There is no denying that the clarity of brand purpose will lead to the overall success of your brand. But to start defining a brand’s purpose, you will need to shift your mindset to consider the meaningful and unique connection your brand/business has with your audience. At a time when consumers are looking for brands that align with their values, it’s never been important for everyone to know the reason why your brand exists and what you stand for.
When defining a brand purpose that’s fit for a digital age, transparency and authenticity are also increasingly taking center stage in brand image building. Although it’s often trickier than it sounds, understanding the values of your target market and maintaining integrity in your brand’s purpose will play a critical role in building long-term customer loyalty.
A solid and compelling purpose will also go a long way to ensuring employees better understand and feel personally accountable for the company’s vision, mission, and values. Collectively, all these factors make the role of purpose-driven brand strategy a vehicle for real business growth. Essentially, strategic branding offers multiple opportunities to meet and exceed business objectives. Here are four tenets that can help you build your brand purpose.
Think of your employees and customers like your family
It’s critical for consumer-centric brands such as TrafficGuard to understand the importance of transparency with their customers. But every brand should think of their customers like their family. It must embody patience, honesty, authenticity, transparency, empathy, and adaptability. Only then can you truly build the best possible relationship consistently.
Leaders also need to step up and confidently communicate the same family values internally to their employees to ensure they come along and enjoy the journey because at the end of the day their time and commitment to you and your vision is a privilege, not necessarily a right. These family values must define your brand’s purpose and make everyone feel a part of something special. That’s what governs a strong family and a strong business too.
Develop a customer-centric mindset
Never forget that your customers are critical to your success. Although it’s easy to get distracted by internal politics, your customers are backing your endeavour, trusting you with their spending, and your business will suffer without them. Making this relationship work will require transparency and accountability. Most importantly, you must strongly align your purpose and values with theirs.
Your product and people will determine your future success. But the foundations must be a strategy that showcases the alignment and dedication to the customer mindset. For example, at TrafficGuard, we pride ourselves in ensuring that everything we mark as fraudulent or invalid that is impacting the clients marketing budget is clearly shown to the user, as opposed to typical players in the market who have a non-transparent approach to showing why things are fraudulent. This level of transparency enables them to look up anything and understand where it’s coming from, who is committing it, why it is invalid and what they can do about it.
This approach provides the tools for them to optimise themselves out of fraud because they have the answers in front of them. We govern our product in this way because it’s everything that we stand for, and our customers can see that this is more than just a marketing tagline or sales pitch. The end result is that our customers feel empowered and educated on a critical problem that is emerging and more importantly they can do something about it.
Build for impact: macro to micro
Building a mission statement must be designed for impact. At TrafficGuard, we learned the value of this the hard way after becoming victims of ad fraud. The effect it had on all stakeholders in our business drove us to conclude that it would also impact millions of companies worldwide if it affected us. We viewed this calling as our duty and more importantly, our obligation, to solve this critical issue for businesses around the world.
In a $455b industry, 27% of advertising spend is lost to ad fraud. To put this into perspective, that’s $127b a year just vanishing into the ether. If you take a deeper dive into these figures, the average return on $1 spent on marketing is $3, equating to $380b in lost revenue. These losses will cascade down to impact employment, profitability, business strategy, company valuation, and the overall economy.
For these reasons alone, brands should be paying attention to customer feedback, product use time, competitor successes, and competitor failures. This data will be invaluable in helping you determine what to do next and all the other factors that affect consumer and business spending. At TrafficGuard, we term this Macro to Micro, so we are looking at customer-specific data and how that ties in with macro factors before making our next move.
Brand purpose is nothing without the right application
Even today, one myth that persists is that a simple mission statement will be bought into by your employees and even understood by the consumer. This is false. The reality is the landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, and sure, the business needs to evolve, but it still needs to stay true to its brand purpose all through the way.
At TrafficGuard, our mission statement is “driving trust and transparency in the digital marketing ecosystem.” Everything we do as a company reflects this. Our training, language, case studies, and communications with clients and investors reflect and reinforce our brand purpose. Ultimately, your goal is to understand the significant impact your business has and build a brand purpose that reflects that in every stage, from people and product to process.
