And yet, there are some brands that are genuinely purpose-driven

[asikurrahmanshuvo]

Companies that have done business, more or less ethically, with more or less success, over the past decades, are now suddenly discovering that having a brand purpose could help increase their profits, especially within the new generations of consumers (millennials and Generation Z ), who are attracted to brands that put purpose at the heart of their content effort, definitely more than my generation.

Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow and now one of the most influential marketing academics, has criticized the widespread adoption of social purpose , arguing that it could lead to brands becoming too similar and undifferentiated.

So if the marketing community is successful in teaching israel phone number list consumers that they should only buy brands that donate to charity or are considered good for the world, all streams can easily take over in a very undifferentiated world.

Instead, marketers should be more self-confident and believe in the good that marketing does in the world for its own sake without seeking a higher purpose, he argued.

Faced with this difference of opinion, Kate Smith , a strategic marketing consultant, seems to have a fairly coherent answer: “The problem is not the purpose per se. The problem is how the purpose is developed and used. Is it being used to define what the company does and how it does it, or is it being used simply to create an illusion of social responsibility or simply as the basis for a campaign aimed at millennials.”

“The problem is not purpose per se. The problem is how purpose is developed and used.”

Kate Smith
The race to a purpose-driven brand didn’t start last year with Field’s speech, of course. In 2019, Unilever’s CEO published a report showing that the group’s brands with a clear, articulated purpose were growing much faster than the rest of its businesses.

At the time, the company committed to a future in which “every Unilever brand will be a brand with a purpose.”

Here’s what CEO Alan Jope had to say: “We believe the evidence is clear and compelling that purpose-driven brands thrive. In fact, we believe this so strongly that we are prepared to commit to making every Unilever brand a purpose-driven brand in the future.”