for their customers. Or even – if it really is – good for the planet, or at least for society. Of course, if you are say, an arms manufacturer, that is going to be tricky, but you shouldn’t be disbarred on ideological lines. Surely the ad industry boycotts and blackballing of for instance ‘fossil fuel’ companies undertaken by pious agencies and others is again – pure self-serving virtue signalling. A personal boycott would be more understandable – but for the marketers involved – actually cost them something (likely quite a lot). As the brilliant Bill Bernbach said – its not a principle until it costs you.

ANDERTONS - MAKING MUSICIANS SINCE 1964

Founded by the current owner Lee Anderton’s father in 1964, Andertons had become the UK’s no. 1 retailer of musical instruments with a loyal following including almost 1m followers on YouTube. Telling Pull when we first met about his company’s status as a brand: “But we’re only a retailer, I’m not sure we can really be a brand.” Perhaps Lee’s modesty was understandable sitting among some of the legendary brands his business sold – like Marshall amps and Fender guitars.

Music Brands

But our job in these circumstances is to uncover the true genius behind the business and use it to enhance the brand’s personality, and create an emotional connection with buyers. This almost always comes from talking to customers. What they said in our research was how much they loved shopping at Andertons – especially at their destination store in Guildford, 20 miles south of London. “The great thing is that all their sales people are musicians. All they seem to want to talk about is making music and helping you do that.” To paraphrase Simon Sinek in Start with Why – they ended up selling an awful lot of guitars as a result. . .

So we defined their mission in 2 words – Making Musicians. This wasn’t an unrelated, progressive cause. It’s what everyone in Andertons thought about and acted on every day.

A good mission statement also makes a good basis for copy or a slogan. And so as well as a beautiful new identity that echoed some of the great brands Andertons sold, while remaining completely unique, Andertons mission statement became its slogan.

THE WORLD DESERVED A BETTER BIKE. GOCYCLE DESIGNED IT

So passionate was Richard Thorpe about creating the perfect e-bike that he left a dream design job with McLaren Cars to dedicate all of his time to that purpose.

With his experience in designing lightweight racing car components and enthusiasm for innovative engineering excellence, Richard believed that an e-bike should be elegant, desirable, a joy to live with and fun. In his drive for perfection, Richard achieved two things they said weren’t possible. He reinvented the wheel and re-designed the bicycle.

It’s no surprise therefore that many have called Gocycle the best e-bike you can buy. And this is the point. It was immediately obvious at our Brand Blueprint™ stakeholder’s workshop that Richard’s life mission was to deliver the world a better bicycle. This was what drove Richard, and what drove the business.

As such, this brand mission found it’s way to being the brand’s headline copy.

In both these examples we refer to having ‘uncovered ‘ a higher purpose for the brands. It was already there. As we sometimes say to clients – you can’t see the label from inside the jar. All we did was discover the higher purpose that their brand already had. This is a long way from attaching  your ice cream to promote a viewpoint on Gaza, BLM, ‘climate justice’ and migration.

You would have to be pretty hard-hearted not to think that the world would not be a better place with more musicians, or more people riding bikes. This type of purpose, humanises your brand, and evokes a positive emotional response from buyers, owners, staff and partners. These examples are proof I think that Brand Purpose does have a purpose. What is essential of course is that it actually IS the brand’s purpose.