Eight Reasons Why Brand Purpose Fails
Organizations hoping to pursue a brand purpose that focuses on more than mere lucre frequently have the best of intentions; however, those good intentions don't prevent many efforts at brand purpose from failing. Guests on the ANA Center for Brand Purpose's Beyond Profit podcast often reflect on the sources of such failure, and below are eight of the causes that they identify. Those championing brand purpose in their organizations will find the following quotes helpful in their own efforts as cautions against common pitfalls.
Mistakes in Defining One's Purpose
Lack of focus due to input from too wide an array of people: "Now I've seen a lot of failed processes, the workshops where the leader who ultimately has to own this process and own the outcome gets overly sensitive about making sure to gather input from all the attendees. Unfortunately, that means that either you have the right attendees or you don't, and that can affect things. Some voices will dominate and skew the outcome. But, ultimately, the likelihood is that you're going to end up getting some form of least common denominator, just a collection of words and ideas."
— Brad Brinegar, founder of and principal at Cubist Martini and executive in residence at Duke University's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative
Lack of alignment with organizational identity: "It can be really challenging for brands to start a social movement around cause, and a common misstep is for brands to begin activating on a cause that's trendy, rather than on a cause that's core to them. We see a clear example of this with the number of brands that jumped on Pride Month as a marketing opportunity, but these brands just felt inauthentic to consumers because it wasn't an extension of a long-term commitment. So, it sort of felt like a press stunt."
— Melissa Anderson, co-founder and president of Public Good
Inattention to the true needs of those whom organizations hope to help: "The traditional sense of customer-centricity is often about pleasing customers. Noble purpose is about improving customers. And those are two really different things, because if you're trying to please a customer, the customer can say, I want that. I want a lower price. I want better terms. I want a better widget. But that doesn't typically drive innovation. You become reactionary oftentimes. But if you're focused on customer impact, which is about improving customers, then your whole team is saying, what are the issues our customers are facing and how might we help them improve them. And it's challenging to do that because it is a quirk of human nature to look at ourselves. We want to make a difference to others, but it requires constant vigilance to point our lens outward."
— Lisa McLeod, author of Selling with Noble Purpose
Overreach: "If you take most purposeful brands and put them in a psychologist's chair, the psychologist would probably say that they're suffering from megalomaniacal delusion. ... If you listen to what Patagonia is saying — that we're in business to save our home planet — that's coming from a company that makes t-shirts."
— Thomas Kolster, author of The Hero Trap: How to Win in a Post-Purpose Market by Putting People in Charge
Mistakes in Implementing Purpose
Siloes and lack of organizational buy-in: "If we have to get specifically into why there is disbelief [on the part of marketers in their own brands' purpose initiatives], there are a variety of different reasons, but a lot of them involve process. They're being run in some corner of the organization versus at the center of the organization. They're being run, say, by marketing, off in a corner. And so, you don't have organizational buy-in."
— Nicolas Chidiac, brand and customer experience strategy lead at Razorfish North America
Nearsightedness: "If there's one thing that holds companies back ... it's the over-emphasis on the short-term look-back financial information. And that area we think has been a limiting factor. As companies think longer-term, they begin to think about the power of dealing with societal issues, of dealing with environmental issues, in a more robust way. But if all you care about is quarter-to-quarter, then sometimes these factors don't matter as much."
— Daryl Brewster, CEO at Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose
Inattention to the practical needs of the business: "One of the mistakes that I think is made in the purpose landscape is that people can confuse purpose with evangelism in a way. If you go out of business, you are not serving your purpose. You can get very strong on a purpose ... but if it doesn't generate business for you, you're not actually delivering on your purpose because you need to be there every year to deliver on your purpose."
— Norm de Greve, CMO at CVS
Inconsistency across geographies: "I think what happens with even the companies that embrace purpose is they're not consistent and they're not coherent. ... Brands run across many countries or geographies. Even a brand in one country has many regions. How many countries is Dove sold in? Maybe 150? So are they consistent in how the brand shows up and the impact the brand wants to make in the world — in the purpose and how to activate it? I'm not talking about being the same. I'm talking about being consistent. That's tough to manage. ... We tend to get tired of stuff as agencies and clients way before consumers even understand what we're doing. So, I think to be consistent and coherent over time is really challenging."
—Jim Stengel, president and CEO of The Jim Stengel Company
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The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Morgan Strawn is a senior manager of editorial and content development at ANA.