PEOPLE & PURPOSE
Building brand trust As consumers become more and more perceptive, marketing teams are having to ensure their company’ s brand purpose is felt across the organisation. According to Julia, the simplest test for measuring whether a brand narrative is rooted in actual operations is by seeing if any other company could tell the same story.“ If you swap out the logo and the narrative still holds, that’ s positioning – not purpose,” she says.“ Audiences have become very good at spotting the difference. This makes storytelling harder, especially now. In an era of AI-generated content, where volume is cheap and fabrication is easy, brands have to work harder to cut through – and to give employees the tools to authentically elevate their voice.” But what does that work look like in practice? While bridging the gap between superficial messaging and actual business operations can make a huge difference in the way an audience perceives a brand, many marketing teams aren’ t actually involved in core business practices. And when marketing teams are operating in isolation, they often have to default to creating superficial‘ positioning’ – crafting a narrative that exists mainly on the surface instead of embedding purpose directly into the business model.
Commercial pressure will always pull in one direction and purpose in another
Yakov Danilevskiy VP of Global Marketing, Services Division Schneider Electric
This disconnect leads to messaging that feels detached from the company’ s actual conduct, which modern audiences are increasingly adept at filtering out.“ Where marketing leaders run into difficulty is when the impact narrative gets constructed independently of the business model and then attached to it,” says Yakov.“ Commercial pressure will always pull in one direction and purpose in another. Yet when purpose is built into the operating model, the marketing narrative writes itself.” To make sure an environmental or social impact narrative is actually embedded in a company’ s operations, Julia says she applies an“ operational test,” to see how these narratives play out.“ The question I keep asking is: where is this visible outside of marketing? If the honest answer is nowhere, then you don’ t have an impact narrative, you have an aspiration in creative clothing,” she says.
marketingchief. com
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