The death of brands? Or new life?

Editor's note: James Forr is head of insights at Olson Zaltman. He can be reached at jforr@olsonzaltman.com.

The heavyweights of marketing and branding love to battle over brand purpose. How should a brand communicate its purpose? How much do consumers care? How can we measure the impact on the bottom line? 

In the red corner, Byron Sharp, who warns that purpose will be “the death of brands.” In the blue corner, Peter Field, who labels such criticism “hysterical.” In a Marketing Week column this summer (“How bad research underpins the social purpose marketing debate”), Andrew Tenzer unleashed another buzzworthy haymaker, suggesting no reasonable person who looks at “the right kind of evidence” could possibly support purpose marketing.

However, what “the right kind of evidence” is, how best to gather it and how to interpret it remains unclear. Marketers could bring added focus to the discussion by thinking more broadly about the purpose of purpose and thinking more deeply about the role of research.

Tenzer argues that the proof, such as it is, for the value of purpose emerges from studies like one conducted by Accenture in which 30,000 consumers in 35 countries were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a set of statements. For example:

  • 62% of consumers said their purchasing decisions are influenced by a company’s ethical values and authenticity;
  • 74% crave transparency into how companies source their products, ensure safe working conditions and their stance on important issues; and 
  • 62% want companies to take a stand on social, cultural, environmental and political issues close to their hearts.

Sounds lovely, but as Tenzer points out, this is cupcake research – tantalizing in appearance but devoid of substance. At most, these results tell us a lot of people would like to think their decisions are influenced by a company’s social values but here, as in so many aspects of life, the say-do gap is yawning. There is no proof this is how consumers actually behave.

Tenzer’s antidote to this flawed research is a dose of less-flawed research – asking consumers to check off which of 13 drivers are relevant to them when choosing a product or brand. Through this lens, sustainability and social issues recede into insignificance. “Value for money (81%), reliability (67%) and product/service quality (66%) are always the most important factors,” Tenzer claims. 

It is hard to know what to make of this. Tenzer’s research refutes the dubious Accenture work, which makes it sound as if consumers are squirrelled away investigating which brand of toothpaste is doing the most to save the puffins. Indeed, the in-depth qualitative interviews our firm has conducted about brand meaning over the last 25 years corroborate what Tenzer has found – for most people most of the time, a brand’s stance on social issues or its stated commitment to the environment are irrelevant. We sit with people for 90 minutes discussing why they gravitate toward certain brands and purpose-related issues are seldom mentioned, even in passing.

However, it is not terribly insightful to declare, as Tenzer does, that people just want products and services that are affordable and functional. That is the lowest bar imaginable; of course they want that. However, consumers also gravitate toward products and brands that help them feel like good parents, feel successful, avoid shame, show off, feel like part of a community or continue traditions. These motivations might not appear in a survey and if they did, they are largely unconscious, so consumers would tend to underestimate their influence. We often don’t know why we do the things we do, which is why psychologists roam the earth. 

While Tenzer’s work does establish that consumers typically are not consciously thinking about brand purpose when they load up their shopping cart, we need to know more. Are consumers ignoring purpose because it is inherently irrelevant to them? Is it because brands generally do a poor job of making their purpose meaningful? Are there deeper emotional levers marketers could pull to better fuse brand and purpose – possibly in ways consumers wouldn’t even be aware of? 

These are critical questions because shareholders increasingly are demanding that companies establish a purpose and support it with robust environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices. This requires linking purpose directly to the bottom line, not just making charitable donations or issuing transparently self-serving messages supporting the cause du jour. Therefore, research should be more than a snapshot that captures the current limitations of purpose. It also must provide a north star to guide brands toward a better path forward.

Discipline and creativity 

Brand purpose can provide a point of differentiation and a critical competitive advantage. However, that requires a degree of discipline and creativity that is almost as rare as a bear with feathers.

Using purpose as a focus of messaging (in the for-profit world, at least) works extremely well for the small set of brands that were built with purpose as their strategic cornerstone. Volvo wouldn’t be Volvo without its safety-centric purpose. Patagonia wouldn’t be Patagonia without its commitment to the environment. Fenty wouldn’t be Fenty without inclusion as part of its story. Their histories bless these brands’ purpose-based efforts with a halo of authenticity.

However, brands not created with purpose in their chromosomes often fall back on lazy, follow-the-leader applications of purpose that, at best, merely do no harm. In other words, turning your logo into a rainbow flag for Pride month may be commendable but it offers a minimal level of support and is unlikely to help your brand when practically every other brand in practically every other category is doing something similar.

For these brands, purpose-based messaging works best when it directly enhances perceptions of a key product attribute, a functional benefit or a psychological benefit that consumers derive from using the brand.

This is harder than it sounds and few brands do it well. One exemplar is Dawn dishwashing detergent. Look at Dawn’s bottle – there is a little duckling on the front. No context is provided beyond a spare explanation on the back in font so small it can only be read by plankton. But if you have an animal-loving child, her demand that you buy the dish soap with the cute duckling on the label naturally piques your curiosity. 

A quick Google search reveals that animal rescue organizations found Dawn particularly effective at cleaning birds harmed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. It was all over the news at the time. Since then, the brand wisely has embraced that unplanned functionality of its product and now boasts on its website that it has helped clean more than 150,000 marine birds and other mammals in North America. 

The brand’s purpose of helping wildlife in peril reinforces perceptions of two key functional benefits – Dawn’s cleaning power and, ironically, its gentleness on your skin. If you asked consumers to check off the list of reasons they buy Dawn, the brand’s commitment to the environment surely would rank far lower than value and effectiveness but that environmental commitment is nevertheless important because it provides a subtle nudge. 

Consumers are not sitting in basement laboratories conducting effectiveness tests and cross-cutting price comparisons on 18 different brands of dish soap. How do they know Dawn is more effective or a better value than any other brand? They’ll often tell you in research, “I ask my friends” but please, when was the last time you discussed dish soap with your friends? For those who know about Dawn’s purpose, however, the story of the birds serves as a heuristic – a mental shortcut – that tells them all they need to know about the product’s quality. It may not be the reason they buy Dawn, per se, but it is a relevant proof point and has become part of the constellation of meaning that surrounds the brand.

Lifebuoy’s “Help a Child Reach 5” campaign is a major part of that brand’s purpose, which is to change the hygiene behavior of consumers around the world, particularly in developing nations where child mortality is high. The purpose is supported by powerful, emotionally moving communication and partnerships with schools and others on the ground. Importantly, this campaign also addresses a key functional benefit of the product, which is that it keeps your hands clean. Every brand makes that claim in one way or another – if soap didn’t clean, it wouldn’t be soap. But Lifebuoy’s higher purpose has imbued that obvious, commoditized benefit with an emotional salience that distinguishes it in the category. 

Dove’s purpose, on the other hand, differentiates at a more directly emotional level – the pride women feel when they look good, in whatever way that person defines “looking good.” The brand’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” brought poignancy to this emotional benefit by dramatizing the corrosive social pressure women feel to present an ideal appearance and championing the notion that every woman is unique and beautiful in her own way.

Falls short

To be clear, these success stories are the exceptions. Much of purpose marketing falls short because it lacks a clear connection between the message being delivered and the brand experience. At its worst, a brand’s purpose message can disrupt the experience that consumers are seeking.

Tenzer has pointed to Carlsberg’s commitment to helping the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) restore seagrass along the U.K. coastline as one particularly awkward mash-up. Drinking a Carlsberg is nice. Helping the WWF is nice. But they are two utterly unrelated experiences, so most consumers probably just scratch their heads and move on. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean Carlsberg shouldn’t aid the WWF. Such efforts are laudable and much needed and also may help the company in other ways, such as providing a greater sense of meaning to employees. However, it falls flat as a consumer-facing campaign because it doesn’t enhance the existing meaning of the brand – not at a functional level, not at an emotional level. 

Moreover, the partnership with the WWF is essentially charity, an appendage, rather than part of a competitive strategy. If times get tough, it would be easier for Carlsberg to cut support to the WWF than it would be for Dawn to stop helping animal rescue organizations, given the centrality of Dawn’s commitment to animal welfare to its positioning. A good deed is not the same as a true brand purpose.

That partnership may not be helping Carlsberg much but it isn’t necessarily damaging the brand beyond a largely wasted advertising spend. In some cases, though, marketing has backfired badly when brands have grown a little too enamored of their own righteousness. Starbucks’ infamous 2015 “Race Together” campaign is a notorious example. The brand learned the hard way that customers had no interest in a deep discussion with their harried baristas about systemic racism. People just want to grab their Caramel Macchiatos and get their bleary-eyed selves to the office. The effort, though well-intentioned, made Starbucks seem out of touch and almost selfish in what it was demanding of its consumers, not to mention its frontline employees.

Work best under the hood

In the context of developing new products and services, purpose may work best from under the hood. Mastercard’s purpose is “to connect and power an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone.” That has driven innovations such as accessible payment card systems for partially sighted people and a program that lets trans and non-binary people use a self-selected first name. Consumers don’t adopt these innovations because they are consciously choosing to support Mastercard’s purpose. They don’t even know what that purpose is. Rather, they adopt the innovations because Mastercard is making their lives easier and helping them feel respected, which forges an emotional connection with the brand.

In collaboration with Wharton’s Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research, our firm has conducted qualitative ZMET metaphor elicitation interviews with corporate executives and investors around the world, seeking to understand the climate for sustainability inside their organizations. A real estate investor told us how purpose led his firm to install fresh-food vending machines in its apartment complexes. Not only were the machines popular, they also drove second-order benefits in the way of greater tenant satisfaction, higher rental rates and lower maintenance costs. No tenant would tell a researcher that she is renewing her lease because of her landlord’s social purpose, although she might say she is staying because the landlord provides valuable amenities or cares for the wellbeing of its tenants.

Both of these cases show that purpose need not come at the expense of profit. In fact, purpose thoughtfully applied can open up new business opportunities and bolster the bottom line. 

Research can clarify and inspire

These examples suggest purpose marketing is most effective as part of a larger corporate or brand strategy. Well-designed research with consumers (and other stakeholders) can help clarify that strategy and also can inspire messaging and innovations that align with the strategy.

Marketers can use upstream consumer research to produce a map of what their brand represents in the minds of consumers – from the most important product attributes all the way up to emotional end benefits. This includes understanding the “jobs to be done” that the brand performs for consumers. 

Surveys don’t cut it at this stage because they can only examine a brand piece-by-piece; it is much harder for quant research to reveal how all those pieces interconnect in a consumer’s mind. It is no different from how a psychologist understands a patient. The psychologist discovers the full picture by asking open-ended questions and listening to your story. The paperwork you fill out in the waiting room only scratches the surface – that is just the beginning, not the end. Similarly, deep qualitative research can yield the understanding required for deep thinking. These insights are valuable in many ways, not the least of which is as a muse for the creation of fresh ideas about how purpose can dovetail with existing elements of the brand experience. 

Various methodologies, including observational techniques or IDIs, can reveal consumers’ unmet functional and emotional needs – insights which brands can funnel through the filter of purpose to create products and services that meet those needs. Sometimes the best innovation ideas emerge from understanding segments of the population that are overlooked by brands in your category. For example, OXO kitchen gadgets initially were designed to make cooking easier for people with arthritis, after the founder watched his wife struggle to peel an apple. Turns out they make cooking easier for everyone. Today, OXO is the market leader, a success story that began with a strategically focused brand purpose.

Both quant and qual, then, can play various roles further downstream – optimizing innovations, evaluating messaging, gauging perceptions of innovative and more environmentally responsible packaging and, ultimately, assessing the implicit and explicit effect of these purpose-driven ideas on brand perceptions. 

This exposes the limits of Tenzer’s research. When consumers state that a brand’s purpose didn’t influence their purchase decision, that can’t always be taken as gospel. Maybe it didn’t influence them or maybe it did and they just didn’t know it. Do you have an OXO tool in your kitchen? Did you realize that you purchased it, indirectly, because of OXOs original social purpose? 

When purpose is executed strategically and executed well, it can function like the frame of a house. No one buys a house because of its frame. You can’t see it. Real estate agents don’t talk about it. But all the things you love about a house are built upon or within that frame. Purpose can work that way, too, as unseen structure behind successful messaging and innovation.

When part of a broader strategy, purpose marketing also extends to internal communication, which is another area where a deep understanding of the audience is imperative. One of our clients asked us to meet with managers and top-performing employees to understand how they felt about the corporation’s newly announced purpose. This was a company that had long prided itself on its hypercompetitive ethos. The old-school Type-A employees felt alienated by the new purpose because it seemed like a radical departure from the win-at-all-costs culture in which they thrived. Others welcomed a break from the past but they doubted whether the C-suite was truly committed to this new purpose, given that performance incentives were still aligned solely with financial success. In other words, everyone was unhappy. However, the research revealed several areas of overlap between the psychology of the two groups. Those points of overlap were like little shafts of light that pierced the fog and offered ways to talk about purpose so that both groups could buy in.

One also can imagine non-traditional uses of research – for example, speaking with government officials or leading citizens in towns where a company hosts its manufacturing facilities. If purpose is part of the company’s strategy, it should live those values in its interactions with all its stakeholders, including members of the communities where it operates. 

Use purpose to drive profit 

In its most watery state, purpose marketing takes the shape of virtue-signaling and formulaic fluff. But well-designed research can help organizations use purpose to drive profit via personally relevant products, services, messages and experiences that are all closely integrated with competitive strategy. Purpose need not be the death of brands. In fact, when thoughtfully employed, purpose can breathe life into a brand or an entire organization.