Is Your Brand Living Up To Its Purpose?
Recently while leading a discussion with a group of writers about marcom writing I was asked what is a brand? While we can all easily recognize brands when we see them, but we sometimes struggle with an encompassing definition.
A brand, I replied, is a promise.
The question that followed was tougher; what is a brand’s purpose? After a few minutes of deliberation, we concurred that a brand’s purpose is to empower users to experience something positive and associate that feeling with the brand. In the 70s Coca Cola’s advertising campaign associated drinking Coca Cola with the altruistic joy of teaching the world to sing.
Brand guru, Simon Mainwaring points out in a recent post, “The most successful advertising campaigns of 2017 will look beyond self-interest and offer solutions for social change by embodying the principle that prosperity is the well-being of many, rather than the wealth of a privileged few.”
The Budweiser ad that ran in Super Bowl LI told the story of their co-founder, young Adolphus Busch who came to our country and overcame the intolerance many immigrants continue to experience. By leading with a commentary on current social concerns, in this case, the immigration debate, Budweiser is positioning themselves as more than a beer. They are saying, “we get it, it matters and we have lived this…we are you.” They have defined a purpose for you to engage with their brand on a higher level.
With purpose-driven storytelling, brands have the opportunity to connect with customers on a human level. When you consider the many choices they have, engaging with them this way creates awareness, shapes perception and drives results. In this case, the Budweiser commercial was the most watched commercial during the Super Bowl and has been view 21.5 million times on You Tube. Now, those are metrics any marketer would like to own.
You can view more recent purpose-driven commercials: Airbnb’s #WeAccept, Coca Cola’s #TogetherisBeautiful, 84 Lumber’s Journey 84, Audi’s #DriveProgress,
