The article that follows first appeared on the Australian media and marketing website Mumbrella on October 30th. This is the slightly longer version of the published piece.
I received a number of complaints about the title of the post.
For the benefit of younger readers it is a reference to a particular Jamie Reid poster (of the same title) from punk times circa 1976 or something. Some of my best friends are hippies.
Eaon
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It was Mark Earls who coined the term ‘purpose-idea’
back in 2002 or something in his book ‘…Creative Age’.
His premise being that
the word ‘brand’ had become – what he called – a ‘fat-metaphor’. A word that
could be used it to mean just about anything we want it to.
Purpose-Idea was a proposed replacement for
‘brand’ – as defined as the ‘what for?’ of a business.
The Google purpose idea, for example, was 'to organize the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful'.
A simple description of how the brand fits into people’s lives.
Not the ‘ethics and values’ place that it’s ended up (for many so-called cultural or conscious capitalism examples).
And, if anything, ‘purpose’ now feels even more esoteric than the
b-word was in the first place.
However, there’s no shortage of reporting that
claims a cause-and-effect relationship between a brand’s ability to serve a
higher purpose and its financial performance.
But is this really proof
that the most successful brands are built on an ideal of improving lives?
Or is brand purpose simply a positional response
that resolves a particular cognitive dissonance and puts a do-gooder spin on
normal consumption habits for old (and new) hippies?
And another example of the delusion of the wrong end of the stick. Getting causes the wrong way round.
The standard rhetoric of the ‘brand with purpose’
goes something along these lines.
It’s much harder to run a mission-driven
company than it is to run one that is simply devoted to making a profit.
This is possibly why there was a sense of
disappointment from Benjamin Harrison in his article in Mumbrella (to which this article was a response) , in which he
lamented the inability of many companies who adopt a purpose-driven position to
actually deliver on that promise.
But should we really expect the purpose
driven brand to be authentic in this way? It’s pretty hard after all.
In their book ‘The Rebel Sell’ Joseph Heath
and Andrew Potter note that "…whenever you look at the list of consumer
goods that [according to critics of capitalism] people don't really need, what
you invariably see is a list of consumer goods that middle-aged intellectuals
don't need ... Hollywood movies bad, performance art good; Chryslers bad,
Volvos good; hamburgers bad, risotto good."
It could even be that the much-deified new
generation of ‘millennials’ – the bullshit proof authenticity-seeking
information generation defined both by their strongly held values and their
strong intention to live by them – is another invention of these same
middle-aged intellectuals, are now looking to temper the disappointment they
feel over their own generations counter-culture failure.
The list of usual suspect purpose driven
brands, as indicated by the Stengel 50, seems to play out to that point.
Starbucks, Apple, Google, Innocent, to name
but a few.
And, of course, Chipotle.
There is no small irony in how Chipotle
appear to expect farmers to produce food for the world using technologies from
the early 1900s, yet seem very comfortable using every trick and tech from the
2014 marketing book to promote that point of view.
Of course, every new pseudo anti-establishment
approach business that declares itself as some sort of alternative to the
mainstream - more artisanal, authentic or purpose-driven – is simply a response
to demand from the mass market looking for things to consume that signal their
alternative status to others.
My favourite description of anti-consumerism
is the one that calls it as ‘the criticism of what other people buy’.
But the truth is that the market is just as
good at meeting consumer demand for anti-consumer products as it is for
straight up consumer products.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference,
to be honest.
Take the sharing economy poster child Uber,
for example.
A shining example of a new social era built
on transparency, connectedness and stakeholder empowerment.
Driven by both a social mission and social
values: advocacy, connection, and collaboration. Harnessing technology to
create social marketplaces that facilitate trust, dual accountability and
social capital between and amongst its stakeholders, employees, customers, and
partners.
A brand with a purpose beyond profit.
The Uber Drivers Networks of New York, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, and London who went on the latest of several strikes
and held protest demonstrations against the company’s somewhat unethical driver
squeezing practices outside Uber HQ’s last week might contest this.
Or let’s ask the drivers working for 3rd
Party fleet partners operating as mini-Uber bases, which, for all intents and
purposes are operating under the exact same economic and operational principles
of the yellow cab or black car bases that Uber was supposed to replace.
We should also give (dis)honourable mention
to Uber in la France with their recent promotion offering riders the option
‘hot chick’ model drivers.
To be fair, it was France, but to describe
the promo as “acceptable” misogyny feels like a bit of a stretch.
Uber is an easy target, admittedly.
In Jean Baudrillard’s 1970 book, The
Consumer Society he describes consumption itself as some sort of ‘magical
thinking’. This is why advertising works so well.
Goods conveying properties beyond their
intended use.
Anti-consumption is probably more so.
You see, the post social media analysts (now sharing economy experts) like to think that organisations like Uber are somehow subversive.
But they are not. The system is simply
incorporating a new market segment.
And it is the same old competitive consumption,
that drives this same consumer spending.
It’s positional and pure marketing.
But the label helps resolve that particular cognitive dissonance.
Now you can feel like a do-gooder and still consume.
We always seek to gain status for ourselves
with what we buy (or rent), and everybody does it too.
The seemingly purpose-driven brands of the sharing economy and suchlike might be
the new cool, but the status-oriented nature of the activity remains the same for the consumers.
Consumerism is something we do to each other, and if anything, straight up conspicuous consumption is more authentic than conscious consumption because at least the status-driven nature of it is not disguised.
[Note: Reid/McLarens
'never trust a
hippy' was a thinly veiled jibe directed at Richard Branson, who's current space tourism product is just about the ultimate
positional good, this week's 'setback' notwithstanding.]
