Book Review: Purposeful Brands
A marketing industry insider explores how a business built on promoting consumption adapts to promoting positive behaviour change that doesn’t cost the earth.
Purpose is not just a buzzword. Purposeful Brands tells the story of a business and management strategy that increasingly fills boardroom agendas, defines business success and should be at the forefront of every communicator’s mind.
Based in California, author Sandy Skees has 30 years of experience in management consulting and strategic communications. She is now an advisor on branding and purpose, having become disillusioned with a career built on selling.
Purposeful Brands is an erudite and original book with a straight-talking style that deals clearly with definitions of the core concepts of purpose and sustainability in particular. It clears up some of the confusion created when organisations sprinkle these terms across their communications without enough thought.
It's underpinned with straight talking for marketing and public relations practitioners as well as managers to operate ethically and effectively and get to grips with issues increasingly defining business success and dominating boardroom agendas.
It’s all about the bottom line for Skees – as she builds a convincing case for her proposition that a robust sustainability strategy and comprehensive environmental, social and governance (ESG) programme is now a proven predictor of a well-run company.
Chapters take us on a logical journey through defining your brand’s purpose, articulating that purpose, operationalising sustainability, closing the say/do gap, unlocking innovation, dismantling, showing up as an advocate, telling your story and engaging stakeholders. It explores key concepts that communicators must consider in their plans, such as greenwashing and greenhushing, the circular economy, and inclusion, with solid suggestions for audience engagement.
A dedicated section on communications outlines how a best-practice communications framework and campaigns approach are essential to centring purpose successfully in your organisation, informing your audiences and bringing about change.
This book is not a communications manual, nor does it work by revealing new techniques for changing consumer or citizen behaviour via communications approaches. What it does well is position the imperative for purpose firmly within a business context and vis-a-vis the necessary audiences to effect change. This can help empower communications leaders to get on the same wavelength as their board or executive leaders.
It’s also a valuable tool for public relations practitioners to operate effectively within the broader commercial context that can often elude them.
Skees has come to believe that “not only could communications be in service to a greater purpose, but the business itself could be organised to solve environmental and social challenges.”
The description of her personal and career journey (she is currently Executive Vice President, Global Purpose and Impact Practice Lead at Porter Novelli) are discussed in tandem with key waypoints in developing a more sustainable approach to business and investing globally.
Skees cites as a key moment the CEO of Blackrock, Larry Fink, announcing that the purpose of corporations should no longer just be shareholder value, but achieving “a greater good.”
While it analyses how businesses handle equality, diversity and inclusion and a range of social issues, this ultimately is a book about how an industry that’s historically underpinned consumption – which places fatal stress on the planet’s resources – adapts to promoting positive behaviour change while driving the bottom line for a new breed of businesses that don’t cost the earth.
Purposeful Brands - How Purpose and Sustainability Drive Brand Value and Positive Change
Kogan Page, 2023
£21.99
About Claire Munro
Claire Munro Chart.PR, CMktr is an award-winning communications professional and manager with over 15 years of experience in Scotland’s environment and housing sectors.
She’s on the Committee of CIPR Scotland and has a CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications and the AMEC International Certificate in Measurement and Evaluation. Claire is both a Chartered PR and a Chartered Marketer.