Brand Purpose: The Backlash Has Context, but the Pendulum Has Swung Too Far

Brand purpose advertising became the dominant industry conversation around 2018 and reached its peak—or nadir, depending on perspective—with the proliferation of cause-adjacent campaigns during the social movements of 2020. The backlash began in 2022 and has accelerated: by 2025, the consensus at major industry events had shifted from "brands must have purpose" to "purpose advertising doesn't work and brands should focus on products." Both positions are wrong, and the evidence base supports a more nuanced view. The critique of purpose advertising is valid in its specifics. Campaigns that adopted social causes for marketing reasons—without underlying organizational change, without consistent behavior, without authentic connection between the brand's core business and the cause it claimed to represent—did not perform well. Consumers, particularly younger consumers, have sophisticated detection for what has come to be called "performative purpose." The Bud Light situation in 2023, while partially driven by political dynamics specific to that moment, illustrated what happens when cause marketing is perceived as disconnected from authentic brand values. But the retreat to pure product advertising has also produced underperformance. Research published in 2025 by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that campaigns focused exclusively on functional product benefits generate lower emotional response and lower brand memory than campaigns that connect product benefits to consumer values—without requiring the brand to take explicit political or social positions. The synthesis that the evidence supports is something like: brands should advertise the values embedded in what they make and how they make it, not the causes they choose to support. A running shoe brand that talks about what it means to push past limits—with genuine depth and specificity, not marketing language—performs better than either the brand that pretends to solve systemic inequality or the brand that talks only about cushioning technology. The former is purpose. The latter is product. What works is character.