Co-Founder, Melanie Welsh, discusses when brands should get purposeful.

Purpose has been around as a tool of brand for some time now, but still we’re often asked about whether it works and how it should be used.

For us it’s more about ‘when’. Here’s our guide to diagnosing where your brand is on the ‘journey’ and what it needs as a consequence.

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When to get Purposeful?

Purpose has been around as a tool of brand for some time now, but still we’re often asked about whether it works and how it should be used. For us it’s more about when.

At Strat House we’re pretty clear that having a brand Purpose can be a very effective strategic approach. We’ve seen a lot of client research vindicating its effectiveness in campaign work. There’s also plenty of high-level evidence to support Purpose across the industry:

• In 2017 Unilever confirmed its ‘sustainable living’ (Purpose-driven) brands grow 50% faster than the rest of the business, and in 2019 CEO Alan Jope confirmed the commitment to Purpose by declaring Unilever would ‘dispose of brands that don’t stand for something’
• Research from Accenture confirms consumers are no longer making decisions based solely on product selection or price; they’re assessing what a brand does and what it stands for – supporting companies whose brand purpose aligns with their beliefs and rejecting those that don’t
• Work by the Boston Consulting Group confirms that organisations with a strong sense of purpose are more than twice as likely to have above-average shareholder returns
• Millward Brown has shown meaningfully different (Purpose-driven) brands capture five times more volume, command a 13% price premium and are four times more likely to grow value share.

 For us, therefore, the question is less ‘whether’ to have a brand Purpose and more about ‘when’ to get Purposeful.

 This is because our observation is that the ‘type’ of brand you are (and can be) seems to be heavily influenced by the maturity of your category, and also your brand within that category:

For us the brand types are a loosely a journey of evolution. There are always exceptions of course, but generally it’s smart to make sure you’ve cracked being a Product-Driven brand (or being Consumer-Focused) before you try to e.g. identify your Purpose, or land it in the minds of consumers.

For this reason, it may well be that your brand does not need to be Purpose-driven and/or that consumers are not ready for it to be Purpose-driven right now. The same applies, but more so, to the concept of Activist brands (more on these from Helen in a future newsletter btw).

Why are there different stages on the brand journey?

We assume the journey evolved because as older brands, in maturing industries, became household names they got to the point where it was hard for consumers to tell the difference based on product alone. Each stage of the journey is fundamentally about putting more space between your brand and competitors:

As you can see from the above, the journey has quite an impact on what goes into a brand:

1. We’re great believers in starting with the core (or Product discriminator). Why worry about connecting with people at an emotional level until you’re sure you’re offering a superior product or service?
2. It makes sense to us to then crack your ‘human truth’ or ‘insight’. Not least because a Purpose should ideally be the brand’s response to that truth (so it will be tricky to identify before then )
3. …and finally on to Purpose: the thing you stand for, because it matters to your chosen creative target*.

 We’re not saying you can’t tackle all of the journey at once, of course you can. But no one has an endless budget. We find working through these diagrams helps teams think about their priorities when planning their brand strategy:

• ‘Do I really need to be Consumer-centric if I don’t yet have brand assets or a product discriminator?’
• ‘Can I identify an ownable Purpose before I’ve understood what drives my consumer?’
• …and ultimately to decide for themselves ‘is this the right time for my brand to get Purposeful?’

* There’s a piece here by Dave Trott which asserts that ‘advertising is run purely to illustrate brand Purpose’. I don’t know which work he’s referring to, but we’re hoping this doesn’t happen too often. The brand Purpose is an essential part of the architecture, upon which all creative briefs should be based, but it’s not a thing to illustrate in and of itself.