Phil WhiteA Brand Purpose Agency Guide
Learn how a brand purpose agency can help you close the intention-action gap by getting brands and retailers working more collaboratively to drive the right behavior change.
Welcome to our guide on activating brand purpose. This article and accompanying framework will help you develop campaigns and behavior-changing ideas that align with your brand mission and brand vision, resonate with your audience, and drive meaningful results by focusing on the interaction of three essential elements:
- What your brand stands for: Capture your brand’s purpose mission or core benefit
- What the world needs: What are the social or environmental issues that matter most to your clients, audience, and the broader community?
- Intention-action gap: Understand and remove the biggest barrier preventing shoppers from taking action. ,
The intersection of these can deliver a triple bottom line win for people, planet, and profit, enabling you to align your current brand vision or brand mission behind a clear purpose articulation that can ultimately transform your brand purpose into profit.
“Retailers, as the main link between consumers and their products, are imperative to communicating sustainable products and increasing their demand.”
Marketing Sustainable Products in the Retail Sector
Step 1: Understanding Brand Purpose
What is Brand Purpose?****
A simple definition of brand purpose is:
“A higher-order reason for a brand's existence that goes beyond making money and adds value to society.”
Digging a little deeper, brand purpose is:
- The brand's reason for being – what is your unique focus and what does your brand exist to do?
A social impact or ambition that's bigger than the brand itself – how does your brand create a better world that will benefit humankind in some way?
A motive beyond simply making money – a recent Edelman Trust Barometer found that 71% of respondents said they'd lose trust in a brand if it put its profits over people!
Why Brand Purpose Matters
The eXo (Exponential Organization) community refers to Brand Purpose as an MTP or (Massive Transformative Purpose). If articulated well and embedded into the DNA of the brand or organization, the MTP scales impact, reduces costs, and gives purpose-driven companies a competitive advantage.
*“Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) describes a better future for the world (or at least your industry or community). It doesn't specify how. It's not about you, your customers, your organization, your products or services. No ‘you', ‘we' or ‘us'. You are not in the picture. *
It is not a marketing slogan. Consider it your north star, but one that doesn't restrict your organization from changing direction. It might excite and scare you, and catch in your throat, it matters that much to you. You might never fully achieve it, yet it is still worth striving for. Generally speaking, a great MTP attracts the customers, community, partners, and resources you need to make a dent in the universe…”
Brand Purpose Examples from Leading Companies
Companies seeking to create a strong brand purpose should look to some of the world's biggest companies who have managed to articulate a compelling brand purpose effectively:
Steve Jobs articulated Apple's purpose like this…
“At Apple, we create tools for the mind that advance humankind.”
Similarly, Lego's is… “Inspiring the builders of tomorrow.”
And here's the one for Tesla… “To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.”
They all share a clearly defined brand purpose, yet they don’t mention phones, toy bricks, or electric cars! Find out more about Brand Activation Marketing Service
Step 2: What is Brand Activation?
Activating brand purpose requires far more focus and singularity than simply articulating it.
Without access to both the "real estate" and consumer attention to tell your story, your brand purpose may not resonate—especially in a fast moving retail context.
The Challenge of Consumer Attention
The biggest challenge is the shopper’s demand for convenience and short attention span while shopping, whether in physical stores or online.
Brands have only a brief opportunity to:
- Grab the shopper’s attention.
- Communicate their brand purpose and values effectively.
- Communicate the right message, offer, or incentive to change behavior
Without addressing this challenge, even the best intentions may fail to register with habit-driven or task-focused shoppers.
Studying Shopping Behavior
To succeed, brands must take the time to understand how their shoppers behave along the entire path to purchase.
This involves:
- Identifying the biggest intention-action gap, or what prevents shoppers from making sustainable purchasing decisions.
- Exploring the tension between what shoppers truly want and what stops them from making better choices.
- Using these insights to develop the right message or role for the brand to play at retail.
By understanding these behaviors and barriers, brands can begin to address the gaps and motivate better buying decisions
The Best Buying Decisions
The best buying decision often emerges at the intersection of those three critical factors we mentioned above:
- What your brand stands for
- What the world needs
- The biggest intention action gap
These intersections provide opportunities to align brand purpose with meaningful behavior change at retail, because no matter how small they seem, at scale they are high stakes and can have a massive impact
The Role of Commercial Partnerships
These intersection points also allow companies, retailers, and non-profits to collaborate to create social enterprise-based partnerships that can drive financial benefits over time, and provide a model for driving a more circular and regenerative economy.
Find out more about Brand Activation Marketing Service
Step 3. How to Address Consumer Barriers Through Purpose-Driven Branding
Overcoming Barriers to Sustainable Consumer Habits
For many conscious consumers, the second most common challenge is not knowing where to start when forming sustainable buying habits. Brands and retailers can play a vital role in guiding consumers by co-creating and collaborating around the following principles
Identifying Shared Sustainable Behaviors
A great starting point is to pinpoint a sustainable behavior that both the brand and retailer can support together. This shared focus:
- Opens a dialogue to agree on strategic alignment.
- Helps uncover any shortcomings in the existing brand, customer or retail experience.
By working together, brand and retail leaders can identify white space opportunities to build stronger customer relationships and enhance their sustainability efforts.
Creating a Shared Plan of Action
Bringing a brand to market in the retail space is a critical moment for action. Success hinges on ensuring everyone involved understands their roles and responsibilities. However, there can be differing expectations:
- Some retailers expect brands to take the lead by recommending ways to encourage responsible shopping and consumption and will charge them to ‘pay to play’ in the category through feature and display
- Conversely, some brands rely on retailers to set clear expectations and will develop their activation ideas, selling strategies and tactics to help the retailer meet their own sustainability goals and commitments. This is a much better strategy because interests are better aligned and retailers will often offer more support by way of media and placement.
To navigate this, brands should:
- Identify key stakeholders and align to the key sustainability goals and commitments of the retailer
- Ensure that goals , commitments and commercial KPIs are shared and used to benchmark success.
Aligning Teams for Collaborative Execution
A shared plan of action provides clarity for all parties, ensuring:
- Responsibilities are clearly delineated.
- Broader teams, partners, and agencies are properly briefed.
This collaborative approach builds alignment and equips everyone involved with the direction they need to bring the strategy to life effectively. It also strengthens partnerships and enhances the likelihood of achieving market share potential while promoting sustainable behaviors.
Connecting the Category to the Need State
Connecting your brand to the consumer’s ‘need state’ involves understanding what consumers truly want and finding ways to meet those needs while positively impacting society and the environment. This connection is essential for aligning sustainability goals with tangible outcomes.
Delivering on Consumer Needs Through Sustainability
Ask yourself: “How can our sustainable behavior help drive consumer needs and unlock category growth opportunities for our brand?”
For example, Tide’s #TurnToCold campaign linked its sustainability goal—reducing energy use—with consumer priorities like superior cleaning performance and value. They achieved this by:
- Highlighting $150 annual energy savings on retail displays.
- Partnering with the NFL to showcase effective cold-water cleaning.
- Promoting online guides for families with energy-saving tips.
This approach allowed Tide to connect sustainability goals with category drivers, resulting in a win-win for the brand and consumers.
TASK
Our Retail Activation for Good guidebook, compiles a list of 10 guiding principles to help steer brands and retailers towards better collaboration in sustainable retail. Discover inspiring case studies along with the know-how to help activate your brand purpose.
Find out more about Brand Activation Marketing Service
Step 4 Understanding the Intention-Action Gap
Once your brand identifies key benefits and aligns with what the world needs, the next step is to determine what prevents shoppers from making the best, most sustainable purchasing decisions.
Bridging the Intention-Action Gap
The ultimate goal is to shift consumer behavior toward sustainable choices by addressing the barriers to action. Key challenges may include:
- Low relevance: Shoppers may not see the product as relevant to their needs.
- Disbelief: A lack of trust in claims about sustainability.
- Emotional disconnect: Insufficient resonance with the consumer.
At a channel level, obstacles might include:
- Inconvenience: Difficulty accessing or using the product.
Complexity: Confusion about category options and benefits.
Deploying Resources Effectively
Traditionally, the intention-action gap is described as the shift from “awareness to consideration” in the consumer journey. But bridging this gap involves:
- Considering the entire path to purchase from awareness to consumption and even recommendation and referral.
- Focusing on the key moments that matter most to.shoppers along that path to purchase
- Investing in product development, packaging, display, or improving navigational education and inspiration in the category to ensure that shoppers are more likely to choose your brand
By addressing these gaps, brands can ensure that shoppers' good intentions lead to action, fostering both category growth and sustainable impact.
About Grounded
Grounded can help you find and measure the value of your intention action gap quickly and efficiently, relative to your competitive set, without expensive or time-consuming research study.
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