Why Your Brand Does Not Need a Purpose
The great advertising delusion of our time.
Sometime around 2015, the advertising industry decided that selling things was no longer enough. Products could not simply be good. They had to be meaningful. Brands could not simply be trusted. They had to be purposeful. And advertisements could not simply persuade. They had to inspire. A great wave of purpose-driven marketing swept through the agencies, and in its wake it left a trail of campaigns that were earnest, well-intentioned, and almost entirely ineffective.
I have watched this phenomenon with a mixture of bemusement and dismay. Bemusement, because the idea that a toilet paper brand needs a higher purpose is genuinely comical. Dismay, because the pursuit of purpose has distracted an entire generation of advertisers from the actual job of advertising, which is to sell things to people who need them.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that companies should be irresponsible. I am not saying that corporate ethics are unimportant. I am not saying that businesses should not consider their impact on the world. These are serious questions that deserve serious answers, and they should be addressed by serious people — by executives, by boards, by regulators, by society at large. What I am saying is that the advertising department is not the right place to answer them, and the thirty-second television spot is not the right vehicle for delivering those answers.
The Confusion of Roles
The purpose movement rests on a confusion of roles. It confuses the role of the corporation with the role of its advertising. A corporation can and should have values. A corporation can and should behave ethically. A corporation can and should consider the communities in which it operates and the environment in which it exists. But the corporation's advertising has a different job. Its job is to communicate the value of the corporation's products to the people who might buy them. When these two jobs are conflated, both suffer.
I worked on a campaign several years ago for a consumer goods company that had recently adopted a purpose statement. The purpose was something about empowerment — I will spare you the exact language, which was the kind of vague, aspirational prose that sounds meaningful until you try to act on it. The creative brief instructed us to "lead with purpose" and to "make the consumer feel part of something bigger." I asked the obvious question: bigger than what? The brand made cleaning products. Effective, well-priced cleaning products that people bought because they worked. Was there really a need to make people feel that buying floor cleaner was an act of social transformation?
We made the advertisement the client wanted. It featured diverse, attractive people doing diverse, attractive things while a voiceover spoke about the power of clean spaces to transform communities. It was handsome. It was sincere. It was completely interchangeable with any other purpose-driven advertisement for any other consumer goods brand. It could have been for soap or cereal or insurance. It said nothing specific about the product, because the brief did not ask us to say anything specific about the product. It asked us to communicate a purpose, and purposes, by their nature, are generic.
The advertisement performed poorly. Not catastrophically — it was too inoffensive to fail catastrophically — but it moved no needles. It did not increase awareness, because there was nothing memorable to be aware of. It did not drive sales, because it gave the consumer no reason to buy. It occupied space. It consumed budget. It existed. And then it was forgotten, which is the worst fate that can befall a piece of advertising.
What Ogilvy Actually Said
The purpose advocates sometimes invoke Ogilvy in their defence, which I find irritating because it requires a selective reading of his work that borders on dishonesty. Yes, Ogilvy believed in brand image. Yes, he believed that every advertisement should contribute to the long-term personality of the brand. But brand image, as Ogilvy understood it, was not the same thing as brand purpose. Brand image was the cumulative impression created by the product's qualities, its price, its packaging, and its advertising — all working together over time. It was specific. It was grounded in the product. It was, above all, intended to sell.
Ogilvy's Hathaway shirt campaign did not give the brand a purpose. It gave the brand a personality — the man in the eye patch, mysterious, aristocratic, worldly. The personality was invented. It was not derived from a soul-searching workshop about what Hathaway "stood for." It was a creative decision made by a copywriter who understood that a shirt brand needed to be interesting before it could be anything else. The personality sold shirts. That was its purpose, and it was purpose enough.
The Real Cost
The real cost of the purpose movement is not the bad campaigns it has produced, though those are numerous. The real cost is the good campaigns it has prevented. Every hour spent defining a brand's purpose is an hour not spent understanding the consumer. Every brief that leads with purpose is a brief that does not lead with the product. Every creative team that is asked to "express the brand's values" is a creative team that is not being asked to solve the only problem that matters: how do we make more people buy this thing?
I sound mercenary, and I do not apologise for it. Advertising is a commercial art. It exists because companies need to sell products, and they are willing to pay for help doing so. This is not an ignoble purpose. It is not a purpose that requires apology or disguise. When I write an advertisement that persuades someone to buy a product that genuinely improves their life — a better car, a more comfortable mattress, a more effective cleaning product — I have done something useful. I have connected a person with a product they needed. I do not need to save the world to justify my profession. Connecting people with useful products is justification enough.
Bernbach understood this. Hopkins understood this. Burnett understood this. The great practitioners of our craft understood that the dignity of advertising lies in its honest practice, not in its inflation into something it was never meant to be. Advertising is not activism. Advertising is not therapy. Advertising is not philosophy. Advertising is the art of persuasion in the service of commerce, and when it is practised well — with intelligence, with craft, with respect for the consumer — it is a worthy and honourable profession. It does not need a purpose to validate it. It already has one.
Your brand does not need a purpose. It needs a product worth buying and an advertisement worth reading. Everything else is vanity.