Product-Driven vs. Purpose-Driven Marketing

Are marketers trying to be too clever? Have they forgotten that they are here to sell? In all the efforts of marketers to create brands that provide people with identity, have we forgotten about the products? In attempting to heal the world, have brands forgotten to help people with a truly unique product.

As the drive towards articulating purpose has ramped up in recent years, the criticism made by some is that such lofty ideas over-intellectualize what is essentially a relatively straight-forward business. Critics maintain that marketing has no role in world affairs and that building content-rich strategies around an ambitious purpose risks distracting businesses from their core purpose which is to compete, market and grow.

A sizzling brand purpose sets out how a company intends to change the world for the better. Its role is to unite customers and culture alike in the pursuit of that intention. It’s a statement of belief, of hope, of pursuit. It’s born of a wish to see the world put to rights.

State what you fundamentally believe must change in the world. Coke wants to see more happiness. Disney wants to see more magic. Virgin wants to see more rebellion. Google wants to see more things found. What does your brand most want to see happen? What do you passionately want to see stop? Whatever you decide: that’s the goal.

What is your brand going to do to make that change happen? The answer to that question must define your unique involvement. It must help explain why you are most qualified to be trusted in this pursuit and how everyone you care about (including of course your customers) benefits from you trying to get there.

Your purpose should be the goal that everyone who works at your workplace and buys from your brand is most committed to see happen. That’s the big picture. But your purpose must also be able to be framed in such a way as to inspire people at a highly transactional level. Steve Jobs didn’t instruct people to “Think different”. Instead, he encouraged them to continually question what they were doing by asking: “What are you doing today to think different?” Such a benchmark question pushes people to evaluate their actions against the impact they will have. Such questions bring the purpose right down to what anyone is doing in any given moment. If you can’t frame a benchmark question from your purpose, it isn’t personal enough and therefore it risks being less relevant.

Examples that may inspire you:

• Virgin: Screw business as usual and let’s see what’s possible.
• Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• Twitter: The fastest, simplest way to stay close to everything you care about.
• Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

To boil all this down more simply, this is what Simon Sinek refers to as your Why Statement.

A brand purpose may ignite interest but the product is ultimately what people have in their hands. Product-Driven marketing centers on the value of the product and why it is better than the alternatives. This is by all means the traditional form of advertising that predates Purpose-Driven advertising.

Product-driven advertising focuses on why a product is better than the competition. The advertising will explain the value proposition in detail. Their will be no awkward walks on the beach. It is all about why the product is superior to the competition.

In this media, we can easily see Yeti combining both the purpose of the brand with the product. It's an indestructible cooler that lasts for days. Why? Because outdoor enthusiasts need the best when they are in the wild.

Coke Could Lead the Way to More Product-Focused Ads

Consumers Want to Hear More About the Goods, Less About the Concepts

E.J. Schultz

By closing down "Open Happiness" and launching a new, product-focused campaign called "Taste the Feeling," Coca-Cola is acknowledging a new reality in food and beverage marketing: If you are going to sell stuff, you better talk about the stuff.

Consumers want to hear more about how products taste, what's in them and how they are made. So marketers would be wise to go back to the basics with ads that put more emphasis on ingredients and quality, and less on high-minded concepts that are seemingly disconnected from brands, say consumer and marketing experts.

"Stop telling me how your product changes the world and start telling me how much I'm going to love your product. It feels more real, relatable and trustworthy, and it's more consumer-centric," said Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist and professor at Golden Gate University.

Under the seven-year-old "Open Happiness" campaign, Coke often strayed into heavy topics like rallying against online bullying. One effort, called "Where Will Happiness Strike Next," included a 2011 video showing how the brand reunited Filipino people working overseas with their families back home in the Philippines for the holidays.

Coke is not abandoning optimistic messaging in "Taste the Feeling," which launched globally last week. But ads make a concerted effort to show people enjoying Coke during simple, everyday moments. The campaign gets back to the roots of a brand whose very first tagline in 1886 was "Delicious and Refreshing." Coke had "started to talk in a preachy way to people. And Coca-Cola has always been a simple pleasure," said Global Chief Marketing Officer Marcos de Quinto, who took the CMO job a year ago.

Coke is not giving up entirely on putting "cultural leadership" in its marketing, said Rodolfo Echeverria, the marketer's global VP for creative, connections and digital. "But it's going to be in a proportion of one out of 10 and not nine out of 10," he said.

Coke has long been in the crosshairs of health groups that blame soda consumption for rising obesity rates—and that's not likely to change. But with the new campaign, Coke appears to have decided to "stop selling past the negative" of sugar, and "just focus on why consumers drink the product in the first place: because it tastes good and is refreshing," said Rick Shea, a former packaged-food marketing executive and president of Shea Marketing.

Additional Reading

• 130 Years of Coke Taglines

Vocabulary

• Product-Driven Marketing - Noted Above
• Purpose-Driven Marketing - Noted Above

Student Activity

• Identify a marketing campaign centered around product and one for purpose.
  • State the Slogan and Purpose of Each Campaign
  • How are the two campaigns different?
  • Which did you find to have a more compelling message and why?