The Best Purpose-Driven Marketing Campaigns
Purpose is at the heart of many brands’ ambitions, and echoed by consumer demand for products and services that make a difference. Purpose-driven marketing campaigns are on the increase, as brands recognise the importance of environmental and social sustainability, transparency, and ethical behaviour to a growing audience of consumers.
Purpose-led companies and brands are driving positive impact while also making a profit. This shift towards purpose over profit is fuelling the rise of purpose-driven marketing campaigns. Below, we explore what a purpose-led marketing campaign is, some examples from around the world, and how to create a successful purpose-focused marketing campaign of your own.
What are Purpose-Driven Marketing Campaigns?
Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, which aim to highlight product and service benefits and features, purpose-driven marketing campaigns aim to showcase the positive environmental and social impact that brands are making.
By aligning your brand and marketing efforts with social, environmental, and ethical issues like climate change, mental health, or fighting childhood cancer, brands are able to build an emotional connection with their target audience who share the same values and concerns for these causes and impacts.
Purpose-led companies, therefore, demonstrate how they are creating social good and promote their values and mission in line with their social good objectives. They can do this by showing how they’re taking social responsibility, contributing to sustainability goals, or incorporating ethical and transparent practices.
Great care is taken to avoid greenwashing and to communicate authentically and transparently to build trust and cultivate loyalty.
There are various options when designing purpose-led marketing campaigns. You can focus on cause-marketing by partnering with an organisation (typically a nonprofit charity) and supporting their cause. For example, you may decide to donate a percentage of your profits to a charity that supports mental health or education.
Another way to design purpose-led marketing efforts is through your corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This is typically done by larger brands that have a dedicated CSR team.
Some companies design their products and services to address social and environmental challenges, such as minimising waste or mitigating climate change.
3 of the Best Purpose-Driven Marketing Campaigns
When designing your mission-led marketing campaign, it can help to draw inspiration from others who have achieved success via their marketing efforts. Below are three examples of successful purpose-led marketing campaigns that have helped position these brands as leaders in purpose, marketing, and doing good for the planet.
👕 Patagonia’s “Don't buy this jacket” campaign
Patagonia has established itself as a leader in cause marketing and environmental sustainability. Their “Don’t buy this jacket” campaign was groundbreaking, encouraging consumers to be mindful of buying things that they didn’t need.
This purpose-driven marketing resonated with environmentally-conscious consumers who are mindful of creating excess waste and the impacts of consumerism. By aligning their values with sustainability and creating an emotional connection with their target audience, this campaign was a big success, fostering brand loyalty and trust.
Since then, they’ve continued with viral messaging about the need to limit consumerism and to be more conscious about the impacts of fast fashion, such as in this short video about “buy less, demand more”:
👟 TOMS' “One for One” Campaign
Shoe brand TOMS is often cited as a leader in ethical and socially conscious marketing. Their One for One campaign promised to donate one pair of shoes to a child in need for everyone one pair of shoes purchased.
This simple action of enabling their customers to do good helped cement TOMS as a global footwear brand and has inspired a wave of similar philanthropic initiatives. Their campaign not only helps people do good, but it also tracks impact. To date, over 100 million pairs of shoes have been donated to children.
🧻 Who Gives A Crap: "Toilet Paper That Builds Toilets" campaign
Australian Sustainable toilet paper brand, Who Gives A Crap, launched a campaign “Toilet Paper That Builds Toilets” which donates half of its profits to enhance sanitation in countries that need it most.
Their purpose-driven campaign helped to showcase their commitment to sustainability and social justice, while also showing their sense of humour. The campaign was also uniquely innovative by showing that even buying loo paper can change the world.
How to create a successful purpose-led marketing campaign: tips and best practices
If you want your sustainable and ethical brand to stand out from the crowd, then creating a purpose-driven marketing campaign may help you do just that. For your campaign to be effective, it needs to resonate with your audience, create an emotional connection, and show real and transparent impact.
With consistent and clear messaging, defining visuals, and a stellar campaign strategy, your campaign may be poised to become one of the best purpose-led marketing campaigns of all time.
This could help to elevate your brand to new heights, win you lots of new and loyal customers, and have a positive impact on your bottom line while also changing the world for the better.
Below are some tips and best practices to help your purpose-led marketing campaign succeed:
Focus on values
Customers are overwhelmed with thousands of competing brand messages all the time. For your brand to stand out, it needs to be succinct, and it needs to catch people’s attention quickly. One of the best ways to do that is to focus on communicating your values in a way that will align with your customers’ values.
Creating a sense of shared value can attract people to your cause and campaign, and create an emotional bond that makes them want to support your brand. This also requires authentic and transparent communication so that your audience feels they can trust what you’re saying and that you’re not attempting to greenwash anything.
Be authentic
Honest, authentic, and transparent communication is critical in today’s world, where consumers are increasingly vigilant and cautious of false and misleading claims.
By communicating your brand’s mission and personality authentically, your customers will also feel that they can trust what you’re telling them.
One of the things to avoid is vague claims or saying anything that could be misleading. Try instead to communicate honestly, and show measurable results and impacts of your products or services.
Create an emotional connection
There’s an art to impactful storytelling. When done right, it helps to create a powerful emotional connection so that people feel that they want to support your brand and mission.
When people are aligned with your brand’s values and mission, which is itself rooted in purpose, people are more inclined to remain loyal brand ambassadors and repeat customers.
Building this emotional connection through storytelling can spark interest in your brand. By continuing to engage supporters and customers through social media, newsletters, and other engagement opportunities, you can also help make customers feel that they are personally involved in your brand and its cause.
Measure and share your impact
Vague and misleading claims about products and services have been the demise and downfall of many brands. To instill trust, any facts and claims you make about your products or services must be quantifiable and verifiable.
It’s important to carefully select metrics and indicators and to be transparent about how data is gathered, measured, and communicated. That’s why many brands turn to reliable and recognised ecolabels and standards to help communicate impact transparently.
Need help creating a purpose-led marketing campaign?
Green Socials provides bespoke digital marketing services to purpose-driven organisations in Australia and worldwide.
If you need help creating a marketing strategy, campaign, or managing your online presence, we’d love to have a conversation about how we can help elevate your brand. Let’s connect!
