The timeline is almost poetic in its compression. Brand purpose arrived as a genuine intellectual contribution to marketing thought — roughly 2010-2015, with its philosophical roots in Jim Stengel’s research connecting brand ideals to business growth and Simon Sinek’s TED Talk providing the populist version. By 2018, every brand had a purpose. By 2020, every purpose sounded identical. By 2023, the backlash was institutional — campaigns were being criticized not for lacking purpose but for having it. A concept that began as a differentiator had become a liability. Fifteen years from idea to cliché, which in marketing terms is actually a fairly long run.
What Brand Purpose Was Supposed to Mean
The original argument was substantive. It went: brands that have a clear reason for existing beyond profit — a genuine contribution to people’s lives or to the world — tend to attract more loyal customers, more motivated employees, and better long-term business performance than brands that are purely transactional. The research supporting this was real, if overstated in the popularized versions.
The application was straightforward: identify why your brand exists in a way that goes beyond the product, articulate that purpose clearly, and let it guide decisions about what you make, who you partner with, how you communicate, and what causes you associate with. Done correctly, this produced genuinely distinctive brands with clear decision-making criteria. Patagonia. Dove (for a while). Lush. Organizations whose stated purpose was operationally connected to what they actually did.
The key word is “operationally.” The purpose had to be real — meaning it had to constrain behavior, not just decorate it.
How It Broke
What happened next was entirely predictable in retrospect and somehow still surprising when it occurred. Marketing departments, under pressure to show strategic depth and differentiation, adopted the language of purpose without the substance. The exercise became: find a social issue adjacent to your category, attach your brand to it, produce a campaign in the emotional register of a documentary short, and call the result a “purpose-driven initiative.”
This process was not cynical in all cases. Many of the people involved genuinely believed in what they were doing. The problem was structural: purpose was being used as a communication strategy rather than as a business strategy. It was positioned as a way to talk to consumers rather than a way to run the company. When purpose is a campaign rather than a conviction, it is vulnerable to the most obvious question: does your brand actually behave this way when it’s not being watched?
For most brands, the answer was: not particularly. Carbonated beverages do not become health-positive because the campaign features inspiring music and a diverse cast. Fossil fuel companies do not become environmentally responsible because they fund a tree-planting initiative. Fast fashion brands do not become sustainable because they launch a “conscious” sub-line that represents three percent of their volume while the other ninety-seven percent continues as before. The gap between stated purpose and operational reality was visible, and audiences — younger ones especially — developed an excellent sensor for it.
The Pepsi-Kendall Jenner Moment and Its Aftermath
The 2017 Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner resolving a protest with a can of soda was not the cause of brand purpose’s decline. But it was the clearest symptom of where the concept had arrived. A real social movement — the protest — had been borrowed for brand purposes, stripped of its specific political content, and converted into a generic metaphor for unity and connection that happened to feature a carbonated beverage as the agent of change. The reaction was immediate, nearly universal, and for once, not wrong.
The Pepsi ad was memorable because it was spectacular in its misjudgment. But the underlying error — using social issues as brand territory without substantive commitment — was so widespread that it would be unfair to single out Pepsi. They just did it most visibly.
What the backlash produced, unfortunately, was not a return to substantive purpose-driven business. It produced a shift in tone — more hedged, more ironic, more aware of authenticity as a performance register — while the underlying dynamic remained essentially unchanged. Brands became more careful about how they expressed purpose. Most did not become more purposeful.
What Survives the Collapse
The organizations that built actual purpose — not as a campaign positioning but as an operational commitment — have largely survived the era with their credibility intact. Patagonia continues to donate a portion of profits, has sued the US government over public land policy, and most recently converted its ownership structure in a genuinely unusual act of institutional commitment to its stated values. Whatever you think of the politics, the behavior is consistent with the purpose. That consistency is what brand purpose was always supposed to mean.
For everyone else, the appropriate response to the ruins of the brand purpose era is not nihilism but precision. Don’t claim a purpose you can’t operationalize. Don’t attach to social issues because they’re culturally salient — attach to them because they are genuinely connected to what your business does and because you’re willing to constrain business decisions in service of the commitment. If you can’t do that, don’t use the word “purpose.” “We make excellent products for people who care about X” is a less inspiring sentence than “we exist to change X for the better,” but it is infinitely more defensible.
The Fuck The Brief philosophy applies here with particular force: the brief that says “we need to communicate our brand purpose” before the brand has a genuine purpose is asking for a beautiful lie. Write the honest version instead.
→ Purpose without behavior is just a font choice. NoBriefs — for brands and marketers who’ve decided to mean what they say.