How to build a purposeful brand

Brand purpose has been climbing the marketing agenda in the last 12 months – and with very good reason. Research points to the significant competitive advantages that accrue to purposeful brands. They differentiate themselves through building and delivering consistently better customer experiences. They command greater loyalty, become an automatic choice for many customers and consumers, enthuse employees and are able to recruit the most talented people. Despite the mounting evidence about the value of brand purpose though, a great deal of confusion still remains about what brand purpose really is – and what role marketers need to play in defining and delivering it.

A few months ago I encountered a ranking of the top 100 companies for brand purpose, glanced at the bottom of the list, and found the Walt Disney Company. Disney? A company that knows precisely what experiences it exists to create? That has those experiences encoded within its DNA? And which has such a clearly defined sense of brand purpose that consumers of all types know exactly what to expect of it? Could Disney really be a ‘brand purpose lightweight’, as it was described in this ranking?

The reason for this bizarre ranking quickly became clear. This survey, like many pieces of thought leadership regarding brand purpose, equated it with Corporate Social Responsibility – with a clearly defined social purpose. I believe that this is only part of the picture. Social purpose is a powerful element of brand purpose – but it’s not the only type of purpose out there. CSR and brand purpose are not one and the same.

Brand purpose really comes from an understanding of who your customers are, what motivates and inspires them, and how that intersects with a credible role for your brand. This might involve the brand taking on social or environmental issues because that’s what matters to its customers and it’s what they expect of it. However, you can build a purposeful brand even if your business doesn’t play an obvious role taking on well-understood social problems. It’s what some of the most successful B2B and B2C brands are doing – on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Here’s how they go about it:

LinkedIn contributed to the Insights2020 research recently conducted by MB Vermeer, which explores the characteristics of successful, profitable, customer-centric businesses. One of the most striking findings of the study is that 80% of those brands have a clear brand purpose to which they link all of their activities and customer experience initiatives. Look closer, and it becomes clear that, for the vast majority of these brands, a sense of purpose comes from the customers themselves.

My favourite example of this is Dulux. Now bear in mind that this is a brand selling paint. You wouldn't necessarily think of it as being on a mission that could rally audiences around a clear sense of purpose. Yet that’s what listening to Dulux’s audiences – and looking imaginatively at the role of the brand – has achieved. Dulux picked up on research showing the impact that the colour of its paints had on how people felt. It translated this into a brand purpose leveraging colour to make people feel better – to improve situations and improve the quality of lives. “Let’s colour” runs through Dulux’s TV advertising, through its initiatives to repaint in bright colours hospital waiting rooms or under-privileged neighbourhoods in Brazil and Pakistan, to tap into the positive emotional impact of colour. It also runs through its approach to selling paint and the customer experiences it creates around it.

Understanding what matters to people is important – but so too is understanding how your brand is relevant to those issues. The sweet spot for brand purpose lies in the intersection between what motivates your audiences and the expertise that your brand brings to the table.

Consistency is an important part of establishing a sense of purpose. It builds trust that you mean what you say – and that you know what you’re doing. As John Rudaizky of EY, a hugely successful, purposeful brand, puts it: “A purpose must accurately reflect the organisation and not be akin to a statement of intent. At EY, for example, our purpose of ‘building a better working world’ is ambitious, but it relates to our role in building trust and confidence in the capital markets and supporting our clients’ aim to drive sustainable growth.”

There’s an interesting example of this in the contrasting effectiveness of recent, high-profile advertising campaigns for Budweiser and John Lewis. The beer brand got a lot of attention during this year’s Super Bowl for running an ad starring Helen Mirren that took on drink driving. John Lewis raised a lot of eyebrows in the UK when its Christmas ad addressed the issue of the loneliness of old people at Christmas. Interestingly, research from TNS suggests that only one of these strategies was effective.

John Lewis was able to build on years of Christmas advertising focused on the brand bringing people together and overcoming separation and loneliness. It aligned with a well-understood brand purpose. Budweiser’s campaign, in contrast, seemed to come out of the blue. It didn’t even align with the other Budweiser ads that the brand had created for the Super Bowl. As a result audiences didn’t see it as relevant to their relationship with Budweiser – and dismissed the purpose behind it.

A steady stream of research (from LinkedIn, Deloitte and PwC) identifies that one of the most significant benefits of brand purpose is the impact that it has on a business’s talent brand. People want to work for brands that have a clear vision and sense of purpose – and they want to know that they can make an impact and a recognisable contribution to bring that purpose to life.

Humanising a brand by telling its story through employees and internal experts is one of the most effective strategies for establishing purpose on LinkedIn. It helps to demonstrate that the purpose runs right through the organisation whilst also adding credibility by showcasing expertise, and signaling to potential employees that they will be part of something meaningful. EY and Shell both excel at using employees to bring brand purpose to life. EY’s Sponsored Content on LinkedIn regularly puts employees centre-stage. “People are vital to almost all organisations, they need to be encouraged to champion the organization’s purpose-led brand from the inside out,” said John Rudaizky in a recent post on LinkedIn. Shell meanwhile has used its Chief Climate Change Advisor, David Hone as the face of its thought leadership on climate issues, providing a human voice for people to engage in dialogue.

The Insights2020 research shows that 64% of the most successful brands focus on driving consistency of brand purpose across all of the touchpoints where they encounter their audiences. This is particularly important to B2B marketers looking to target audiences throughout the buyer’s journey. There’s no point engaging audiences with your sense of brand purpose at the top of the funnel, if that sense of purpose disappears once they click through to a landing page, reach out to a sales rep or turn to you for support with the products and solutions they’ve bought. Great B2B brands focus on delivering end-to-end customer experiences that reflect what people value most about their brand.

There’s a cautionary tale here in the downfall of Chipotle, a brand that established a powerful sense of purpose through award-winning TV advertising about its commitment to serving wholesome, fresh, natural food. Unfortunately this purpose seems to have been largely contained within the advertising campaign. Chipotle didn’t value the customer experience of its food enough to ensure proper hygiene or ingredient sourcing in line with the expectations it established through its advertising campaigns. After a series of serious food poisoning outbreaks, it’s now cited as an example of brand purpose gone bad.

In a lively Advertising Week Europe session on real-time storytelling, LinkedIn’s Director of Global Marketing, Keith Richey talked about the need for brands to show restraint and acknowledge which real-time events and issues they can get involved with – and which they should avoid. As he explained, it all comes down to knowing your brand purpose. When an issue emerges that your brand can credibly address, and is relevant to your purpose, then it’s in your ‘swim lane’. Not only do you have permission to address it on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter – but everyone involved will also have a very good idea of what the brand needs to say. If an issue is outside your ‘swim lane’, then it’s often best left alone. Purposeful brands aren’t loudmouths on every issue – but they are authoritative and credible when the time is right.

Dealing with Big Data is one of the big challenges facing any marketing department today. As LinkedIn’s Director of Global GTM research, Christina Jenkins, explained in a recent post on this blog, a sense of purpose should give brands a real advantage when it comes to dealing with the data deluge. It brings focus to how you approach and use the data, to ensure you don’t do things just because you can but because they support a well-understood purpose. That’s something we pride ourselves on at LinkedIn. Our purpose is to connect the world’s professionals and make them more productive and successful. By doing so we hope to create economic opportunity for everyone on earth. Every use that we make of data reflects this – and that’s why our members trust us to use their data in the right way.

That’s perhaps the single most powerful advantage that brand purpose brings. It aligns expectations both inside and outside of your business. When people know what you stand for they find it far easier to trust you – and that trust builds the more they see your brand purpose in action.