Brand purpose has had a strange lifecycle in marketing.
At its peak, it was treated as a near-moral requirement. The idea that every organisation needed to stand for something bigger than itself became orthodoxy. Purpose statements were written. Campaigns were built around societal missions.
And for a handful of brands, it worked. Patagonia built a business around environmental conviction that ran through every decision, not just the marketing. A few others followed. The results were real, and they were noticed.
Then came the copying.
What tends to happen when something works in marketing is that everyone reaches for it, regardless of whether the conditions that made it work are present. Businesses with no genuine stake in a cause started performing one. Purpose became a shortcut people hoped would replicate results they had not earned. And when that happens at scale, the backlash is predictable.
Critics pushed back hard, arguing that brand purpose had been widely misused. In many cases, it had become performative. Brands were bolting lofty causes onto businesses that were simply trying to sell products, and calling it strategy.
Much of that criticism was right.
But the reaction has gone further than the correction warranted. In rejecting the excesses of the purpose era, the industry has started to dismiss something that still has real value. And that is a different kind of mistake.
The real problem was never purpose itself
The real problem was what people believed purpose was supposed to do.
It was treated as a substitute for strategy. As a moral position to communicate externally. As a platform for campaigns.
None of those are the actual job of purpose.
Strategy decides what a company will do, where it will compete, and how it intends to win. That is its job. Purpose does something different. It answers a question that strategy does not: why would it matter if you succeeded?
Those are two distinct questions. Conflating them is where the purpose era went wrong. And continuing to conflate them, in the other direction, by dismissing purpose because it was misused, is where the current thinking goes wrong too.
Most businesses do not need a grand cause
One of the lasting mistakes of the purpose movement was the implication that every brand needed to fix something global.
Most do not.
A manufacturing business, a professional services firm, a B2B technology platform — none of these need a sweeping societal mission to build a strong brand. Expecting them to perform one is where purpose became theatre.
What they do need is something simpler, and in many ways more powerful: a clear articulation of why the work they do actually matters.
Not in financial terms. Not in product features. In human terms.
That is a different kind of purpose. It is not a campaign. It is not a press release. It is the answer to a question that most leadership teams struggle to answer plainly: what would be genuinely lost if this business stopped existing?
When a business can answer that question clearly and honestly, something shifts.
Where purpose actually does its work
The real value of purpose is not external. It is internal.
I have sat in enough strategy workshops to recognise the pattern. A leadership team aligns around a strategy. The logic is sound. The direction is clear. And then, months later, execution stalls. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because the people responsible for delivering it never fully believed in it.
Strategy provides direction. Purpose provides the reason to care about travelling in that direction.
Alex H. Smith makes a useful distinction in No Bullsh*t Strategy — the “why” of a business is not strategy. It is a leadership tool designed to help people internalise a direction and feel genuinely invested in executing it. That framing holds up. When a clear sense of purpose is present, the strategy stops feeling like something to agree with and starts feeling like something worth doing.
That is not a small distinction. The distance between intellectual alignment and genuine commitment is where most strategy execution fails.
Clarity first, purpose second
There is a sequence to this that matters.
Purpose cannot be manufactured from the outside. It cannot be workshopped into existence through a two-day offsite, or audited into a business by a consultant who spends three weeks reading internal documents. If the answer to “why does this work matter?” is not already alive somewhere inside the organisation, the exercise produces a sentence, not a belief.
This is where inside-out thinking becomes important.
The most useful version of brand purpose is not a statement crafted to resonate with an external audience. It is an honest articulation of something the people inside the business already know to be true about the work they do and the value it creates. The job is to surface it, sharpen it, and make it legible, not to invent it.
When that happens, purpose stops being a communications device and starts being a unifying lens. It becomes the thing that helps a leadership team make decisions consistently. It becomes the reason a new employee understands, within weeks, what this place is actually about. It becomes the signal that attracts the right clients, the right people, and the right partners, and quietly filters out the rest.
At Di Marca, our purpose is to use big-brand thinking to lead change and help our clients win. That statement does something useful beyond describing what we do. It immediately clarifies who we are for. A client who wants a new logo or a prettier website is not our client. We work with businesses that want to create real change. The purpose does not try to attract everyone. It is designed to resonate with the right people and be irrelevant to everyone else. That is how a genuine purpose is supposed to function.
A better frame
The critics of brand purpose were right to challenge the way it was used. Performative purpose, purpose as campaign, purpose as a substitute for genuine strategic thinking — all of that deserved the scrutiny it received.
But the concept itself was not the problem. The misuse was.
When defined correctly, purpose is not a piece of marketing theatre. It is one of the more effective tools a leadership team has for turning a strategy from something people understand into something they believe in.
Strategy without purpose can still work. But it tends to require more management, more explaining, and more pushing than it should. When purpose is present and genuine, the energy runs in a different direction. People do not need to be convinced. They already know why it matters.
And that, for any business trying to execute at pace, is worth quite a lot.
