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Your brand purpose is an opportunity to connect with your consumer on a personal level and resonate with their values. Brand purpose allows you to efficiently communicate and establish your identity in relation to your competitors. It goes much further than just making promises that in reality, any brand can deliver. (I should also add here, your brand purpose should not include the obvious offering that any business can offer. There is a minimum expectation that I expect of any business, and there are a few times when these expectations are required to be communicated). In a nutshell, your brand purpose is what makes you different.
In an ever-changing world, you must be proactive with a firm belief in your values. This message should go further than just talking about your product. Your brand purpose is your opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competitor and ensure that your customer knows why they connect to your brand value as well as the brand itself.
Identifying your purpose is a challenging task, but it brings your mission statement and vision together to contribute to the overall brand identity. Combine this with constancy about your messaging and you have a key to success.
Here are three examples of brands with a strong brand purpose:
Yorkshire Tea has a fun approach to their social media presence. There has been one “stunt” that the social media team at Yorkshire Tea delivered (in my opinion) perfectly…
Things that are coming home:
? 2 x Kallax shelving units
? 1 x Billy bookcase
? 24 x Dime bars
? Football#WorldCup pic.twitter.com/2PIL1NtHKr— Yorkshire Tea (@YorkshireTea) July 7, 2018
This post was funny, engaging, relevant with historical references that were really prominent.
However, in recent events, we have seen them in the news in relation to their social media response to the BLM movement, when they were seemingly called out for not reacting quick enough. This escalated quickly and resulted in #Solidaritea with other tea brands including PG Tips and Teapigs.
Innocent Smoothies has such an engaging way of communicating. It’s fun, friendly, cheeky and targets both children and adults alike. They like to hide messages on their packaging, both discretely and in plain sight, and this fun aspect makes them different from competitors.
I’ve previously worked with packaging companies and the legislation that must be adhered to can sometimes leave very little space on the packaging for anything other than essential communications.
Innocent encourages true interaction with more than just their product (smoothies and juices etc.) and has strong ethical values with their packaging. They play on the literal sense of innocence, with their tone of voice creating a personal first-person engagement. They take this innocence further by offering widely recyclable packaging solutions to ensure a smaller footprint on the planet.
Method has really revolutionised the glamour in cleaning for me. They offer a strong identity with ethical status and ecological values, previously an unheard-of approach to the cleaning industry. Now they have developed into a visually engaging brand. They have created a visual progression by utilising the current influencer lead market into becoming a leader in engaging imagery and aspirational product placement. Evoking complementary colour schemes with their product identities, leading towards ASMR design.
These are just some examples that stand out for me and all for very different reasons. I resonate with these brands and their attributes stand out in my mind due to their impact.
I guess it would be nice to review these in a years’ time and see if I still have a similar opinion or if the values I currently hold dear about brand purpose are still the same.
