"Brand Purpose Should Echo the Values of the Business"
Rory O’Connell at Travlrr reflects on the purpose of brands.
When we decided to launch Travlrr a couple of years ago we set our sights on making a production platform that was fair to both customers and to production companies. From our perspective we felt there could be a fairer model than the crowdsourcing platforms. This was not our brand purpose per say. A company's brand purpose should echo the values of the business but it can also help if it relates to your offering. A brand purpose is beyond profit or revenue for a company but can of course add value to society and can create an emotional connection with your customers. I guess we could say brand purpose is akin to values.
In these ever uncertain and challenging times it's a good time to reflect and see, does our brand or business have a purpose? Are there personal or company values that we can lean on to find our brand purpose? Some companies call this a corporate responsibility programme and can be used to attract both customers, employees and suppliers that have a similar outlook.
From our own point of view, we knew that Carbon reduction and the environment was the sphere we wanted to look at. We researched options, such as a Carbon offset credit system but that felt too detached and a little cold for us. In the summer of 2019 we partnered with award-winning conservation charity ‘Trees for Life’ (https://treesforlife.org.uk/) with an innovative sustainability initiative. Whereby, for every brief commissioned on the platform we will plant native Scottish Trees in the Caledonian Highlands to the equivalent of 7500kg of carbon emissions or the same as an average household produces in seven months. https://www.travlrr.co/carbon-offset.
We flew up to Inverness (offset those flights naturally) to meet the Trees for Life team, to learn about the impact and how our funding would assist in the restoration of a vast new forest. We planted our first trees and it really did give us a positive benefit on how our business was enabling positive change and also a huge personal benefit is seeing how your organisation can give something back.
I would suggest that now more than ever such programmes are needed and brands, marketeers and agencies should be exploring new ways of working that have less of an impact on the environment and deliver the same if not better results.
All our Tree planting comes from our own profits and it's important that the brand purpose is not linked to a P&L or as a cost saving exercise, too often we see larger corporations get this wrong. We are now in an innovation phase, many have been disrupted and some have more time on their hands than perhaps they would like so it's a good time to reflect and to review many parts of a business.
During the coronavirus many brands have been exploring new ways of working, creating new purpose driven content and ads in a more sustainable way by using existing assets, new shots and as always a great script and last week SkyScanner launched a great example of this approach with a new campaign called ‘We will see you again’ similarly with Australian tourism a recent campaign created by M&C Sydney called, ‘with love from Australia’.
