Report Higher purpose When marketing works for the customer as well as the organisation, everyone benefits, leading to an increase in consumer trust in brands as well as in marketing itself. Toachieve this, marketing must be able to respond in moments of potential crisis and uphold brand values through a solid and integrated communications strategy. This alone, however, is still sometimes not enough the foundations of a solid brand should be a sense of purpose Words: Alex Blyth B rand values have always been important to marketing, and, according to the experts, they are becoming even more so. Since 2015, brand consultancy Radley Yeldar has carried out research into the worlds most purposeful brands and published its findings in its Fit for Purpose Index. Paulina Lezama, brand director, says: It has become clear that purpose is more than a passing trend. It is an integral tool for any brand wishing to create wider value than financial profit and remain relevant to consumers, investors and employees. Brand delivers this value in a number of ways. First, it ensures that even in the largest, most geographically disparate organisations, there is consistency of message. As Christopher Baldwin, head of marketing, Northern Europe, at Selligent Marketing Cloud, puts it: Brand values permeate everything a brand does, so its imperative to have these established and immortalised to ensure alignment across a business. For Roland van Breukelen, marketing director at SAP Hybris, the issue is one of trust and loyalty. Customer loyalty has long been the ultimate prize for brands, and trust is the main driver to achieve it, he says. People need to feel like they can trust the person or entity they buy from or interact with. Others point to the rise of the millennials as a key driver of this shift. Not only is this the largest demographic group in history, but it is also the one with the highest expectations of brand behaviour. A recent study of millennials by American Express found that, in the US, 68 per cent want to make a positive difference in the world. Also, 78 per cent of US, 81 per cent of French, 74per cent of British and 68 per cent of German millennials say it is important for the values of their employer to match their values. Whether driven by the need for consistency, a desire for loyalty, or a response to consumer demands, purpose and values are rising up the corporate agenda. As a result, the most successful marketers are increasingly those who recognise the importance of clear values, consistently communicated and profoundly experienced. The speed read The power of brand has endured and is more potent than ever Social media offers a window into the mindset of the customer Brands with purpose and values engender customer loyalty Articulate values without jargon to mobilise and inspire your audience Choose values that relate to your business specifically Creating a point of difference There is no shortage of brands doing well to uphold their values. The Body Shop, for example, has spent the past four decades communicating its ethical credentials. Initiatives such as its widely promoted Forever Against Animal Testing petition which aims to reach eight million signatures this year is the latest in a long line of significant statements of intent and leadership. Dove is another beauty brand that has pushed beyond the traditional confines of the sector. Florence Touz, professor in communication at Audencia Business School, says: By breaking established sector codes, it brought together women from around the world into a new community rarely seen before in the field of beauty and cosmetics. The brand understood that its subject was self-confidence and deployed a world of content on this theme. Its Dove for self-esteem project goes far beyond soaps and shower gel. The brand has already reached 20 million young people and women through mentoring or training programmes. In a similar vein, online fashion retailers ASOS and Missguided are among a growing number of brands that have embraced not retouching the images of models they use on their sites while tanning product Isle of Paradise also uses its Instagram page to display real women rather than image-edited versions, adding to a discussion that has become highly topical in the media. In a very different sector, one of the most high-profile examples of a business currently challenging traditional notions of purpose and value is electric car manufacturer Tesla, which is building a strong brand in a very unconventional way. The company has been able to convince 500,000 consumers to pay for a car that has not yet been produced. Getting the basics right by building a brand and connecting the brand strategy with the business strategy has proved a powerful means of getting customer buy-in. Damaging revelations While many brands are getting it right, there are also many examples of brands that remain behind the curve. Neil Davidson, managing director of behavioural communications agency HeyHuman, points to United Airliness recent mis-step.After forcibly ejecting a passenger froman overcrowded plane, United Airlines responded in the most undignified way imaginable.Insteadof putting their hands up and apologising for the mistake, the CEO tried to suggest it was thepassengers fault for being disruptive. This turned an already bad situation into an irretrievable one. Facebooks data-usage revelations are a further case in point. Bryony Thomas, bestselling author of Watertight Marketing and former marketing director at Experian, says: Facebook users have invited the platform into their homes and lives, at an unprecedented level of intimacy. The implied values at Fit For Purpose play here were privacy and trust. When values appear to have been Index 2018 trampled, the sense of outrage can be palpable. Then theres Volkswagen for years one of the most trusted brands on the planet whose reputation and share price plummeted after the emissions scandal that erupted in 2015, and which cost the company $25bn in damages. Since that crisis, the Volkswagen marketing team has worked hard to recover the brands reputation although further legal actions are to come. Its communications have focused on people and their relationships with their cars, aiming to recover trust rather than generate sales and its global market share has increased. Social media scrutiny Social media plays an important role in all of these examples, good and bad. It magnifies the statements and actions of organisations, putting them under immediate, intense scrutiny around the world, and it provides a forum for consumers to share and develop opinions. Thanks to social media, the stakes are now a lot higher and an issue can snowball without warning, says HeyHumans Davidson. All you need is for the wrong person to retweet something and you have an angry mob at your door. To survive in this environment, you need to build a set of values that will work well in times of crisis. Social media makes it harder for brands to hide during a crisis, but it would be a mistake for marketers to see it as a negative influence; it also offers great insight into the issues that consumers care about. Kevin Virsolvy, regional director, marketing and demand generation, EMEA and APAC at IT consultancy Crimson Hexagon, says: In todays unpredictable consumer landscape, preferences are constantly evolving, which does not help brands that struggle to keep up and predict what consumers truly desire. Fortunately, social media data offers a real-time window into the minds of the consumer world. This allows organisations to track consumer preferences dynamically and uncover the most relevant insight relating to their brand. Beyond this, social media also offers opportunities for brands to engage positively on thoseissues that consumers care about. For example, Moses Velasco, chief strategy officer at social media marketing platform Socialbakers, points to the way Tesco responds to topical, emotional, consumer issues. Our data shows that some of Tescos best-performing posts on social had a philanthropic, human-interest angle that clearly resonated with audiences, he explains. From healthy eating andreducing food waste to scrapping the tampon tax, Tesco latched onto important and meaningful industry topics to drive their fan engagement in 2017 and it paid off. The grocery giant massively increased its number of fans on Facebook in 2017, by almost a quarter of a million. Discover your values How do brands ensure they get the message right? How can they find the values that best represent the purpose of the company and the interests of consumers? For many organisations, it is a difficult process that requires them to elevate their perspective beyond the transactional. Many marketers feel pressured or coerced into creating messaging and marketing that pushes conversion or puts ROI [return on investment] as the primary focus of every piece of marketing, says Baldwin, at Selligent. But if you fail to engage with your customers after the transaction, that lifetime customer value will quickly dwindle. He points to John Lewis and cycling brand Rapha as examples of those that have found and communicated values beyond the simple transaction. Professor Touz, at Audencia Business School, goes further, arguing that brands must look beyond relationships to tap into customer passion. Whether offering service, entertainment or coaching, each brand must find at the heart of its DNA the values that will mobilise its community, she says. Red Bull chose extreme sports, Always chose feminism, and shoe brand Repetto the expertise required in ballet dancing. She continues: The purpose of marketing and communication should be to hear and respect audiences not to sell at any price. To have forgotten this is an aberration of the end of the 20th century. It is a short-term vision that destroys resources, confidence and value. More and more companies are engaging in co-creation marketing, involving consumers in their strategy. Beyond jargon When the values that connect your brand to its customers have been identified, marketers need to find ways to articulate them without producing empty corporate jargon. Perhaps the biggest issue most corporates have is in espousing generic values that do nothing to tell us, or their own people, what makes them special, says Matt Gibbs, analyst at Radley Yeldar. When we surveyed the values of the FTSE 100 a few years back, in our Value of Values survey, we discovered that more than 40 per cent of the 100 had integrity as a value. This was closely followed by words such as honest, excellence, collaborative and open. We think these are broadly useless and lazy. They seem to be more of a box-ticking exercise than anything that might elevate the brand. Enrons values were, famously, Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence, proving how hopeless they were in giving the company a moral compass. Our favourite values are those that are wholly ownable by brands, or that work in a combination that is ownable, concludes Gibbs. For example, Innocents values are good to the core, protected futures and heroes of change. Although the average smoothie drinker may not be able to tell you exactly what the brands values are, its these positive connotations brought to life through the actions and marketing of the business that drive its equity. Coping with crisis Identifying the values that drive your brand, and then articulating them in a way that engages people, is not easy. It is, though, far easier to do it in moments of calm than in the eye of a crisis. When marketers invest time in advance, they are more likely to find themselves in a far stronger position when a crisis does hit. Anthony Earley, commercial director at strategic communications consultancy Verbalisation, cites the example of Coca-Cola and its best taste values. The recent sugar tax has led many other brands such as Fanta, Lucozade, and Ribena to reduce the sugar in their recipes, but Coca-Cola has stayed true to its values of being the best-tasting liquid and kept its full-sugar version the same. Its strategy for overcoming the sugar tax and remaining true to its values is to drive marketing and spend behind their lower-sugar variants. Another example is the position Nutella has developed as an integral part of life for many families. This helps it to weather attacks related to the use of palm oil better than many otherbrands. Values in a crisis are not simply about strong relationships they also guide the actions of your people. If something hits a business that causes reputation damage, returning to core values should guide and underpin how you respond, says Bryony Thomas. Look at the recent racial discrimination scandal at Starbucks; the company responded with a full and genuine apology, and closed more than 8,000 stores in the USA for training on racial bias. While the incident was still damaging, the speed and scale of response was widely welcomed. Fundamental shift This focus on values and purpose is clearly more than a passing fad. It is a fundamental reshaping of the relationship between brands and consumers. Consumers continue to move away from more is better to meaningful materialism, says Elayne Read, senior brand planner at Coley Porter Bell. Younger consumers are less interested in acquiring more there is so much to buy out there that they feel stuffocated. The end result of this is that people feel less of a need to acquire more things, as evidenced by the rise in shared-ownership Zipcar, and rental services such as Hire the Catwalk. Brands such as Volvo are recognising this with their new Care campaign, in which it envisages a future where people no longer buy cars, but subscribe to them instead. Set to the soundtrack of The Sound of Musics Favourite Things, it shows the darker side of capitalism, with endless piling up of packages and crowds pushing to get into a retailers one-day sale. As people move towards sustainable practices that put the collective good first, we are seeing ideas such as peer-to-peer transactions, the circular economy, and zero waste as well as the rise in wellness architecture becoming more mainstream. It is a trend that few organisations can afford to ignore. More than anything, the organisations that want to get this right need to recognise the pivotal role played by marketing. As Davidson, at HeyHuman, concludes: Marketers must have a voice in the boardroom. If youre not influencing the product, youre just doing marcomms. Be a real marketer, otherwise youre not going to have any power over the message youre trying to convey. cim.co.uk/exchange Social media data offers a real-time window into the minds of the consumer world Kevin Virsolvy, regional director, marketing and demand generation, Crimson hexagon