Why Building A Brand With Purpose Is A Great Investment
“What would you say…you do here?”
It’s one of my favorite lines from Mike Judge’s cult classic, Office Space. But it also happens to be a question that every business owner and marketing director should ask themselves about their brand.
Brand Purpose, or a brand’s reason for being beyond making money, is no gimmick. It’s actually one of the most important factors for people to consider when building a modern brand for any business.
The study found that when the logos of a conventional brand and a purpose-driven brand are presented side by side:
People tend to favor the brand with a known purpose.
Designing your brand around a purpose not only carves out a meaningful role for it to play in the lives of the people it serves, it can also cultivate positive emotions around the brand, increasing the likelihood that people will remember, buy, and remain loyal to it. And a recent study by the communications firm Porter Novelli proves it.
More than 75% of the people surveyed said they were more likely to trust the brand with known purpose.
78% were more likely to remember it.
72% were more likely to be loyal to a brand that was dedicated to a purpose they believed in.
71% said they’d be more likely to buy the purpose-driven brand over the alternative if the price and quality were similar.
Source: Porter Novelli Study
Those feelings and connections didn’t just come from seeing logos.
They came from knowing and understanding the purposes behind those logos. You don’t need an MBA to understand that these things matter to a growing business.
While marketing is designed to make people do things and take action, branding is designed to make people feel things and connect. Purpose is a great place to start. By aligning your brand with a purpose your audience cares about and reinforcing it consistently, you can instantly conjure positive feelings toward your brand. And that goes a long way toward getting people to click “Buy Now.”
Take Patagonia for example. In a 2021 study on the reputation of corporations, the outdoor retailer scored #1 in terms of consumer perception, and it’s not by accident. Rather than operating with a more expected brand purpose, like making quality outdoor gear, Patagonia went deeper. They’ve stated that their purpose is to build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to protect nature, and not be bound by convention. Nothing subtle about that.
Simply stating your brand’s purpose doesn’t mean anything to consumers unless you back it up. This deeper brand purpose bleeds into everything Patagonia does, inspiring everything from the way they make their goods to the introduction of their apparel repair program, sustainability initiatives, even their public lawsuit against the Trump administration to protect millions of acres of Utah wilderness.
By defining their brand purpose, living it through their actions, and sharing that purpose with their audience, Patagonia has grown from a small shop in California to one of the most beloved American brands with an estimated revenue of $1.5 billion in 2022.
This success isn’t by accident. Sure, there’s a lot of work between here and $1.5 billion in revenue, but it starts with answering the complex questions, “what does your brand do here?” and “what does our business stand for?” with simple, compelling answers.
As a Brand Director at EightySeven, I’ve seen the power of focused brand purposes first hand. And if you want to enhance recall, inspire loyalty, and drive your business forward, then one of the best investments you can make is investing time into answering those questions.
Thinking about investing in a purpose to enhance your brand and grow your business? Let’s talk! Shoot us a message at hello@madeby87.com