Brand Purpose Consultancy

Brand purpose consultancy is the work of deciding what a company is for in a way that changes decisions: what it will fund, what it will stop doing, and what it will refuse even when the revenue is available. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, including the purpose behind Octapharma’s Nuwiq launch and the broader patient purpose Takeda now uses to frame its category agenda.

• Since 1999brand strategy and purpose work
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

Purpose work is usually bought by a CEO, a CMO or a chief strategy officer, and almost never as a planning exercise. There is normally a decision in front of the leadership team that the current description of the company cannot settle.

• A statement exists and nothing followed it. The purpose was written, launched internally, printed on a wall, and no budget line, no product decision and no exit has been traced to it since.
• A growth decision is contested. Two businesses both look attractive and the leadership team has no shared basis for choosing, because the only stated reason for the company to exist is broad enough to justify either.
• A category is being redefined. The product still works but the terms of the category are moving, and the company has to say what it is for before it can say what it sells.
• The claim is about to be tested in public. A listing, a regulatory process or an activist campaign is coming, and a purpose written for a brand campaign will not survive the questions.
• Recruitment and retention have become the constraint. People are joining and leaving on the strength of what the company is for, and the current answer is not credible to anyone inside it.

Why most brand purpose work changes nothing

Brand purpose is the most over-claimed service in this category. The reason is structural rather than cynical: a purpose statement is cheap to produce, impossible to disprove, and pleasant to agree with. Four failures account for almost all of it.

• It is written to be agreed with. Any sentence that every executive in the room can sign without discomfort has, by construction, ruled nothing out. Consensus is the symptom, not the achievement.
• It describes a benefit the category already provides. A food company existing to nourish people and a bank existing to help people build their futures are descriptions of the industry, not of the firm.
• It is owned by marketing. A purpose that lives in the communications budget can only ever buy advertising. It cannot kill a product, decline a customer or move capital, because the function that holds it has no authority to do any of those things.
• Nothing checks it. There is no measure, no review trigger and no named decision the purpose is supposed to govern, so there is no moment at which anyone discovers it has stopped being true.

The test we use is blunt. Name the last three significant choices the company made, and ask whether the purpose predicted any of them. If it would have been equally comfortable with the opposite choice, it is a description of the company’s manners, not of its intent. Our published guide, what brand purpose is and what it is not, sets out the same argument at more length.

What our brand purpose consultancy includes

Five bodies of work. Most companies need the second and third more than they expect, and arrive asking for the first.

1. Establishing what the company is already for

Before anything is written, we establish the purpose the company is already acting on, which is visible in where the money goes rather than in what the leadership team says.

• Where capital, headcount and management attention have actually gone over the last three to five years, and what that pattern implies the company is for.
• What customers, employees and non-customers believe the company exists to do, and where those three answers disagree.
• Which claims the company has credible permission to make, separated from the ones it would like to make.

2. Defining the purpose as a set of decisions

We write the purpose last. The work before it is a set of decisions the purpose has to be able to govern, so the sentence is an output rather than a starting point.

• The decisions the purpose is expected to settle, named specifically: which categories, which customers, which partnerships, which acquisitions.
• What the company commits to fund because of the purpose, with a budget line attached rather than an intention.
• The purpose statement itself, written once the above is agreed, and tested against the decisions rather than against taste.

3. The refusal list

The part that makes purpose real is the part most programs skip. A purpose that has refused nothing has cost nothing, and a purpose that has cost nothing cannot be distinguished from marketing.

• The revenue the company is prepared to decline, named in categories, customer types or channels rather than in principle.
• The products, partnerships or markets the purpose rules out, and who has the authority to enforce that when a quarter goes badly.
• The escalation path for the first real conflict, agreed in advance, because the first conflict is when most purpose statements quietly expire.

4. Resolving purpose against positioning, architecture and culture

Purpose is the smallest of the brand decisions and the easiest to confuse with the others. We draw the lines explicitly so the work lands with the team that can act on it.

• What belongs in the purpose and what belongs in the market position, which is a separate decision about what the company stands for competitively.
• How the purpose reaches the brands the company owns, which is a portfolio question rather than a messaging one.
• Which parts of the purpose require the organization to behave differently, which is a transformation program and should be scoped as one rather than hidden inside a brand project.

5. Measurement and the financial case

A purpose with no line to the business is being asked to survive on goodwill, and it will not survive the first budget cycle that goes badly.

• The measures that tie the purpose to preference, price realization and retention, chosen so they can return an uncomfortable answer.
• The decisions the purpose governs, logged, so that a year later it is possible to see whether it governed them.
• Ownership, review triggers and the point at which the purpose should be revised rather than defended.

Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, by Joachimsthaler, Powney and Rolka, found that strong global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year from 2001 to 2024, with a dollar invested becoming $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. That is a finding about brand strength, not about purpose statements. Purpose earns a place in that number only where it has visibly governed what the company funded and what it turned down.

How a brand purpose engagement works

1. Diagnose. Leadership interviews, customer and employee research, and a review of where capital and attention have actually gone. The output is the purpose the company is currently acting on, stated plainly, next to the one it believes it has.
2. Decide. The decisions the purpose must govern, the commitments it funds and the refusal list, worked through with the executive team until each item has an owner rather than an endorsement.
3. Write. The purpose statement, the narrative that carries it to each audience, and the resolution against positioning and portfolio, so the sentence is the last thing produced rather than the first.
4. Embed. Measures, review triggers, governance and the escalation path for the first conflict, so the purpose still governs decisions after we leave.

Two published brand purpose engagements

Octapharma was launching Nuwiq, a hemophilia treatment produced using human cells rather than hamster cells, into a market where competitors communicated mostly on vitality and safety. Rather than argue the product features, Vivaldi moved the proposition to what the company was for, developing a positioning around the notion of pure humanity and designing a brand book to serve as a compass for the organization and set the guiding principles for its marketing and communication. The concept tested well both qualitatively and quantitatively among patients and doctors in several countries, who saw it as relevant, credible and differentiating, and Nuwiq was subsequently launched in several markets. The useful part for a purpose conversation is the order of work: the positioning and the governing document came before the campaign, which is why the idea survived contact with several different markets.

With Takeda, purpose was the output of the analysis rather than its brief: across three phases of patient journey and cultural trend work, Vivaldi identified six opportunity areas and helped the company arrive at a broader purpose, enabling patients to live their fullest, healthiest lives, then connected it back to Takeda’s existing strategic pillars.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for brand purpose work

Three reasons come up repeatedly in the briefs we win.

• We insist on the refusal list. It is the least comfortable part of the engagement and the only part that makes the rest testable. Firms that skip it are selling a narrative, and the client usually knows it within a year.
• Purpose is built next to positioning and portfolio, not instead of them. Our brand strategy group holds all three, so a purpose that turns out to be a positioning problem or an architecture problem gets reclassified early rather than shipped as the wrong deliverable.
• The work is scoped to end in decisions. Every engagement produces named decisions with owners and review dates. If a client wants a statement and a launch film, we are the wrong firm and we say so at the proposal stage.

How to evaluate a brand purpose consultant

Worth asking of anyone on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask what the purpose will rule out. A firm that cannot answer this in the pitch will not produce it in the work.
• Ask which decisions the purpose is meant to govern. If the answer is communications, you are buying a campaign platform under a different name.
• Ask how they establish what the company is already for. Purpose discovery that relies only on executive workshops will return the purpose the executives wanted to hear.
• Ask what happens at the first conflict. Every purpose meets a quarter where honoring it costs money. A firm that has not thought about that moment has not finished the work.
• Ask what they hand to the CFO. A purpose with no measurement and no line to preference or price is an expense with no owner.

Brand purpose consultancy, branding agency or management consultancy?

Related work

Purpose is the smallest decision in the brand strategy group and it borders most of the others. Where your question actually sits:

• Corporate brand positioning owns what the brand stands for in the market, which is a competitive decision rather than a question of intent.
• Cultural transformation owns what the organization will actually do differently, and any purpose that requires people to behave differently belongs there as well as here.
• Brand architecture owns how the brands you already own relate to each other and to the parent.
• New brand development owns launching a brand that does not exist yet.
• Verbal and visual identity design owns naming and identity execution once the intent is settled.
• Research and insights owns the evidence, including the customer and employee work a purpose has to be tested against.
• Brand performance owns measurement, including the tracking that tells you whether the purpose is still true.
• Brand playbooks and tools owns the guidelines and the governing documents your teams run on day to day.
• 360 branding strategy owns digital brand expression across channels.

This work sits inside our brand strategy group, part of the Brand, Innovation & Experience practice at Vivaldi, where the argument is that brand is the face of the business strategy rather than a communications budget.

Brand purpose consultancy in the US and worldwide

Our purpose work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US practice led from New York. Purpose travels badly when it is written in one market and translated into the others, because the refusals that matter differ by market: what a company declines in Germany is rarely what it declines in the US. We run the decision work with the regional leadership in the room for that reason, and the governing document is built to be argued with locally rather than simply distributed. Since 1999 we have worked on brand and purpose for companies across pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, financial services, industrials and technology.