Purposewash

Background

Purpose. You could argue it was the marketing word of 2019. But so much ‘purpose-led’ marketing is insubstantial, no more than a one-off campaign that jumps onto a cultural trend and has little to no real impact.

Purposewash of this sort undermines agencies genuinely committed to impact-led strategies and creative.

The task was to wake potential clients up to the real opportunities for purposeful marketing both for the world and for their bottom line. And to remind them of GOOD’s USP, that the agency does purpose properly.

Idea

The thinking was that if ‘purposewash’ was a thing it should be an actual ‘thing’, a product that people could buy and apply.

So, 100 bottles of Purposewash were made, beautifully packaged and launched like a high-end bodywash, with a film to match.

People who were lucky enough to get their hands on a bottle could apply it and find that they felt and smelled beautifully purposeful.

For a while.

When, however, that washed off, they could pick up the phone to GOOD to find out what real, impact-led purpose could deliver.

Results

Within days, Purposewash was picked up by the trade press (PR Week, Creative Brief, Campaign) and by marketing bloggers.

Our Thoughts

We’ve talked about ‘woke-washing’ elsewhere in Directory. That’s what Unilever CEO Alan Jope calls it, when brands come out and merely pretend to be purposeful. They don’t just damage themselves, they encourage more abuse of advertising and advertising people. In that sense, GOOD isn’t trying to generate a few leads for its new business team but trying to alert the rest of us to the simple truth that advertising’s biggest problem right now is advertising itself. Too much, too witless and too shallow. I don’t hold out much hope for them in re-educating an industry but I do hope a couple of clients go to them and ask for help because the overwhelming evidence is that when brands try to do good things sincerely they get good business results.