The idea of brand purpose is pretty contested within marketing. Critics are claiming that we’ve reached ‘peak purpose’ and are calling for people in advertising to stop trying to save the world and get back to selling stuff. But is this true, or have we actually reached another level of maturity when it comes to purpose? 

With consumers more switched on to social change than ever, marketers have a responsibility to create meaningful impact as well as driving sales. But how do you measure meaningful brand impact? 

Today, Becky Willan is joined by Mitch Oliver, Global VP of Brand and Purpose at Mars Inc - a multinational manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products and the fourth-largest privately held company in the United States. In this conversation, we’ll be discussing how to translate a business’s purpose into meaningful and measurable brand impact - across different markets, categories and products.

Do you want to learn how to build a purpose-driven business from Given, the consultancy that’s helped some of the world's largest organisations become purposeful? Download the Insiders’ Guide to Purpose HERE.

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You'll be hearing about why purpose is first becoming an essential part of marketing, as Mitch says, the fifth P, what doing it properly really involves in practice, and how to measure positive impact alongside commercial success. Before I speak with Mitch, let's find out how a five year old's honesty led her to realize that marketing can help change the world.

Mitch's dad worked in construction and her mum, a nurse, had always instilled the mantra in her, Be kind and treat everyone equally. Mitch didn't know what she wanted to do career wise, but she knew she wanted to be financially independent. And after university, she got onto the grad scheme at Mars. That was 30 years ago.

I mean, it was just fabulous, it was fun.

[00:01:50] Mitch: When I was 40, someone asked my son, who would have been about five, what do your mum and dad do?

And he said, Mummy makes choc choc, which I thought was quite cool, fine I'll take that. And he said, and Daddy feeds the poor starving babies with a spoon. And I thought, okay, okay. And I think that was the first part of me thinking, okay, I need to think about what I'm spending my time on and how I can love my job.

[00:02:32] Mitch: Of course, that's another moment where you go You know, life is short, right? You never know what's around the corner.

So what am I spending my time on? The only thing I've got is time. And I thought about leaving Mars. I thought I'm going to go and join an NGO and change the world that way.

[00:02:52] Mitch: So people in the NGO world who said You don't know, you don't know you're born basically.

You've got the richness of resource. Why would you leave if you think you can do this on the inside? I could do much more by working within Mars than I could by going and working at a charity or something. And it doesn't happen overnight. You don't wake up going, right, this is what I've decided. But I think over time, I thought I'm, I'm going to stay.

And I'm going to do everything I can and create the world that I think I want. I'm very lucky and privileged that I work for a great organization that enables me to do that.

[00:03:29] Mitch: Lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

And where would you say that the business is on the purpose journey?

In fact, Mars is a 50 billion US dollar global company operating in over 170 countries. 60 percent of our business is actually pet care. The rest is confectionery and then food. So we have, I think 15 billion brands that span from the ones you'll know, like M& M's and Pedigree. all the way through to our veterinary health brand.

So we have 3, 000 veterinary health clinics around the world. We have science and diagnostics for animal welfare. So, um, I just sort of set the picture that Mars is a much, because this is relevant when it comes to purpose, Mars is a much bigger and more complex organization than I remember, than

[00:04:35] Mitch: we know and love.

And, and therefore, well, seven years ago, I was asked to help The global organization, and then we're a family owned business still, which is incredible. Fourth generation moving to fifth generation ownership. And I was asked to work with the family and the board globally too. We thought we talked about extract our purpose from the business.

And because we operate across such a diverse group of products and services, obviously you have to have a purpose that can encompass all of that. And we went through a process. We have 150, 000 associates around the world. We call them associates employees. And we worked with our associates as well as the family owners, as well as the board.

And what we came to was that our purpose at Mars is That the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. It's very deliberately worded, as I'm sure you can imagine. And the core of it, that this isn't something that sits separate to the business element of Mars. It's not like there's the business bit and then there's the purpose bit.

It is that how. Every single decision that we take, whether that's a board decision or whether you're an, you're a vet associate or you're working in a factory, every decision you take every day about how you do business, you want to think about, is it going to have a positive impact towards the world we want tomorrow?

That's the purpose. Then you, we will have like definitions of what is the world we want tomorrow. So for example, in our pet care business, we say we want a better world for pets. And where are we on our journey? Well, like most companies that take purpose really seriously, whilst those particular words were only articulated seven years ago, Mars has been a purpose driven organization since its very inception.

I think that what we've done is brought it from being implicit We've had principles for 70 years. We've had principles. So you ask any Mars associate what the core principles of Mars are, there are five, and they'll be able to tell you what they are. But we've now made it explicit. So we've now explicitly defined, developed, we test it with 95 percent of our associates can tell you what our purpose is.

We know that those associates who believe we're acting in line with our purpose are likely to be unbelievably up to 12 times more engaged. I mean, the Data is phenomenal. And we are getting that message out into the world externally, although we have a very strong principle that what matters is what we do, not, not what we say.

So we care less whether the external world can tell you what Mars's purpose is, because that's Why would they care, frankly? But we care more about that they think that Mars is a business that's trying to have a positive impact because this is what it's doing, for example, about net zero or about gender equality or living wage or any of those type of issues.

Extracting it, making the implicit explicit, as you talked about. I also think having recorded another episode recently on purpose in family owned businesses, that there's a really unique and interesting sort of dynamic at play there in terms of that sort of long term perspective. The freedom from not having to report quarterly to the markets.

And that's something at Mars we are free to make our own choices on. And so, so it gives you, I mean, freedom is one of the five principles of Mars, by which we mean actually financial freedom. The freedom to make our own choices, not beholden to, um, stock markets, et cetera. So it is, that is a competitive advantage at the heart, I guess, of our purpose is the ownership structure.

[00:09:14] Mitch: business unfortunately has come to mean almost the word business has unfortunately come to mean money. And I think when you bring the family dynamic into it and you think about a family that's built something over a hundred plus years, and of course there's money has been made and you need, I'm not, you know, I'm not at all naive to the fact that in order to deliver purposefully, you need to make money. That, you know, there was a quote, our ex CEO Grant, who retired recently, he used to say, profit without purpose is meaningless, but purpose without profit is impossible. You know, once you're privileged enough to pay the bills, you go, why?

And you've just got back from Cannes where the world's sort of best creative minds meet to talk about all of that sort of stuff and where Pedigree won a Grand Prix for Adoptable, so congratulations for that. But having been there, what's your assessment of where we're at with Purpose and Marketing?

I mean, can over the last few years Purpose And associated topics have been front and center, right? You couldn't, you couldn't go to a talk without it being on the agenda somewhere. And this year was all about AI. That's the thing that you could tripped over in every conversation kind of thing. We've got a world that as we know more people are going to election.

this year than have ever been to the action in any year ever in history. Got a world where views are becoming increasingly polarized and people are becoming increasingly polarized and, and, and this sort of concept of purpose marketing, it, that all of that is coinciding, I believe, with what I, you know, the hype cycle of something where everyone jumps on the bandwagon of something and everyone goes, Oh, it's the brave new thing.

Well, we've got, we're over the hype cycle. And now we're into settling and I think it's a different phase of maturity for purpose and branding. And, and, and I use purpose in the sense of having a meaningful and measurable impact in the world. Um, whilst delivering growth on your brand, um, all brands have to have a purpose.

It doesn't have to be meaningful. They don't have to change the world. I, I absolutely do not think this is something that all brands should do. I think it's the responsibility of marketeers to not be sort of, you know, swayed by the hype by going, Oh, well, that's yesterday's news, but to go, okay, we're over the hump.

We're at a different level of maturity. How do you do purpose? Well, and I think For me, I get really frustrated by this notion that purpose marketing is either successful or not successful. It either drives growth or it doesn't drive growth. There is no other lever in marketing that you go, it is either a good lever or a bad lever.

You don't go advertising is either successful or not successful. There are good ads and there are bad ads, right? There are successful ads that drive growth and brand equity and there are ads that don't. Don't do that. The nuance in these, what makes great ad and how do you codify that? And I think that's the phase we're at in purpose, which is there is effective purpose that has an impact in the world whilst driving sales and share, and there is poorly executed purpose attempts that.

that deliver either only one of those things or neither of those things. So our responsibility as marketeers is to not get, Oh God, that's yesterday's news. I'm going to jump on the next bandwagon. And I actually think there'll be real competitive advantage to those of us that stay the course and go, okay, now what we need to do is we need to start looking at the data, looking at the ROI data, working out, codifying what works and what's not.

doesn't work. And right from the beginning I've said you can't do purpose short term.

So if there is a difference between purpose marketing done well and not done well, do you have a view on the sort of common attributes that you might find in those most effective types of work?

We talked about extracting the purpose from the corporation. I think you have to do the same with purpose on a brand. So it's much easier if you're creating a brand because you can, you can start from the very beginning to create a brand that has it in its DNA. But I think you have to look at your brand and you have to say, what credibility has my brand got to lean into this issue?

What has been in that that we can authentically play a role in this, in this space. So if I give you an example of a brand that I've worked on and off on for many, many years of Maltesers, Maltesers had always told women's stories in a lighthearted way. Pictures of lots of women together, chatting and laughing and the lightness of the product translating into the lightheartedness of the moment.

Therefore it's completely credible that Maltesers moves into a space where it brings lightness of touch to the stories of women that often aren't heard. So we started with the stories of women who live with disability. We then moved into the stories of. Gay women dating. We then more recently, very recently have talked about maternal mental health and the stories of new parents sharing how tricky things can be, but, but all with the lightness touch of Maltesers.

That's a very simple example of authenticity. If you've got a brand and you're trying to find a way to attach it to some issue, that will not work. So I think it has to start by looking from the brand and extracting the purpose out. You have to commit to doing it. In a way for at least three years. And then the third bit is you have to measure not only the brand performance during that time, but you have to find a way to get a measure of the impact, the change you're trying to create in the world through your purpose activity and measuring it, even if it's a proxy, even if it's in a small way.

So those are the three things I would say. It needs to be authentically from the brand. It needs to be sustained over time and you need to find some way to measure it. Both brand performance and world impact.

We've just touched on that just a moment ago with Maltesers, and that's something you've led within Mars, but also as part of your role with the Unstereotype Alliance. What have you learned from doing that work that you think, Anybody who's really trying to drive the purpose agenda for their brands should know about.

I was on the board of Stonewall for a while. The lightbulb moment was when, um, I thought, well, I wonder what, how good our ads are. And it was right at the beginning. I read a report, Lloyds Bank did a report on the state of advertising in the UK and representation. And I happened to read it, goodness, not the kind of thing I normally do.

Um, and I thought, Oh my goodness, that's fascinating. And then I just got, we got a student over the summer to just look at our ads and literally count men and women and stuff. This was before the Unstereotype Alliance was, And I, and it was awful, right? It was, the numbers were appalling. A third of the people it featured in our ads were women.

This was in chocolate, right? Who's buying the products? I mean, don't even get me into the, the stereotyping. I mean, they were all in the bloody kitchen and I hadn't seen it. So my journey started by I just being, you know, Sort of brave enough to bring that personal passion into work and then believing if you stick to it and you're persistent, you can genuinely create meaningful change.

You've just got to find your people.

Whereas I guess, you know, how far you lean into purpose or sort of issues that really matter to people in the world as a choice, as a strategic choice.

So we expect that every single brand has to do marketing in a way that is responsible, inclusive, and sustainable. So responsible, inclusive, and sustainable sit at the bottom. You then have what we call advocate brands, which are brands that choose to engage in something that has more of a societal and environmental impact at certain times.

So I don't know, it may, Skittles is a great example of that, which always supports pride and has done for many, many years, but it's not an LGBT platform brand. It's, but it has got credibility because it's done it in a sustained way over time. And then at the very top, we have what we call activist brands, which means that actually at the core of that brand is something that means that that brand will have a measurable and meaningful difference in the world.

So, so Pedigree is a great example of an activist brand that at the core of the brand wants to eradicate, um, end dog homelessness. And that's a core of its DNA because it believes in the good of all dogs. And therefore you can see that therefore the majority of its activations, like the platform that won at Cannes recently, is creative for the brand, but it's also helping drive dog adoption.

That's the way we think about it. So I think there is a difference between whether or not a brand you think can have a purpose as part of its DNA. And I think it is. important to recognize if it's the answer to that is no, fine. I think that's completely fine. But it's not okay for a brand to say no, I don't think this brand needs to be inclusive.

So, so how does that work at Mars?

is doing already. So it's got the weight of the corporation behind it to add to that credibility and authenticity. So in the Pedigree example, our pet care division for many, many years has had an ending pet homelessness program that sits behind the dog adoption platform of Pedigree. So rather than a brand going, do you know what I'm going to, I'm going to link to breast cancer.

Which miles is doing nothing about. There's no, there's no background to that. So one of the first things we do is we help support the brands that want to do that, but to look at what have we got in the organization to give you that depth and credibility, because that speaks to risk and opportunity, because the key thing you need to focus in on this is risk and opportunity on the top two bits of the pyramid.

We would work with our internal corporate affairs, external affairs people to think about, have we got the credibility? What are the risks? What could go wrong, et cetera. We would. Always recommend bringing in a third party expert. For example, when I did the Maltesers work with the women living with disability, we worked with Scope throughout the whole process, which is the UK's largest disability charity.

But I think also there's a bit about the culture and creating a culture of. Safety, because people are very scared about getting this stuff wrong, particularly on certain topic areas, if you lean into some topic areas that are particularly spiky. So you have to create a safe space. We have a process where anything that we think could be risky is checked.

And then we do social listening so that if we think anything is being picked up as being risky, we can quickly check in and adapt to it. And you've got to have people's backs, I think, in those situations.

So one of the things I'd love your perspective on is just how important. Is consistency when it comes to thinking about how you execute on the purpose activity or the making a difference activity that you're looking at and how do you manage differences in consumer attitudes, especially when, you know, a lot of the topics that we're talking about, whether that is about gender or disability, for example, a culturally nuanced and perhaps are understood differently in different, different places.

Yeah. I mean, I

So, you know, if you elevate the inside. up to the fact that sometimes talking about the stories that aren't talked about in a light hearted way can bring joy and pleasure then and telling the stories that aren't often told. Now in the UK, We started with telling stories of people living with disability.

It was around the Paralympics. It was great. It was powerful stories to tell, and you can tell those stories and you can tell stories about dating as a gay woman or whatever, which we did. You can't tell some, the dating as a gay woman stories in other markets, right? And, and we are not. a political organization, and we would put people at risk.

We would actually put associates at risk if we were to do that in countries where it is, sadly, and not what I would choose, but it is illegal to have same sex relationships. You'd actively be putting people's lives at risk, and we don't want to do that by, obviously. So you find another way in, another story that's not often told about women that's relevant and meaningful in that context.

[00:25:37] Mitch: Again, I would say for the bottom of the pyramid, if you like, so for inclusive marketing, we have a very clear, again, we've partnered with the Gina Davis Institute. And once a year, they audit, all of our ads globally in all of our markets across all of our segments, and they give us an objective review on how well we are doing.

representing different sections of society. When it comes to more a specific brand, having an impact, we workshop with that brand to say, what is the actual impact you're trying to have in the world? So pedigree is an astounding example. So pedigree, the impact that they wanted to have in the world is they want to reduce the number of homeless people.

dogs by increasing people getting their dogs through adoption. They have spent three years bespoke creating, working with rescue centers to create a measurement as to what is happening in the number of dogs that are adopted and rescued. And how are we reducing the number of dogs, therefore, that are on the street?

In other examples, like when we started on the Maltesers journey, we just, we found a proxy. So at that point, we said, would it be possible that we could change people's attitudes towards disability? So we just did a very simple poll every six months, whilst we were doing that campaign to see whether, have you seen the Maltesers ad?

If so, has that made any difference to your views on people living disability type thing? And that actually worked very effectively as well. And that was a very simple tool. So we make bespoke measurements depending on the campaign for the ones further up the pyramid. And then we have some sort of third party cross portfolio metrics at the bottom of the period.

So is that something that you work through with brands as well, in terms of what change levers are they trying to pull, or does it not really, do you not think about it quite that way? Cause I guess, you know, you could say there's definitely a sort of attitudes, behavior piece. Some brands will do that. I think in the example of Sheba and Reefs, they're sort of developing quite targeted interventions that are kind of solutions that are on the ground.

And there may be other brands that I guess do get a bit more involved in trying to change policy to try and create that wider system change. Do you feel like you have all of those levers at your disposal, or do you tend to go into one or another? I don't

as a brand by brand level. And I don't think there's a right or wrong. I mean, I think the holy grail is to try and measure something that's an output metric like the pedigree case. I wouldn't in progress over perfection, right? I wouldn't tie yourself up in knots and not do anything because you can't.

You can't work out how to measure the output metric. And I also wouldn't under play how important brand communications is in driving at scale behaviors and attitudes. I joined Stonewall after. Gay marriage was approved and everything, but the story they tell about how gay marriage or same sex marriage came to be a policy in the UK.

One of the single biggest things that happened was EastEnders ran a storyline about two men and it normalized it, right? So, you know, as communicators who communicate, and there was another thing about friends. I remember when Chandler in Friends, gave up smoking. Apparently the impact that that had on people giving up smoking in the U.

S. was, was 10 times greater than any campaign that had been run by government and state. So, and, and okay, those are TV series, but advertising is part of that system. So I wouldn't underestimate changing attitudes through Advertising at all. Because when, when the brands start raising the game on these things, actually the business has to respond as well.

So if you're going to put ads showing people with disability, What are your business policies about people? How many disabled associates have you got? What are your business policies on it? Are they good? Are they bad? Are they not? You know, the typical pattern is you do something and then you communicate about it.

Like to use communications to provoke action as much as to communicate action.

[00:30:50] Mitch: I just want it to become a standard marketing lever. I want it to become the next P of marketing. I want it not to have to be championed by groups of passionate people in the organization. I want it to be part of your toolkit as a marketeer that you look at, that you just like you look at price or innovation or other things, But that you look at from a strategic point of view is, is this one of the levers I'm going to pull on my brand?

If no, fine. If yes, how do I build that into everything that I do in this brand? You know, what's on Twitter or whatever? Our job is to worry about what the people who buy and engage with our products care about. And if you talk to any consumers out there, you know, The first thing they care about is the cost of living in the UK and great quality products.

We have to deliver that, but they do care. They do care about a better world. They do want to be able to make simple choices in the products they buy that aren't quite, it's not complicated that goes, well, I feel a little bit better because I'm buying something that's doing something a little bit positive.

[00:32:01] Mitch: Oh, you're welcome. I've enjoyed it.

Be deliberate about the role of purpose in your brand and decide whether you're just doing the basics or want to make purpose a core pillar. Start inside out, not outside in. Find an authentic connection between your brand's, DNA, and relevant societal or sustainability issues. Use what's already happening at a corporate level to add real weight and substance.

Think in years, not quarters. A campaign might only last a few months, but building a brand that can create meaningful impact means committing to a minimum of three years and ideally five.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like more practical advice on building a purpose driven business with brilliant insights from people like Mitch, Download the Insider's Guide to Purpose at givenagency. com forward slash thinking.