More and more, we’re seeing brands saying they’re “purpose-driven”, but what does that even mean? Knowing how to genuinely demonstrate purpose can make all the difference between being a leader or laughing stock.
Each of us can arrive at a definition of purpose in our heads, it used to be a simple word we all recognised. The difficulty is that literal definition has morphed into a fudge-like slop that gloops across self-help and mindfulness before business and marketing then serves up its own.
“Purpose” is responsible for some of our most important questions. Either the massively macro (Why are we here? Who am I? What’s the point of everything?) through to the micro (What’s the point of that road sign?)
Today we’re talking about business and brands so the pointy end is “What’s a business for?” That might seem like a childish question, surely we know what businesses are for, ostensibly, to sell stuff to people who want that stuff. Yay stuff.
But in our purpose-driven era, what should a business be for now? We’re not blissfully happy about where life’s heading (hello rampant capitalism, climate change and grave inequality), so we’re rightly questioning what business is for.
The pandemic coloured our lives the past two years. Only since we’re zooming out can we return to the bigger picture of what’s really going on. There are subsets of change in technology and culture but as this picture crystallises pretty much everything that’s happening is derivative of our primary existential threat of climate change.
Back in the good (bad?) old days of burgeoning mass consumerism, it was easy to know what business is for; to create the market that provides for our needs, wants and desires, the mass market, the global market. Wealthy nation states of the 20th century created wealthy middle classes in the 60s and 70s thanks to this.
By the 80’s we were so pleased with our economic miracle that we decided to give economics the driving seat with free market capitalism in the Reagan-Thatcher deregulation years. It turbo-charged our pickle with climate, and increasingly mis-distributed all the money being made. That’s why we must reconsider what business should be for.
Business can’t just be for new shoes and scatter cushions. Business, every business, must now be part of solving the problem of our wrongly shaped economy. The idea of a social license has arrived (thanks Larry Fink at Blackrock), to denote whether a company these days still has legitimacy to exist and grow. It’s not just customers, but shareholders and board members who are re-examining their business purpose. Why should any business exist, when there are already so many to choose from?
Why care whether businesses get their act together and figure their purpose or not? Well, at this point in our slow-motion car crash, it really really matters.
It matters because like innovation and technology, this concept of purpose is a way of exploring the future of the economy, how businesses drive us towards a new and different end, and how the role of advertising and marketing might help in that process.
None of these questions are new, instead, we’re saying purpose acts as the lens to look at future markets, consumer markets, and how companies and brands will continue to compete. Or maybe ‘compete’ might be replaced with a different word that’s less zero-sum in nature.
Given we face constant change, what might describe the way people’s choices are changing? In short, less based upon what, and more choice driven by why. Some call it conscious consumerism (yes, we’ve been unconscious the past 70 years). Our children won’t be choosing brand A from brand B only upon features like price and performance the way my generation did. I sincerely hope not.
Today’s children, then their children must choose to change the actions of business that makes up their economy. It might even become their only means of fixing how that economy works for them. That’s because consumers will be forced to take responsibility for their actions, not out of personal virtue but out of necessity. Doing the right thing must come down in price, and the cost of doing wrong go up. Only then will people be free to buy with intent. It’s the future many of us long for but simply can’t have because the economy is changing way too slowly.
What tends to be individual buying judgements for the wealthy and lucky today must become a majority judgment tomorrow.
The importance of a company having to prove its legitimacy as a precursor to attracting investment is a good kick-start for the 180 needed at the top end of town — where organised money lives. We need this to snowball because we can’t wait any longer for the self interested stick-in-the-muds of that group to die.
Think of this license as organised money making its first gesture towards taking responsibility for itself — early signs of better judgment. There’s good evidence of this, big newsworthy examples that prove our point, but it’s simply not happening fast enough and rarely in plain view.
Two good things come of this
- Capital becomes more selective about where it lands
- It gets harder for dubious companies as their throats get choked
Capital markets work so much faster than governments can, but we need them to work at light speed now.
To further untangle purpose we also need to split the economy into its different parts — because they’re not all the same.
“Purpose” in the sense of meaningfully contributing to the human project has stronger roots whenever profit matters less. Not for profits are set up with purpose in mind. They’re not about money, they’re about fixing messes the free market and government ineptitude has made. NFPs need money to do their work and compete with others to get it, but money isn't why they exist. Instead it’s a clearly understood purpose that attracts people and binds them to a cause.
The public sector is like an extension of government because its agency is funded by taxpayers. Their purpose is advised by academics, experts and policy people, and their charter is set by government. They’re only as effective as the government will let them be, and not openly accountable to the public — you and I can’t decide to buy or not buy from them.
On the other side of the fence, the private sector is profit driven. It means they must make money for someone — founder, investor, worker, community, all in different combinations.
It’s in the legacy private industry where purpose is thinner, not because legacy is full of terrible people but because it was designed and built when efficiency, scale and financial results were all there was to strive for, and all that mattered to shareholders.
Legacy companies were built in essential industries but morphed into money machines. They give us products and services we now take for granted as part of life, at scale efficiency with anticipated long-term demand. These are the perfect conditions for top level decisions to drift from the work being done, to the money being made. We built the system this way without thinking too hard what we were doing, and we all fell in lockstep with it (our 70 year coma).
Felix Mobile is an example of the in-betweener, TPG Telecoms pivot to reinvent its legacy by starting with a clean sheet instead of redesigning its whole battleship.
Why? Because it’s very difficult to turn a big successful legacy without making less money doing so. Shareholders aren’t averse to change per se, they’re just averse to not making as much money today as they did yesterday, and that always gets in the way of change.
When owners expect last year’s return plus 5% they’re not loving a turnaround story delivering less than the year before or the year before that. This is what fossil fuel companies have faced the past 30 years. When you’re one of a handful of established players like a big 4 bank or major supermarket, who’s volunteering to do the right thing first? Like musical chairs you’ll lose your seat and be out of the game. When it’s all about the money there’s no incentive to blink and give up your spot in that race. That’s a big problem and this race needs to change from making the most money into saving our skins..
It’s also why the legacy private sector is where we see most purpose shenanigans. We shouldn’t be too shocked or surprised to see purpose mishandled and abused by the bigger, older, successful brands.
It’s a matter of circumstance. Imagine you’re a legacy company marketer; you’d want to be part of the new purpose wave, you’d want to do something to stay in frame. It begins with best intent, but little can save it from at best missing the point, and at worst being ridiculed. Every legacy brand is one bad creative meeting away from another Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad.
Somewhere along the line the detachment and clear thinking that usually spots a mistake somehow left the building. I’d like to think that’s where agencies can help. I don’t think it’s complicated, it’s just delicate. The public’s bullshit meters are innately configured to spot when purpose is just the craving for spotlight and profit by another name. Just because purpose is today’s new black doesn’t make its bullshit smell any different.
At the heart is responsibility. Companies don’t operate with their head in the sand, they know what’s happening around them. Flirting with purpose as a diversion from taking responsibility is a weakness, a disregarding abuse of license to operate. Thankfully it’s going to be treated that way by the public and be self-fulfilling over time. But agencies mustn’t get caught in the middle today.
That’s why we owe it to clients and to ourselves to speak our minds respectfully and say no. In free market economic theory it’s the government’s role to step in, regulating where laws and loopholes let companies get away with destruction. In real life it’s a tall order for governments, especially Australia’s to do that job, and it’s why the rest of us must step in and hold business to account and scrutinise their license to operate. Just because we work in an agency and serve commercial clients, and government included, doesn’t absolve our own responsibility. We’ve a job to do like everyone else.
In helping guide brands in this Wild West of purpose, exercising objective thinking is key. Every brand is different, in its history, specialism, successes and failures, and in every way that it’s run. With a better understanding of what’s really going on you can weigh up whether purpose-driven marketing is warranted, because sadly too many times it just isn’t.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which we create, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.