When Purpose isn't a special event

The secret when it comes to purpose is a pretty simple one, as it turns out (or, at least, easily said, hard to do!). Don't make it a special event. That is, when brands embed purpose in their regular, daily actions and behaviors, the messaging part becomes easy. And people take notice!

This was a finding of a 2020 Deloitte survey of over 2,000 people worldwide about their experiences with brands during the pandemic. This research suggested that a brand's ability to embrace and communicate its core values and purpose, with consistency, is critically important. And that demand for consistency and regularity was hard to miss--with, to list just one example, respondents expressing a desire for brands to make a long-term commitment to their community and employees, rather than being selective about when to lean into purpose-driven messages.

The pandemic has done a lot to spotlight this point about purpose over the past year. For example, nearly 80% of those we polled could name a brand that they felt responded positively during the pandemic. More importantly, two-thirds specifically took note of what they perceived to be negative brand actions--with many of those individuals ultimately walking away from those brands altogether.

There can be real value in brands' bringing purpose to the forefront of the enterprise, not just at critical inflection points during the year, but every single day. How can you do this for your brand? The Purpose chapter of our #GlobalMarketingTrends report suggests three strategies to help guide organizations toward making purpose a constant in their messaging. We understand that all businesses are starting from different places, and that the path to purpose for a start-up is going to look different than the path for a large, legacy company. How easy this is--or hard--is going to be different for every company. Still, these three strategies can be valuable approaches for any company to take, as the inspiring examples included here demonstrate.

• Owning brand purpose: As customer experts, no one understands--and can articulate--the "why" behind a brand's products and services like marketers. By infusing this "why" into messaging to build emotional connections with customers, marketers can address individual personalities, wants and needs--and create true differentiation. Take for example, Ella's Kitchen, an organic baby and toddler food company that seeks to "create healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime" for their consumers. They work with suppliers and stakeholders to ensure that their supply chain meets their "good to each other" ethical sourcing standards, and provides their consumers, parents, and caregivers, with resources that help them instill healthy eating habits in their young children. Going further than their own operations, Ella's Kitchen also donates hundreds of thousands of food pouches to underserved children across the world.
• Catalyzing the enterprise purpose: By looking at recent data and interactions with consumers or potential partners, marketers bring an "outside-in" perspective to the table, creating an invaluable snapshot of a company's brand at a moment in time. Unilever's enterprise purpose is "to make sustainable living commonplace," and when they measured this purpose-driven output, they found that their sustainable living brands were growing 69% faster than the rest of their product portfolio, and delivering 75% of the company's growth. Those numbers are an excellent argument for why marketers should be taking the lead in guiding C-suite conversations, helping to determine a brand's enterprise purpose and driving strategy around that central goal.
• Fusing brand and enterprise purpose: Embedding enterprise purpose into marketing can sometimes feel secondary; but the truth is that for some enterprises, purpose can be the sole reason why someone may be loyal to the brand. I've seen this come to life myself at Expensify, a corporate credit card and expense reporting company. They have a brand purpose of making expensing and reporting fast and easy. After growing in popularity, they were able to expand their enterprise purpose and CSR initiatives, and now donate 10% of card revenue to societal initiatives related to purchases--for example, donating to causes addressing homelessness when someone books a hotel room through their platform. That connection of every purchase to a related donation has helped create brand loyalty.

As for our work at Deloitte, and my role as CMO, our purpose dates back 175 years. We strive to "make an impact that matters"--to our people, our clients, and our communities. While we have a rich history of acting on our purpose, I am proud to see our latest efforts at bringing it to life, including our annual Transparency report, or our global WorldClass initiative, or our WorldClimate commitment. But I'm especially proud that, to help amplify, scale, and broaden our purpose--and to make sure it's not a "special event"--Deloitte has created a new US Purpose Office, led by Kwasi Mitchell, an amazing leader and Deloitte's first US Chief Purpose Officer. I am fortunate to be able to work closely with Kwasi, who will, I know, empower our people like never before to lead with their passions and help Deloitte make an impact that matters--while always making sure that our actions match our words.

Read more at the link here and, please--share your thoughts on infusing purpose into your own work, or examples of positive change you have seen in the marketplace, in the comments below.

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