Four Examples of Brand Purpose from ANA’s 2018 Masters of Marketing Conference
Vineet Mehra, EVP and global CMO at Ancestry, presents on stage at the 2018 ANA Masters of Marketing Week. Ancestry was one of the many brands that highlighted purpose during the event.
By ANA Staff
In keeping with its annual tradition, the ANA recently named its “Word of the Year” by selecting “Brand Purpose.” It defined this pursuit as “a long-term business strategy tied to a societal benefit that guides every strategic decision and action, from product development and customer/employee engagement to marketing and hiring.” Given the topic’s importance to marketers, it’s not surprising that “brand purpose” featured prominently in various sessions of the ANA’s 2018 Masters of Marketing Conference. One presenter even shared research indicating that brand purpose is one of the factors that most powerfully drives sales and promotes positive public perception. Other speakers shared specific examples of how their brands were undertaking benevolent social missions — and, importantly, not just arbitrary ones, but rather missions rooted in the nature of their particular products or services.
Denny’s restaurant: As a provider of food and hospitality, the diner chain has found a fitting social mission in its efforts to help fight food insecurity. These efforts have included raising $6.3 million to help fight childhood hunger, as well as helping to feed the victims of disasters such as the recent California wildfires.
The Keurig beverage brewing company: The increasing visibility of fair-trade issues has alerted many coffee drinkers to the precarious economic situations faced by many coffee growers. As a prominent seller of coffeemakers and coffee, Keurig felt a special responsibility to help address this issue and has vowed to improve the livelihoods of one million coffee growers by 2020.
The plight of struggling farmers isn’t the only societal challenge that Keurig has felt a responsibility to help address. The fact that its single-serve coffeemakers use disposable pods has raised concerns about their impact on the environment, prompting Keurig to:
- Pledge that by 2020 its operations will produce zero landfill waste.
- Develop recyclable coffee pods for the U.S. market.
Deluxe Corporation: As a manufacturer of the checks that facilitate the transactions sustaining many small businesses, the Deluxe Corporation nursed a natural sympathy for these companies and their owners. To shine a spotlight on their successes and challenges, Deluxe created 100 short, cinema-quality documentaries that it hosted on the site SmallBusinessRevolution.org. This project eventually developed into Small Business Revolution — Main Street, a series available on Hulu and other over-the-top platforms. The shows highlighted the plight of struggling businesses — but Deluxe didn’t confine its assistance to mere publicity; in addition, it contributed $500,000 each season to revitalize a nominated town’s Main Street businesses.
Ancestry.com: In helping its customers to explore their genealogical roots, Ancestry.com frequently guides them to family trees formed out of grafts from many racial and cultural cultivars. This role in enlightening the public on the issue of diversity gave the company a natural platform from which to contest the divisive message proclaimed by white supremacists at a 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ancestry.com countered this message with a stirringly patriotic ad that celebrated America’s diversity.
From its community of subscribers, Ancestry.com identified a group of living Americans descended from the 57 white men known as the United States’ “Founding Fathers.” These descendants were both black and white. When the ad featured them reading the Declaration of Independence, it invited the audience to embrace diversity as an intrinsically American value. The ad made this appeal all the more resonant in its concluding scene, which featured the racially diverse descendants in a tableau that mirrored John Trumbull’s famous painting of the document’s signing.
Although brand purpose loomed large in the presentations made by Ancestry.com and other companies at Masters of Marketing, the conference addressed a host of other topics. Click here to browse the full array of insights shared at the event.