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Five years ago, I wrote a column asking if brand purpose had “jumped the shark.” I was reacting at the time to a Saturday Night Live skit that featured brand managers of Cheetos being pitched by rival agencies.
One of the agencies just wants to show kids having fun and snacking. The other agency pitches increasingly absurd, purpose-centered advertising tropes like immigration, racial inclusiveness and transgender rights while touting the cheesiness (no pun intended) of the Cheetos brand.
This skewering of purpose-washed commercials was a bit too much on the nose. Though half a decade later, we may be in another “jump the shark” moment.
Just the other day, there was a PNC Financial Services ad parroting almost verbatim the “find your why” TED Talk by Simon Sinek, the 18-minute video that launched a million corporate purpose restatements. A Hellmann’s Mayonnaise Super Bowl spot touted the brand’s purpose of tackling food waste and starred NFL great Jerod Mayo who, um, tackled people who were about to waste food. Angry investors in parent company Unilever accused Hellmann’s of being “obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business.”
Has brand purpose lost its luster? Or, as Adweek senior reporter Paul Hiebert put it: Is brand purpose in hibernation? Yes … and no.
Yes: Companies have had over two years of pandemic-focused messaging, leaving audiences increasingly blasé of corporate self-congratulation. Coming “out” of the pandemic, brands’ messaging has been on optimistic consumption.
Purpose-centered ads don’t sell as much stuff as fun, creative and celebrity-filled ones. And today’s inflation is driving consumers to prioritize price over purpose credentials, anyway.
No: Countless surveys and studies point to consumer desire to buy and support brands that help people, their communities and society at large. That isn’t going away. But the methods that brands and companies use to manifest purpose are indeed changing.
There are three ways that a brand or company can actualize its purpose: Storytelling, story-doing and story-being. Most brand purpose messaging has so far been messaged and communicated in culture as cause-based advertising campaigns, philanthropy partnerships and PR-able CSR initiatives. This is purpose storytelling.
Brand purpose can be further activated by corporations and companies taking a stand and doing something tangible, measurable and sometimes controversial in culture. In modern marketing, brands doing things is becoming more important than brands saying things.
If brand storytelling seeks to explain a better feature or a benefit, story-doing posits that the brand is better experienced than explained. The same applies to that brand’s purpose: Doing purposeful deeds in culture and enrolling lots of people into the mission is “purpose-doing.”
Thankfully, businesses are moving beyond solely touting their purpose. Now, the effort is to make purpose more systemic, employee-centric and immune to accusations of purpose-washing. Brand purpose is no longer something you just message. It’s how that purpose is activated by the people inside the brand and received by people who buy it.
It’s an ethos, not a campaign. And brands should look to evolve the activation of purpose from simply storytelling and into story-doing.
Airbnb has moved its purpose of creating belonging from humble beginnings to supporting refugees, blocking bookings in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, instituting corporate-wide work-from-anywhere offerings and allowing its platform to be a direct conduit for contributions for Ukrainians at war. It is doing its purpose, and customers have responded with more bookings on its platform versus booking on the competitor sites.
Airbnb is well on its way to becoming a story-being brand. After all, the more a brand does in culture, the more it becomes itself in culture.
Tesla has also moved from a story-doing to a story-being brand as it progresses its mission to transform society by transporting it. As a car company, it hasn’t spent any money on traditional advertising and hardly any advertising at all.
And yet, it is currently the most valuable car company in the world. Its SpaceX brand is constantly in the news with new launches and advancements, while any product that the company puts out receives immediate cultural attention and sells out before it’s even manufactured.
The ethos for other purpose-centric brands like REI, Toms, Chobani and Patagonia is not found solely in their stories and campaigns. Their purpose and mission are intertwined with the entire brand and customer experience, and purpose is often the perfect bonding agent between the two. When this happens, the brand’s purpose, its very reason for being, is its best form of marketing.
Touting purpose through marketing campaigns and messages has become a tried-and-true mechanic for brands to build audiences and share of voice. Just take a look at all the purpose-forward work that recently won at Cannes. But to stay relevant going forward, brands need to move beyond thinking about the purpose story and instead systematically activate purpose both internally and externally in culture through things that require doing rather than telling.
