Brand Purist, your brand purpose partner
Brand Purist is a London-based branding agency working with startups and small businesses globally. We help you define and express your brand’s purpose, ensuring it drives your strategy and resonates with your audience. Discover how we can help your organisation grow through a clear and compelling brand purpose.
What is the brand purpose?
The brand purpose is the reason a brand exists beyond just generating profits. It’s the big WHY. It encapsulates a brand’s commitment to a higher goal, serving as its compass in creating meaningful connections with audiences and driving positive change in the world.
The brand purpose should be at the heart of everything you do. It’s the guiding principle that informs every decision, from product development to marketing. Living up to your brand purpose means that you consistently deliver on its promise.
Why brand purpose matters
Brand purpose matters because it goes beyond mere transactions. More than just a mission, it's the emotional and ethical anchor of your brand. It helps you inspire teams and connect with audiences.
An authentic brand purpose can help you instil trust in today’s discerning consumers. It can provide a clear direction for your brand’s actions, ensuring a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
Clarity of purpose is powerful. It influences everything you do: your written and verbal communications, visual identity, behaviour and so on. Your vision and mission statements are also derived from it.
Brand purpose vs. mission vs. vision
Brand purpose is the reason a brand exists beyond making money. It often reflects the brand’s contribution to society and its commitment to improving people’s lives.
Brand mission is a clear and concise statement that defines the brand’s current objectives and how it plans to achieve them.
Brand vision is a forward-looking statement that outlines what a brand aspires to become in the future.
It’s good to disentangle these three facets of your brand. But keep in mind that there’s always some flexibility. The brand purpose can be mission-like, because not every brand wants to or needs to change the world. In the case of aspiring startups, the purpose can also be very future-oriented and blend with the brand vision.
How to uncover your brand purpose
- Reflect on origins: dive deep into why your organisation was founded. What gap or need was it aiming to address?
- Engage stakeholders: conduct interviews with employees, customers, and partners to gain diverse perspectives on the brand's impact and essence.
- Analyse core values: identify the values that have consistently driven your decisions and actions.
- Assess market differentiation: understand what sets your brand apart in the marketplace. What unique value do you offer?
- Synthesise insights: combine all gathered information to craft a purpose statement that resonates, guides, and inspires.
Our approach to brand purpose
Brand Purist works directly with founders to understand what drives them. Why did you start the business? What gets you up every morning? What impact are you hoping to have on the world?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Sometimes it’s very practical and grounded. Other times it is bold and visionary. Uncovering the purpose is a collaborative journey but it’s Brand Purist’s job to steer you in the right direction. It’s often the personal stories that inspire the most authentic brand purpose.
Working with larger organisations, we prefer to involve team members across the business. Listening to their voices fosters trust and increases cohesion.
Brand purpose examples
Here’s a diverse selection of brand purpose statements that we’ve created with our clients over the years:
Shape Beyond: business consultancy
It was really important for the founder and the Brand Purist team to create a business consultancy brand with a positive vision. It had to have a purpose that went beyond driving growth for businesses. It had to resonate with the next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs. These must-haves inspired the brand purpose:
Skill Trace: tech recruiters
Skill Trace’s straightforward yet effective approach is captured in its brand purpose:
Playfilled: people consultancy
The founders’ personal experiences of working in the demanding yet unfulfilling corporate world drove them to start Playfilled. They have a deep desire to reimagine the experience of work, fix broken systems and shift beliefs around play. This is captured in Playfilled’ brand purpose:
Reading Mate: edtech startup
We distilled the essence of the brand to reflect an ambitious startup with an impactful social purpose:
Glamp: marketing platform
The term ‘glamping’ is a combination of ‘glamorous’ and ‘camping’. It’s a way of enjoying the great outdoors without sacrificing the luxury and comfort of a hotel. The brand purpose is simple, aspirational and centred around community building:
A strong brand purpose, just like a brand's name, can kickstart creative thinking and fuel the design process.
