Has your brand found its true purpose?

Kushil Gunasekera was just another boy in Seenigama, albeit one from a privileged family. His father was a prominent lawyer and they owned property and riches. Like any young boy he had many friends in his village and they would play together all the time. He felt his friends were just like him – smart, young and eager.

When the time came for him to be educated he was sent to Colombo. After his education when he returned to his village he found these friends of his, as smart and eager as he was in his childhood, were left behind and did not have the opportunities he had. But due to his Colombo stint he had far more skills and job opportunities. 

At that point his life developed purpose and he created ‘Foundation of Goodness’, an institution that is now helping 28,000 rural beneficiaries annually from 400 villages free of charge from 11 empowerment centres islandwide with the flagship holistic community model in Seenigama. These are centres imparting skills to thousands across Sri Lanka, and ensuring that smart young people don’t need to come to Colombo to be assured of a bright future.

Kushil says he was externally rich and internally poor earlier but internally rich now with this purposeful venture.

Like Kushil, brands too must find its own purpose. And with that they will find new direction, energy and focus. Greater consumer loyalty, a new set of consumers, increased engagement on social media, and motivated and improved employee retention are some of the results of creating brands with purpose. 

Lifebuoy

Lifebuoy is a brand with clear stated purpose. Its brand manifesto is written with purpose and dedicates itself to ‘bringing health and hygiene to a billion people’. By clearly defining a social purpose for the brand, Lifebuoy has opened itself to committing to real work in society aimed to benefiting communities directly and purposefully. 

It’s ‘help a child reach 5’ campaign done in chosen villages in India is an interesting example of how a brand can manifest its stated purpose by actually saving young lives. Through this campaign Lifebuoy highlights and educates pregnant women in areas of high infant mortality, on the importance of washing hands as a means of personal hygiene. 

This way it ensures their child stays healthy and increases their chances of surviving infant hood. This kind of action helps build favourability among consumers and fosters bonds between the brand and the community at large. It helps explains clearly to millennial employees seeking purpose in their jobs why they should come to work every day. And by linking washing hands to hygiene and health it’s a direct call to brand usage. Linking big purpose smartly to usage can lead to big sales. 

Ariel

Another way a brand can show purpose is to do a communications campaign that commits to a social purpose. Effective communications will not only create brand loyalty. It will result in behaviour change. The Ariel washing machine ‘share the load’ campaign is one such example. This Effie and Cannes award winning communications campaign sought to sensitise insensitive Indian male partners to the need to share in the household chores. 

It recognised that many Indian men thought that household work was meant to be done by the women at home, and they couldn’t be bothered by it. The Ariel washing machine brand campaign therefore started a conversation online on social media with a pertinent question – is laundry only a woman’s job? And this became the basis of an active debate with different sections of society weighing in with their diverse viewpoints.  Key opinion leaders, women leaders and even sensitive progressive men highlighted the unjust expectations on women, even in modern society, to be active contributors in terms of finances as well equally to be wholly responsible for household chores. Ariel then launched a very moving film showing an aged father writing an emotional letter, saying sorry to his grown daughter and how he was wrong in setting a bad example by not partaking in day-to-day household chores at home when she was little. 

He promised to mend his ways and start now. This brand campaign sought to bring about behaviour change in men and as a laundry brand targeted at women this created strong positive connections with the consumer, creating increased loyalty for Ariel versus surf which was the market leader. 

Havells

One other example of a brand that garners the power of its communications to perpetuate new thinking and thereby influence social change is ‘Havells’. This brand has products in a very low involvement category such as ceiling fans and iron machines, which though relatively expensive, has traditionally involved a process of purchase with a strong influencer role. 

In this case the influencer being the trusted consumer goods retailer. But Havells through clutter breaking advertising has created a consumer preference for the brand, and its purpose driven advertising ideas have played an important role in differentiating it from competition and at the same time impacting society in a positive way. 

Havells fan advertising with its tag line – ‘herald the winds of change’ makes an impassioned plea for people to think in a new way about established notions. It shows in its advertising a newly married couple going to the marriage registrar, and the official tells the wife that her new name after marriage will have her husband’s surname tagged on (as is convention), and her husband interrupts to say no and that he will instead take on the wife’s name much to the surprise of the official, and of the viewers. 

In doing so, the brand puts out a bold progressive message of change and influences consumers to prefer the modern Havells as their new choice and equally suggests that people challenge some old notions and concepts that maybe retrograde.

As one progressive CEO said: “Saying the purpose of a brand is only for profits, is like saying the purpose of life is only to breathe.” In the new socially aware world we all live in, a brand that discovers its own larger purpose will successfully continue to be preferred over its competitors. And will be a motivating factor for attracting millennial employees.  Brands that influence positive change in behaviour will have greater social engagement and create stronger affinity and bonds. This will be crucial to ensure loyalty from the consumer. A CEO or CMO who merely focuses on brands and bottom lines without creating a purpose for their brands will soon find the bottom being pulled out from under their feet. One clarification though – CSR that a company does is different from imbibing a brand with purpose. 

CSR is good and necessary but when your brand is purposeful it has a much bigger impact on the issue at hand. If your agency does not understand this language, then you should seek a better partner who does or insist they team train themselves in this area of expertise. Brands without purpose beyond category benefits will serve no purpose at all in the not so distant future. 

(The writer is a marketing communications expert with over 20 years’ experience in multinational locations. He can be reached on [email protected].)