There was a moment — roughly between 2013 and 2017 — when brand purpose felt genuinely radical. The idea that a company could stand for something beyond its product, that profit and principle could coexist without one canceling the other, that a brand’s “why” mattered as much as its “what” — this felt, briefly, like a real shift in how business thought about itself. Then every brand got a purpose, and the shift became the wallpaper.
The Golden Age (When Purpose Was Still Surprising)
The intellectual foundation was solid. Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” gave the concept a TED-friendly architecture. Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan demonstrated that a $60 billion company could build purpose into its operating model and still grow. Patagonia made environmental activism a business strategy before anyone had a framework for it. These were genuine examples of purpose functioning as a competitive differentiator — because they were early, because they were consistent, and because the purpose was embedded in actual decisions rather than just communications.
The consulting industry noticed. The agency industry noticed. The conference circuit noticed. Purpose became a deliverable.
The Proliferation (When Every Brand Found Its Why)
By 2019, the purpose workshop had become a standard line item in brand strategy engagements. Companies that made snack foods discovered they were “nourishing human connections.” Banks found they were “empowering people to build better futures.” A telecommunications company, somewhere, declared it existed to “bring the world closer together” — unaware, apparently, that Facebook had already claimed that particular purpose and was having some difficulties with it.
The resulting purposes were not lies, exactly. They were aspirations laundered through the language of mission statements until the original intention became unrecognizable. The purpose existed in the brand deck. It did not exist in the pricing model, the supply chain, the customer service department, or the bonus structure of the executives who had approved it.
The Backlash (Quiet but Structural)
The backlash arrived not as a dramatic reversal but as a slow erosion of credibility. Consumers started noticing the gap between what brands said they stood for and what they actually did. Brand purpose, which had briefly made some brands more trustworthy, began making all brands less trustworthy — because the category had been so thoroughly colonized by performance that genuine purpose became indistinguishable from its imitation.
By 2023, major holding companies were quietly advising clients that “purpose-led” was a difficult brief to execute well. Some CEOs began describing purpose communication as a reputational liability. The cycle had completed itself in under a decade.
What Remains
Purpose works when it costs something — when a company makes decisions that sacrifice short-term revenue in service of a principle it actually holds. It does not work as a brand communications strategy applied to a company that operates identically to its competitors in every dimension that matters. The question worth asking is not “what is our purpose?” but “what have we actually given up in service of it?” If the answer is nothing, you don’t have a purpose. You have a tagline.
For everyone who has sat in a purpose workshop knowing this but not quite knowing how to say it: Fuck The Brief is available at the NoBriefs shop. It does not have a brand purpose. It has a point.
