As we near the end of a tumultuous, era-defining year, other industry voices are joining the FT in arguing that there is a business imperative to become more socially responsible. Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI reported that this year saw a sharp increase in expectations of business leaders to speak out on social and political issues (up from 62% to 68% YoY). Along the same lines, Marketing Prof Scott Galloway recently said that, “Capitalism fails unless it rests on a foundation of empathy and love,” and last week the president of the Market Research Society, Jan Gooding wrote, “We are entering an age when every brand should be doing something to create a better, fairer society.”
This all stands in stark contrast to the backlash against the very notion of ‘brand purpose’, which took hold before the pandemic. As Mark Ritson commented in 2019,
“Patently, the whole concept of brand purpose is moronic. I do not want Starbucks telling me about race relations and world peace -– I want it to serve me a decent coffee in pleasant locations.”
How quickly this sentiment has aged.
For a variety of coalescing factors, from the decline of the post war consensus to the tech revolution, brands have never played a more central role in our lives. This dominance puts greater responsibility on companies to demonstrate their point of view, and act on it. At either end of the spectrum, from progressive brands like Patagonia and Noah NYC, to juggernauts such as Google, Visa Card and Coca-Cola, all are urging us to ‘shop local’. Businesses are slowly coming out from the shadows of neutrality and staking their ground.
At the end of 2020, brands have been called out for keeping silent, not saying the right thing, or not doing enough, and the proportion of people saying that they want to buy from brands that reflect their own values has risen from 54% to 72%. That’s a remarkable rise and whilst of course, it is claimed, it shows intent and will — and that’s significant enough to warrant serious attention.
This new landscape is tough to navigate, but shying away from or ignoring the question is not sensible. The reputational damage of not putting purpose into action, especially for brands which claim cultural clout, could be detrimental to the overall business. The example set by Dr. Martens repaying its furlough money, a brand which owes much of its success to the cultural zeitgeist, is what the right thing looks like.
Consequently, the term ‘brand sustainability’ has taken on a whole new meaning. Strategy teams are not only planning for long-term commercial success, they are also ensuring that the brand is prepared for cultural discourse, as abstaining is no longer a viable option.
The Empathy Delusion, written in 2019 by Andrew Tenzer of Reach Plc and Ian Murray is crucial to this discussion. The report states that the world view of mainstream marketing is absolutely not the world view of much of the population — this much we should have already acknowledged. The outcome is that most marketeers show equal to or less empathy in understanding people’s perspectives which don’t match their own. This especially comes to light when we don’t reflect the makeup of the people we are trying to engage, notably demographics such class, race and gender, or attitudinal-led behaviours.
This has proven to be a timely paper given the spotlight 2020 has shone on these major disparities. The question is whether a global pandemic and widespread social activism is enough to break this age-old problem.
However, there has been at least one promising outcome. There are plenty of new, independent brands springing up, precisely because the founders were not seeing themselves represented by existing organisations. These are brands that start with purpose, not product. For instance, beauty collectives for underrepresented skin tones and diverse media publications — two industries that suffer from majority white leadership and staffing. These burgeoning businesses understand how best to serve a community, not just ‘customers’.
For brands big and small, this shaken up world has created new roles for them to fill. Too many organisations start with the product and tack on marketing, without connecting back to any underlying purpose, mission or values. The events of this year should have turned this process on its head. We don’t need every brand to have an opinion on the world at large, but the private sector has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to decisive action.
2021 is going to be a tough year for the UK. It’s going to take a forensic effort to understand the new landscape and the space brands can and should occupy within it. Work and family life have blurred, in the same way that public and private sectors have (note the semantic exchange between the two worlds of the terms citizen and human with customer and consumer). There has been a space left by the decline in collectivism and there is a growing expectation that the private sector plus the charitable sector will shore that up. The reality of this is another question, but it does leave a meaningful opportunity for brands to make an impact beyond their commercial sights.
Purpose without meaning is called out as disingenuous, and damages brands sometimes beyond repair. But by talking to people about the things they care about, are thinking about, and living everyday, brands can be relevant, helpful and simultaneously grow. It’s our responsibility to put purpose back at the heart of brands, not just in a deck, but in practical terms — however uncomfortable and hard the journey might be.
