The latest salvo in the brand purpose wars

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The online debate over the benefits of purpose marketing continue with Andrew Tenzer’s column in Marketing Week.  It also is a useful discussion about research design.

Tenzer argues that purpose marketing has no impact on whether consumers purchase a brand. He contends the entire movement behind purpose marketing is based on specious research outcomes such as, “62% say their purchasing decisions are influenced by a company’s ethical values and authenticity.”  The socially desirable answer to a direct question like that is “yes,” but in reality that may not match up with people’s actual behavior.

A better quant approach, according to Tenzer, is a ranking question such as, “When it comes to buying brands or products, what are the most important things to you?” and have consumers choose from 13 different factors, with social purpose listed alongside customer service, quality, value, etc.  (He suggests a Max Diff approach in which people are asked which factors are most/least important as another way of going about it.)

He claims that in these studies, value for the money (81%), reliability (67%), and product quality/reliability (66%) always rise to the top and social purpose plummets.

But this is a flawed approach, as well, because it assumes people can tell you why they buy a brand.  However, often they can’t because those reasons are unconscious. Sure, “value” for the money…but “value” can mean a lot of things.  It could mean performance. It could have to do with how a brand resonates with your identity or the memories you associate with it.  Sometimes people aren’t even making decisions, as it were. They are just on autopilot – especially for repeated routine purchases.

It would seem that if you want to know the relevance of purpose marketing for a brand, you need a qualitative understanding of that brand.  Most likely, Tenzer is broadly correct – greenwashing is real, people tend to be skeptical of do-gooder marketing claims, and so many brands are claiming to be doing “good” that it is very hard to stand out for those efforts.  But that doesn’t mean purpose marketing is always irrelevant for every brand, and any self-reported motivations should be taken with a healthy degree of skepticism.