Have you ever read a book or watched a film whose message you could not understand or even identify? Chances are that when the covers closed and the credits rolled, you ultimately did not enjoy it or recommend it to anyone else. People gravitate to stories that have something meaningful to say. This principle applies equally to the stories that brands tell the public.
Brand purpose is a company’s fundamental reason for its existence beyond profit, often centered on making a positive impact or fulfilling a meaningful role in society. Customers have become increasingly privy to and have subsequently placed heightened importance on the purpose driving a company’s services. While they are of course aware that companies of all shapes and sizes ultimately aim to make profits, consumers desire to understand the more profound reasoning behind their operations. Customer experience is central to building trust, satisfaction, and hence loyalty.
Brand Purpose Real-World Examples
Given consumers’ interest in companies’ purpose, the world of branding and communication is now being reframed as human to human rather than business to business or business to consumer. Building connections and relevant experience with customers is instrumental to re-energize brands and foster impactful engagement.
Recently, there have been tangible instances of world-renowned brands utilizing this opening to create and find enhanced success. Nescafe, popular across the globe for the coffee it produces, clearly displayed its brand purpose to audiences through its advertising campaign “For the Moments that Matter.” It shows a man addressing all the people he’s met in his life and inviting those who truly know (or knew) him for a cup of Nescafe coffee.
While the movie Barbie was a worldwide phenomenon during its release year in 2023, the brand itself has always been. While Barbie has been massively successful and dominant since its 1959 entrance into the market, it began to falter and come under increased scrutiny in the last few decades with the rise of feminist movements. Barbie was being widely criticized for promoting and perpetuating idealized, narrow, and unrealistic beauty standards for young girls. Noticing that their consumer base felt this way, Barbie switched gears by focusing on representation and inclusivity through designing dolls with a diverse set of physical appearances and career ambitions.
Both Nescafe and Barbie were successful in their brand purpose campaigns by identifying the most important reason people used their products. Nescafé realized that while people enjoy coffee for many reasons, the most important one is that it gives them the opportunity to sit down and deepen their connections, even if they’ve known each other their whole lives. “For the Moments that Matter” illustrates this concept clearly through its short, dramatic commercials. Barbie recognized that parents buy Barbies for their young daughters to inspire them and to make them feel confident and so decided to strategically broaden the types of dolls offered to widen their potential client base.
Empowering Employees: Harnessing Internal Brand Purpose
Implementing brand purpose doesn’t necessarily have to be centered around conveying a message externally to customers; initiatives can be internal, primarily targeting employees. Internal brand purpose initiatives aim to strengthen alignment inside of the organization, which in turn can inform the definition of a more genuine, and therefore more successful, message externally.
Such messaging serves as a reminder of what drew employees to work at the organization when they were exploring career opportunities. Taking the time and effort to ensure that employees do not lose sight of the “why” forms a sense of authenticity.
For example, the outdoor clothing retailer, REI, enacted “REI Yay Days.” The initiative provides REI employees with paid time off that would be used for enjoying the outdoors through activities such as biking, hiking, camping, and other outdoor activities. REI similarly encourages its customers to enjoy the outdoors through selling its clothing, proving that it’s a principle they truly believe in.
Similarly, Microsoft conducts “Hackathon” sessions where members of different teams and departments work together on unique projects that don’t fall inside of their usual scopes of work. In doing so, Microsoft promotes innovation by creating opportunities for their employees to experiment. This matches their ambition to empower individuals and organizations across the globe to use Microsoft technology to come up with, and execute, their new ideas.
Brand Purpose Misfires: The Pitfalls of Disingenuous Initiatives
With the increase of access to information in the modern age, companies must realize that the public is better informed about their practices and procedures than ever before. Crafting a branding campaign that outlines its purpose must be legitimate and backed up by reality. If not, it can be discovered and turned into a net negative instead of a net positive. People appreciate sincerity, while the reverse may come off as an attempt at deception, particularly when it feels hypocritical. In 2019, Amazon announced its “Climate Pledge,” vowing to reach carbon neutrality by 2040. Their pledge received public backlash due to the knowledge that Amazon is heavily reliant on fossil fuels and carbon-intensive shipping efforts. Similarly, Uber launched a new promotion called “UberCopter,” transporting passengers between New York City’s Manhattan and its airport, JFK. This also received a negative reception from people, as they claimed its catering to the wealthiest members of society was in direct contrast to its original brand purpose of offering increased accessibility to transportation at lower prices. Designing brand purpose campaigns comes with the inherent risk of miscommunicating to existing and potential customers. Yet the benefits of conveying the message accurately and genuinely make it a worthwhile endeavor.
Brands are expected to find ways to engage stakeholders, both internally and externally, in the “why” rather than the more commonly communicated “what” and “how.” This provides a fantastic opportunity for brands to connect with people on a deeper level than previously possible, crafting stories that resonate with their audiences.
In conclusion, it’s important for brands and businesses to consider their “why” to be the strong driving force behind their “how.” This way, they can create stronger connections with their clients and employees, in addition to strengthening their reputation and resonance. As a consulting company that has been working with clients for 30 years now to strengthen their reputation and help them find a strong “why,” we are steadfast advocates for the need for both young and established businesses to pause and analyse on a deep level what value they bring to their clients and how their relationships are being built to be able to define what their brand purpose is and base their operations and mandates on that. At the end of the day, it is all about true and genuine connections.