Three Dimensions of Brand Purpose

Brand purpose has been firmly advocated as a fundamental requirement for winning the favor of today’s apparently more discerning consumers. But the return on investments for articulating and implementing brand purpose remains ambiguous because reliable evidence regarding the relation between brand purpose and brand performance is still lacking. Shedding light on this relation has been directly impeded by the unavailability of validated measures to quantify brand purpose and, even more fundamentally, by the absence of a conceptual framework for brand purpose. First, we derive a conceptual framework where brand purpose is the goal to create value in three purpose dimensions: financial success, customer benefits and third-party effects. Second, we develop and validate a consumer-based measure of perceived brand purpose. Based on these quantitative scores, the specific composition of a brand’s purpose can be located in the three purpose dimensions to support and structure its analysis in both academic and applied settings. Our own analysis of the data for 111 brands from 1,531 participants reveals an almost universal hierarchy and specific trade-offs among the purpose dimensions. Crucially, brands which are perceived to focus on customer benefits and third-party effects outperform brands that are perceived to focus on financial success. In conclusion of the article, we integrate brand purpose into the branding literature and discuss avenues for future research. We furthermore outline how our findings, and the novel measure may be applied in brand management to track and optimize perceived brand purpose.

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