The Purpose Behind Purpose-Driven Marketing: An Evening With Bill Oberlander

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to Bill Oberlander, the founder of Oberland, speak at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on the ever-growing importance of purpose-driven marketing in modern advertisement campaigns. This event was part of a series of advertising speakers that come to Newhouse throughout the year, in what is known as the Eric Mower Advertising Forum. After taking some time to dissect the conversation, I've gathered some thoughts on the key things that stood out to me from a public relations perspective.

The biggest connection that I found between Oberlander's presentation between his intended audience of creative advertising students, and people like myself who were viewing from the standpoint of PR, was the emphasis on trust between the organization and it's intended audience. The term "purpose-washing" was mentioned quite a few times throughout the presentation. Purpose-washing is essentially when a brand or organization decides to put their own stamp on a cause or an issue that sounds good in theory, but can come off as showy or forced. Oberlander referenced Coca Cola as a brand that has found themselves guilty of this through their "No Labels" campaign. Coca decided to use their brand of Diet Coke to launch a campaign that centered around removing the labels from their cans and bottles, to stand in solidarity with people from all different backgrounds who face stereotypes and prejudices because of the labels that are associated with their backgrounds. While it seems like a strategic play in theory, Oberlander noted that really any organization that has labels on their products could have put this together, and the fact that Coke decided to launch this under one of their smaller brands, rather than their parent brand led to an either further lack of authenticity.

This need for authenticity is what captured me as a student of public relations. Brands can do all they can to create a promotion or campaign that is driven by real purpose, but if the meaning is lost because it feels forced or unauthentic, the purpose is eliminated and the brand can appear desperate. As practitioners, it's our duty in the organization to work with our publics to find ways that we can support causes that are important without it feeling like a publicity stunt.

Photo Credit: Aaron Swartz

The second aspect of Oberlander's presentation that I found to be most interesting was the connection between purpose-driven campaigns and the bottom line. A constant scenario that Oberlander would mention would be the interaction between the creative teams launching radical ideas to the C-Suite members of the organization. A key example he noted was that of REI. Their #OptOutside campaign was based entirely around closing their stores on Black Friday in order to encourage their customers and employees to spend the day outside rather than falling victim to the hype of the biggest shopping day of the year. It's an idea that when pitched to people concerned with profits sounds crazy, but it worked. This is another concept that can relate to PR because it is entirely executed off of knowing your audience well. As an outdoorsy company, REI was in the right business to take this risk, and their Cyber Monday sales rocketed with a 60% increase. The PR team was likely instrumental in working with both public opinion and internal relations to ensure that this campaign would be a success, and it certainly was.

My main takeaway from the evening was that our generation is quite different from past ones. Purpose and purpose-driven strategies mean more to the consumers than ever before, which makes the basics behind understanding a target audience in PR incredibly important. To understand our brands and organizations, we must first understand those who we want to appeal to.