Nika Worlund (00:00)
If you never have advertising campaigns,
if you don't do consumer experiences, there is no way for your customers to actually experience what your brand purpose is. And at that point, why have it?
And that's not a bad thing that you don't have the budget to do it. I work with many small brands who are just starting out and they don't have the time and the staff to execute all of the creative ideas they might have. And so for them, I recommend literally just deleting brand purpose from their positioning and replacing it with point of view.
Nika Worlund (00:37)
Welcome to Design Bigger, the podcast for designers and studios ready to think bigger, design bigger brands and land bigger projects. I'm Nika Worland, an Exbig agency brand strategy director who took her blue chip client expertise and built a freelance career helping independent agencies around the globe. This is the podcast where I share the tricks of the trade for lean design thinking to set you up as a world-class creative talent. As a translator between business and creatives, I'll show you how to speak client, hack top agency frameworks and think like the best studios out there.
If you're ready to design bigger, hit subscribe and let's get started.
Nika Worlund (01:12)
Okay, you might be thinking that we're like five years too late to talk about brand purpose, but listen to the end because actually I think purpose is alive and well, it just evolved. And actually there's a new framework in town that I have been using way more recently than brand purpose. And I'm gonna deep dive into both of them.
So let's start by saying that, brand purpose is probably one of the most misunderstood brand concepts. it has taken the marketing world by the storm. And a nutshell, brand purpose is the brand's core reason for existing beyond simply making a profit, right?
Of course, every single brand is in the business to make money. Some of them are choosing to do something that's not for themselves, that's also for the world.
But the reason why the concept became so successful is that there were actually lots of studies that showed that doing something good for the world is also good for business. And this is where it got really tangled and complicated. So let's rewind and understand where it came from. You probably have all heard about Simon Sinek and his influential TED Talk on the Golden Circle. He did it in 2009.
And his core idea was that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do
The phrase that you probably all have heard is start with why is actually his quote from that talk. And so that was 2009. This was the time where, you know, brands like Patagonia and Tom's have been on the up. And then a lot of brands followed this idea. know, Dollar Shaved Club, Warby Parker came to the market with
the new D2C model, but their purpose was all about democratizing style. And then you have Everlane, who stood for radical transparency in fashion, who gives a crap, toilet paper, which everybody laughed at first, but actually became quite successful. this approach resonated really deeply with consumers, especially within the...
kind of this growing direct to consumer space. And so in 2019, so like 10 years after the Ted talk, Unilever, which is a company that I would say is the thought leader in marketing and brand management.
position itself as a champion of brand purpose. They have said that
attributing success of their biggest brands like Dove and Axe and Ben & Jerry's to purpose.
And so riding this wave of success, they claimed that all Unilever brands would become purpose led. I worked on Unilever at the time and I have been in so many brand purpose workshops and it was great. I worked on Dove and I worked on Domestice, which is a European toilet cleaner and Axe at the time was all about
empowering men to be vulnerable and kind of escaping the toxic masculinity.
And Uniliver said, know, that brands taking action for people and planet actually grew 69 % faster than the rest of their business in that year. so when this quote came out, it has transformed the marketing industry overnight and everybody wanted to follow them and everybody wanted their brand to have a purpose.
And then there were also a lot of studies coming out that were monitoring the business performance of brands with purpose. One of them was brands with a Z in the end. You know, they looked at brand value growth throughout 12 years from like 2006 to 2018 that showed that brands with a strong brand purpose grew their
%
And so everybody got really excited about brand purpose. A little bit, think it was because we as marketeers see and understand a lot of behind the scenes.
activities that businesses do and we know how unsustainable, how cruel
product development can be. Right? We understand the environmental footprint, the social sacrifices of producing global brands. And so when the marketing industry was told that, hey, you can actually stand for something bigger and you can try to transform the business you work for to make it do good in the world, everybody saw it as their own personal mission. And so I was doing
brand purpose workshops with most of my clients. Like every week I remember I had a brand purpose workshop.
But then what happened is that naturally not every brand is designed to do good in the world. Some brands are just chewing gum or just candy. And they're just there to do the one basic thing they need to do.
But because of the popularity of this framework, brands began force-fitting purpose-led messages into their brands
The best examples of that was the Pepsi campaign with Kendall Jenner, where she appeared to be trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement.
Gillette was criticized for entering a debate on toxic masculinity. There was like a lot of big brands trying to find
their purpose when there hasn't been.
many initiatives and they were just trying to make it an advertising message to look good and it backfired.
I myself was guilty about selling purpose to brands who didn't need it at all. Like I remember those workshops were quite painful because sometimes I was like, well, you're not doing anything. You shouldn't have a brand purpose, but everybody wanted one.
In reality, brands that ended up having a brand purpose were the brands that had founders or leadership who believed in it. It is very hard for a business that has never done anything beyond earning money to be told, hey guys, you need to change for good, right? I, as a consultant can create the most persuasive presentation.
and come up with the most exciting brand purpose. But if there is no initiative on the leadership side, it's just not going to get any traction.
And so what happened is we would sell the brand positioning, it would have brand purpose, and then it would go to this business and the business would just not act upon it.
But sometimes it worked great because you would get a client who is trying to do something good in the world, who is trying to change their category for better and produce the product in a more sustainable way. And then you give them the purpose and then it just,
creates a laser focus for their business and it gives them the language to speak with their consumers and it really skyrockets their business.
Another thing that was happening during that time is that brands that were getting really excited about the purpose and a lot of brands who actually had the founders or the leadership who believed in doing good in the world, they would forget that their business actually solves pretty simple issues in their consumers lives. And then they would bank their entire brand story on the purpose.
And consumers would just not connect with that because in the end of the day, if you're buying a razor or if you're buying insurance from your company, you just kind of need to know how it works. You worry about the costs and you want to know how it's going to make your life easier. Right. And so many brands would just go and talk about these high level blue sky thinking purposes and consumers just did not care.
Nika Worlund (08:54)
Another thing that was happening at that time was when brands would then also design their brand around the purpose. A really good example of that is what happened in skincare industry around 2015 when so many brands have done the hard work of cleaning up their ingredient lists or new brands were launching that had
you know, organic ingredients, clean ingredients, no fillers. And they would design to this purpose of, bringing pure ingredients to the people and pushing back on the category norms and leading with a more sustainable, clean formulations. And they all ended up looking the same. Like I remember they all had
white packs with like green leaves on them and it was very like pure and clean.
And I think five years after that, they all had to redesign with its own personality in mind.
So after all of this, people started questioning whether every brand needed to have a purpose. Does a soda brand need one? What's the purpose of my candy bar beyond just delivering a moment of indulgence So in 2023, Unilever's new chief executive said that purpose could be an unwelcome distraction for brands.
And that not every brand should have a social or environmental purpose and that they don't want to fit that on brands unnecessarily.
It was seen as such a U-turn because Unilever, as you remember, was championing brand purpose as a framework for all of the brands and really made people believe that it is better for business as well. But
As I've said, I was working for Unilever at the time and there were absolutely brands that champion brand purpose
like Dove and Axe and Domestice and Ben and Jerry's. But then they had brands like Magnum Ice Cream, which was all about just kind of sensual pleasure and delicious, creamy ice cream. And they just realized that that brand did not need a brand purpose. Hellman's Mayo did not need a brand purpose in the way that they've been doing it.
So after that, brand purpose became less of a mandatory framework for brands. Most brands opted out of it. Some brands like the ones we know and love like Patagonia and Dove kept it because they were ready to invest in it and act upon it. But most brands continued doing corporate responsibility on a...
corporate level because their parent companies were required to do so. They were required to follow the ESG guidelines, which stand for environmental, societal and governance impact, or they followed other corporate social responsibility practices like environmental protection and the way they treat workers and then philanthropy and corporate ethics. But the vast majority of brands
opted for purposes that weren't about social or environmental issues.
And that's not to say that only companies that follow ESG are responsible, right?
There are so many ways a company can do good in the world that's not this formal way of giving back or be seen as a socially responsible organization.
like, you know, partnering with charities and paying employees fair wages and offering full financial transparency.
But as I've said, many companies shifted away completely from social environmental purposes because they were doing that on a corporate And so I started seeing this new kind of purpose.
that was more about championing consumer experience.
So for example, a brand would say, exist to bring joy to the everyday life. Okay, that's the very bland purpose, but I have started seeing a lot of purpose examples that were about joy and pleasure and freedom and comfort and actually just focusing on the consumer benefit and making consumer lives better.
And honestly, I think it is totally okay. If you as a brand can act upon your purpose, so for example, your purpose is about creating moments of pleasure in the everyday, again, a bland example, but if you act upon it and you activate it through your events, through your campaigns, through your limited editions,
through every single touch point and experience your consumer has with the works on the brand. They're very clear why this brand exists, and no matter what they do, it should deliver on creating this moment of pleasure. So yes, in a way, it's not like the purpose that you think...
when you think about a social purpose,
It is just a statement. almost becomes like mission or vision,
which is a completely different story and I would need to record a different episode to really explain the differences between the two
But
As I've said, I think it's absolutely fine to have a purpose like this because I can see how practical and helpful it can be in the marketing initiatives. However, if the brand doesn't have the budget and time to activate this purpose, there's no point in having it.
I see so many brands that have brand purpose in their brand model and they don't do anything about it simply because they don't have the budget.
and when you don't have the budget to activate it, what is the point of having a purpose?
If you never have advertising campaigns,
if you don't do consumer experiences, there is no way for your customers and consumers to actually experience what your brand purpose is. And at that point, why have it?
And that's not a bad thing that you don't have the budget to do it. I work with many small brands who are just starting out and they simply don't have the time and the staff to execute all of the creative ideas they might have. And so for them, I recommend literally just deleting brand purpose from their positioning and replacing it with point of view.
POV. So what point of view is it's essentially a brand belief that separates this brand from everyone else. So for example, Mayfair Group, which is a fashion brand that created that empathy sweatshirt that old celebrities were wearing.
Their point of view is to...
celebrate the unfiltered human experience on the internet where everything is polished, happy and perfect.
So what they have done here is they say what they believe in, which is radically different from everyone else in the category. And also that taps
into consumer need or
pain point.
Another good brand point of view example I really like is Liquid Death. They say, we're just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do. Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more out of them to drink more more while helping to kill plastic pollution.
they have a company mission in there as well, but their point of view is that first sentence that says, we're just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do. That separates them right away. If I didn't know anything about liquid death and I received a document that said our point of view is that I would know not to do anything my marketing brain would want to do.
Another good example is Yoga with Adrienne, which is a famous yoga influencer on YouTube. And their point of view is that, and I don't remember exactly how she phrases it, but essentially their point of view is that wellness industry is really focusing on achievement and beauty standards. And they just exist to find what feels good.
It is yoga for people who just want to feel good. It's not about losing weight. It's not about looking a certain way. It's not about wearing hot yoga pants. It is just about showing up and finding what feels good. So a good point of view in general gives you this clear perspective on your customer and what they stand for or against,
but it also gives you the clarity about the status quo of your industry and how it's not working for them. And then it also tells you exactly how this brand does it differently, right?
So in May, for example, they say is making people sick essentially because everything looks polished and perfect,
but we're going to do it differently because we're going to celebrate the unfiltered human experience on the internet. So this juxtaposition about what's out there and how the consumer is unhappy about it and how we're going to do it differently and solve this problem is what point of view is all about.
So I really recommend using point of view instead of a brand purpose for smaller brands who are just starting out and don't necessarily have the time budget or employees to execute a high level brand purpose, whether it's social or not social.
Brand point of view will still give you the focus that a brand purpose will do and it will be helpful for everyone who works on the brand. It would still sit at the very top of your positioning model or pyramid like brand purpose would. It just doesn't come with a baggage and a long list of initiative a brand needs to do to achieve them.
Which one you do, whether it's a social purpose or a general experience purpose or point of view is up to you. You kind of have to be the therapist and a detective and you have to balance these two very different personality traits.
you have to be incredibly skeptical to see through all of the fluff and BS that is very often surrounding the business. And at the same time, you need to be the most romantic, idealistic person in the room to be able to find that tiny nugget of good.
and then inspire everyone by blowing it up and getting people excited about what may be and how the perfect world might look like. So, skeptical, romantic, idealistic designer is what
is needed to really navigate these tricky times of greenwashing.
social purpose consumers voting with their wallets.
So that's it for today. I hope this helped you really understand how to use brand purpose whether you should and explore the point of view a little bit more Until next time, go create something big and beautiful And remember that the best designers are skeptical.
are Romantics, are idealistic, but most importantly are strategic.
