The sad abuse of purpose as a marketing tactic

We will look back at this early part of the century as the advent of the “Great Purpose” in branding. Everywhere you look, in every boardroom, among businesses, marketers, brand managers and advertisers alike, the notion of purpose has become ubiquitous.

Joe Public was one of the first to relook at everything through the lens of purpose, including our own brand. Our executive creative director, Pepe Marais, has been running purpose workshops for close to a decade with some of SA’s most established brands. As more brands all over the world have followed the enlightened path of purpose, more financial evidence has piled up to make a financial case for purpose-driven brands, to propel the purpose ideology further. In fact, the message to the C-suite has been to choose the way of purpose and end up making more money; there’s the proof.

That assertion, however, is problematic. In this paradigm, purpose is still slave to the bottom line and the reason many do it. However, wasn’t the whole point of purpose to look at the bottom line in a different way and not just purely in financial terms?

A debate I was involved in at a conference about the Nike “Take the knee” Colin Kaepernick campaign raised an interesting point. How legitimate was it for a brand like Nike to launch such a campaign? Its commercial success was hailed as definite proof that Nike had been right all along: the financial argument which was to be the nail in the coffin of all the naysayers.

Instead, I argued the contrary. I asked if Nike did the right thing to sell more sneakers. If Nike had perhaps taken a true risk on this occasion, and was willing to lose money, even temporarily, in the name of its lofty ideals, it would have made a more convincing case for Nike being truly purpose-led. And perhaps turn me into a long-term brand fan.

The price of purpose is authenticity and taking risks. Purpose isn’t the marketing bandwagon you should jump on because it’s good for the bottom line. Purpose must come from an authentic place, a deep internal process of reflecting on the profound impact of what we do. It must affect everything a company does, starting with the business, not just communication and marketing.

When Patagonia announced a few weeks ago that it was making earth its “only shareholder” by retransferring all ownership to two newly created “purpose” entities in an effort to cement the company’s values in its operating structure and step up its fight against the climate crisis, I felt it was truly putting its money where its mouth is. This type of authentic purposeful action will have me, the consumer, believing in you and make me want to become a staunch advocate for your brand.

Unfortunately, what we are seeing all over the world are brands abusing purpose, and consumers starting to be a lot more critical of companies’ greenwashing attempts. They increasingly see through it. And it’s not just consumers, regulators are starting to clamp down on such claims.

The world has seen relatively few claims brought against firms for misleading environmental claims, but the Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal, or “dieselgate”, in 2015 was a major exception. For about seven years, VW’s advertising had touted its cars as “low emission [and] environmentally friendly”, claiming they met emissions standards, and would retain a high resale value — this despite having fitted cars with “defeat devices” that would limit emissions during tests. After five years of wrangling, the US Federal Trade Commission finally forced the German carmaker to settle the case with misled consumers for nearly $10bn.

Purpose is too important to be discredited and contaminated with marketing gimmicks. Agencies that see more briefs delivered under the umbrella of purpose shouldn’t be afraid to interrogate them. The long-term health of the brand they are working depends on it.

Laurent Marty is the strategy planning director at Joe Public.