The recent trend of brands engaging in purpose-driven conversations has been amplified by the events of 2020. From COVID-19 to #BlackLivesMatter to climate crisis, brands and organizations of any type are increasingly seizing the opportunity — but also feeling the pressure — to engage in complex conversations.
This makes many corporate executives and communicators nervous, as they’re facing difficult questions: What is our topic? What is our angle? What is our voice? Practitioners are longing for guidance on how to approach this.
To help fill this void, the USC Annenberg Center for PR partnered with PRWeek to research various strategies and best practices in brand purpose communication.
In 2019, PRWeek seized the uptake in brand purpose communication by launching the inaugural PRWeek Purpose Award with the intention “to recognize activations that use creative ideas to genuinely further positive causes and also acknowledge the organizations and individuals behind them.” The initiative was well received by brands and agencies, as indicated by the hundreds of entries to the inaugural competition.
In early 2020, the USC Center for PR research conducted a content analysis of 183 campaign entries with the goal to offer insights for practitioners in these areas:
- Categorize predominant purpose topics: what are the types of topics that organizations choose, and what is their prevalence?
- Propose a typology for purpose-driven campaigns: offer insights into the authenticity of purpose as a motivator for a given campaign
- Identify emerging best practices, along with examples of how not to approach purpose communication
Here is a brief presentation of the findings. The full report can be downloaded on the Center for PR’s website.
Cause categories
The campaign cases considered for this study fell into five different types of cause categories, with several cases qualifying for more than one category:
- Social causes – 79 cases
- Health causes – 43 cases
- Economic causes – 32 cases
- Environmental causes – 21 cases
- Political/policy causes – 13 cases
In the social cause category, prominent causes included diversity and inclusion, genderequality and LGBTQ advocacy. Diversity and inclusion, in particular, seemed to be a highly applicable social cause that almost every organization could adopt. Youth empowerment also received attention from various organizations.
Health causes encompassed 11 distinct topics, including medical conditions such as cancer, mental health, disabilities and senior care, among others. The majority of health campaigns were led by nonprofits, although some for-profit organizations took on health issues if they operated in the health sector.
Economic causes were the third most popular cause category. Banks, financial institutions and insurance companies embarked on initiatives regarding financial health and personal finance, which aligned closely with their brands. Among the 33 economic campaigns, five touched on workforce, welfare, and corporate culture. Four campaigns focused on poverty; one was on child poverty while the other three centered on an arising issue — period poverty — faced by women around the world. Three campaigns highlighting period poverty were conducted by feminine care brands. A few campaigns focused on tourism and city development.
Despite the global concern about the climate crisis in 2019, a surprisingly low number of organizations addressed environmental causes. Most of these programs were awareness or action-driven and organized by nonprofits, although a few were initiated by for-profit companies.
Prominent political and policy causes include immigration, gun violence, reproductive rights and human trafficking. Similar to health-related causes, they were mostly conducted by nonprofits. Only two organizations focused on immigration.
Brand purpose typology
The case analysis yielded a typology of brand purpose based on the apparent motivation behind the campaign as a measure of authenticity:
Purpose-Led — Brands that link themselves directly and long-term to a particular cause, making this cause more central to the organization’s mission than CSR campaigns. It is considered the most authentic and genuine approach.
CSR-Centric — Brands that choose a cause that in most cases somehow relates to the company or its brand(s) and turn this topic into a long-term campaign with broad organizational support.
Branding Motivated — Brands that closely align with a particular purpose. If done genuinely, the brand will benefit while making a positive contribution to change.
Opportunistic — Brands execute a purpose-themed campaign as the opportunity arises. These initiatives tend to be short in duration and limited in impact. They have the potential to become more impactful if brands evolve the program by making a deeper and long-term commitment to the cause.
Commercially Motivated — Initiatives where commercial benefits appear to be the primary motivation rather than the cause itself. Cases in this category tend to prioritize awareness for a given cause and stop short of action. Their KPIs focus on market visibility over actual change.
Disingenuous — Campaigns that knowingly make false or misleading purpose claims to promote the brand with no positive impact on causes. Practitioners should stay away from disingenuous activations.
This table illustrates the distribution of cases in each purpose category. It is encouraging that the three most genuine categories show the highest frequencies. But pure commercial gain as the primary motivation is prevalent, and disingenuous campaigns do exist — luckily only in a small number of cases.
Best practices in brand purpose communication
Based on our analysis, we propose the following best practices:
Brand fit
There are pros and cons to each type of campaign brand fit. Organizations should think carefully about which brand fit is the most authentic given their mission and the other elements of their campaign. The cause should make sense given the context of the organization’s purpose statement, past efforts and expertise, and should not be selected purely for self-serving reasons.
Research
Conducting research before implementing campaign activities reflects a real commitment to the issue and helps to position an organization as more knowledgeable about the cause or field. Organizations should dedicate campaign resources to research, so that the findings can inform campaign strategy and provide insight on how to advance specific causes. Research can be used to inform campaign strategy, but also to provide content for thought leadership.
Messaging
Messaging should focus on coalition-building for change, instead of tearing down competitors. This puts the social cause first instead of the competitive advantage that the campaign may give the company. Brands should refrain from communicating what is a part of their normal business operations as purpose.
Other best practices detailed in the full report include:
Need for authenticity— This is the overall guiding principle in genuine purpose communication.
Partnering — Brands are encouraged to initiate industry-wide cooperation in an effort to enlist partners and competitors alike in tackling important problems.
Internal employee engagement — Internal stakeholders and employees should be involved in some way to help build the organization’s purpose from the ground up.
Interactivity — There should be some interactive component to the campaign that prompts people to take an active part in it, ideally in a creative way.
Measuring success — KPIs should include cause-related, action-based events rather than just media reach, and should certainly stay away from reach and advertising equivalency.