Building a framework for brand purpose

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I expect most readers will have already seen or heard ‘brand purpose’ discussed; the advertising industry seems obsessed with the topic.

But what’s changed is that large and established organisations have now started to embrace the concept fully. We’ve seen a mass of campaigns with purpose messaging run in the past year from the likes of Mondelez, Unilever and Nike. Cadbury’s Donate Your Words campaign with Age UK is a great example of how the biggest brands have invested in this approach.

At Twitter, the rapid growth of brand purpose marketing presented us with a new and interesting dilemma. As a small advertising research team, there had been an increasing number of water-cooler conversations with internal stakeholders on the topic.

Questions generally focused around three things: whether it worked and why; how it could work better; and what role would Twitter play. Internal stakeholders had their own hypotheses but little evidence available, and the most relevant insight was restricted to claimed survey data, which was often criticised for falling foul of social desirability bias.

Our team needed to give stakeholders something deeper to cut through with two types of brands: the sceptical, who needed proof of value; and enthusiasts, who wanted guidance on how to do it well.

To answer these three questions, we embarked on a programme of research that included combining of qualitative and quantitative methods, including implicit response testing with research agencies Firefish and The Numbers Lab. We spoke to experts with practical experience of purpose marketing and explored a selection of UK purpose campaigns incorporating different targets, categories and causes.

Throughout both our qual and quant it became apparent that recent changes in our world had led to a growing sense of instability; because of this, people increasingly felt that brands had a role to play in helping solve this issue.

More than 80% of respondents to our survey said that brands should be using their position to effect positive change in society, while 77% said that brands had an opportunity to make change happen through purpose campaigns.

This need from consumers has led to them being increasingly receptive toward brand purpose campaigns, reinforced by the results we saw in our implicit response testing, where two in three campaigns implicitly shifted at least one brand attribute positively.

For younger audiences, the results showed that brand purpose campaigns were even more effective. Every campaign we tested shifted at least one implicit brand attribute positively, with perceptions increasing by up to 6 percentage points.

Knowing brand purpose worked and why interest was growing, we now needed a practical tool that we could use to improve the campaigns brands were discussing with us. Using a key drivers analysis, we quantified the importance of 14 separate criteria within brand purpose campaigns for increasing brand positivity. From this we saw a clear mandate – the strongest contribution to campaign success came from grabbing people’s attention, inspiring them to get involved and sparking conversation.

These elements are fundamental to any successful advertising campaign, but often secondary in purpose discussions. Our findings suggested that successful purpose campaigns rely most heavily on good creative. As basic as it sounds, reiterating the fact that the standard rules of advertising still apply is now one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of our internal and external consultations.

Of course, more needs to be considered when it comes to brand purpose. This includes fit with the brand, how genuinely the brand abides by its purpose, and how realistic its goals are. We calculated the contribution that each of our 14 elements had on brand positivity and included a hierarchy of importance within our framework, making sure that the most important elements could be discussed first and foremost to ensure the focus is on areas that drive the most impact.

Another concept we unearthed was the value in careful consideration of target audiences. We’ll often see purpose campaigns hotly disputed, with phrases such as ‘woke-washing’ and ‘virtue signalling’ bubbling up in a predictable way.

To the brands we spoke to, this was a serious concern – opening themselves up to criticism and putting themselves at risk unnecessarily. The difficulty with this was that then brands felt a need to appeal to the widest possible audience to avoid a reaction.

What our research found was that appealing to everyone was extremely difficult (the only campaigns to do this were climate change related) and a better driver of impact was based on campaigns targeting specific audiences.

One example was a retail purpose campaign targeting women. The message logically carried much more weight with this group and the performance reflected this.

In terms of brand positivity, the campaign came out top of all the campaigns we tested when cut against its primary target audiences. Essentially, the more targeted the messaging, the easier it is to have impact.

Understandably, there is a balance to strike between scale and impact. However, we can address the concerns of our clients and give each brand we work with more confidence that its decisions are based on robust evidence, rather than determined by its own aversion to risk.

Rob Turnbull is a research analyst, market insight and analytics, at Twitter