Branding is vital, and so is purpose

IF you are a practising brand consultant with even a small amount of passion and commitment for your work, the recent Volkswagen malpractice revelations as well as the New York Times piece that exposed Amazon's "bruising" workplace practices will reinforce the always present doubts you should already have about the effectiveness of "branding".

At the best of times, branding is a moveable feast. It is a process that has always been orbited by moving parts, some of which exit to be replaced by newer more contemporary ones: attributes, benefits, values, links to business strategy, personality, positioning, culture, and on and on the list goes where it ends at today's most controversial and arguably most relevant of all underpinnings: purpose.

The role and purpose of business and brands have evolved significantly over the past 40 years. In the 1970s, the purpose of business, according to Milton Friedman, was to generate profit (and very little else) to shareholders. In an era of still emerging competition it was sufficient for Madison Avenue to focus on the functional attributes of products and services, ultimately building many of these into brands. But soon enough USPs gave way to emotional messaging in the 1980s and 1990s. Then everything changed again with the rise of technology and globalisation where once disconnected and autonomous markets merged, connecting people from across the globe, at the same time educating them to be more savvy and more demanding.