On purpose

With Davos currently underway, and the environment crisis as a central issue, marketers everywhere are limbering up for a major push on brand purpose.  If you’re one of them, you need to stop right now. Because chances are you’re about to head down a fast track to futility.  Let me explain.

In my experience there are three types of ‘purpose’ exercises.

1.      Purpose = bullshit.

This is a cynical attempt to reframe your ordinary ‘greed is good’ business model against the purpose narrative to make it look current and less problematic. It’s likely to be owned by someone in corporate without P&L responsibility and justified on spurious ‘brand image’ grounds. Run away. Or just burn the cash and save time.

2.      Purpose = image correction.
This is a communications-based task designed to tell stakeholders that your business is much more purposeful than they think. In fact, it always has been, it’s just that until now there hasn’t been this purpose-shaped bandwagon to jump on. This is playing catch up, so don’t make it sound like a massive change (it isn’t) or some central guiding principle of the business (if it was why didn’t you say so back then). Some humility here would go a long way. 

3.      Purpose = business strategy.
The business intends to grow and make money in a way that is primarily driven by it’s purpose.  So ‘purpose’ is not some add on. If the CEO is not in the room when you’re discussing purpose, you’re probably in one of the two camps above. Businesses can reposition themselves around purpose, but it’s a ground-up, root-and-branch, pick-your-analogy-for-comprehensive strategic business change. 

The businesses in type 3 don’t need to develop a brand purpose…because they are a ‘purposeful’ business already.  If so, and if you subscribe to the view that brands are the face of the business strategy, then it follows that purposeful businesses will result in purposeful brands.

I get fed up with brand purpose being handed over to the marketing department to ‘do’. So if that happens to you, look your CEO squarely in the eye and call bullshit on him or her.  You do the craft of brand management a massive disservice by not calling this out , and by attempting to help your business bluff its way to being seen as better than it is. The real business change that leaders in Davos are rightly calling for needs to be addressed in the office of the CEO not the CMO.