Culture & Alignment · 6 min read

Purpose did not die. It got personal

It used to be about we are the world. Now it is about me: my job, my financial future, my family.

For most of the last decade, the pitch for brand purpose ran the same way: declare a stance on a big societal issue, and loyalty, engagement and profit would follow. That pitch is now out of date, and the latest research is specific about why.

Edelman's 2025 Trust Barometer found that trust in brands has overtaken trust in government, media and NGOs, with 80% of people saying they trust the brands they use to do the right thing. But the report's central finding is a correction to the old purpose playbook, not a confirmation of it: consumers are no longer asking brands to change the world. They are asking brands to change my world. The shift is from grand societal gestures to practical, personal relevance, financial stability, everyday reassurance, a sense that the brand is on their side.

Purpose has not disappeared. It has narrowed and sharpened. The same research found 64% of people choosing brands based on their beliefs, up four points year over year, and 73% saying their trust in a brand increases when it authentically reflects the culture people actually live in, not a generic social cause. Purpose that reads as performative, distant from the brand's actual product or the customer's actual life, now costs a brand more credibility than staying quiet.

Inside organisations, the picture is more consistent than it is on the outside. Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found 89% of Gen Z and 92% of millennials say a sense of purpose is important to their job satisfaction and wellbeing, up from the year before. But the same study notes that purpose at work is subjective: some employees define it as social impact, others as financial security, learning, or simply work that respects their time. A single mission statement on a careers page does not automatically produce any of that.

The practical shift for organisations is this: purpose used to be a communications exercise, a stance you took publicly and hoped would translate into loyalty. It now has to be a lived, specific, provable set of actions, close to the product and close to the employee's actual day, or it reads as noise in a market that has grown sharply better at telling the difference.

This is the shift a proper brand-purpose framework has to account for now: not a purpose statement written once and left on a careers page, but one built out from a real cultural tension into a vision, mission and standard of proof specific enough that employees and customers can actually test the brand against it.

Purpose was never a nice-to-have. What changed is the definition of what counts as purposeful. Brands and organisations that are still running the old, broad, save-the-world version of purpose are increasingly out of step with the people they are trying to reach.

Topics: Brand Purpose, Trust, Employee Engagement