Why Audiences of Marketing Want Purpose | Head of Brand Strategy at GS&P, Andy Grayson

There's 3 reasons that I think this is more important than ever before. The first is that audiences are demanding this more and more. I'm not going to use the word millennials because I think everybody uses that word. But basically, a new generation of consumers, of people who are going to buy your products, want companies to be driven by a purpose. want companies to have a grander vision. And they wanna know what those visions are. And they're making decisions based on what those companies are telling them and choosing them over other companies because of that fact. These are just a couple stats from some study on millennials. Um, but it rings really true, doesn't it? If you learn about a company and why they're in business and why they're making certain decisions because of what they believe in, you're more likely to say, yeah, I kinda agree with that. I like that company that they're doing that. That seems like they're run by real people. Not just a faceless corporation that's trying to make money. And there's lots of them out there. The second reason is, and I think this is funny, Ben Jones from Google kind of called it abundance world. And I think we are living in this abundance world right now where it wasn't that long ago where we lived in a time of attention and media scarcity, you know, where someone could put a message out and And everyone would kind of hear about it because it was— everyone was talking about it. And I'm sure that happens now, but it certainly takes something amazing to bubble up to the surface these days. And that's because we live in this world where there is so much media. There are so many companies trying to do what you're doing. There's so many companies trying to vie for attention. How are you gonna stand out? And the way you stand out is by talking about your why. This isn't that surprising when you think about it, but it's pretty staggering that our time spent looking at a screen has increased 500% in the past 3 years alone. That's crazy. You have to break through that and show up on that screen for people to care about you these days. 137,000 new companies are started every day. Fuck. How are you gonna stand out? You have to articulate why you're in business and why people should care about you to cut through the clutter. Don't let that depress you. Let that excite you and want you to tell your story that much better. Obviously, that's a global stat, but it's a compelling one. And the third reason, and Simon mentioned this in the video, but I wanna make a particular point about it, because if you remember one thing from this presentation, remember this all the way through your career, is that people aren't really rational thinkers. Lots of sales and marketing and business has been built on this idea that people are rational thinkers. They need to know the price. They need to know the features to make a decision versus you and a competitor. And sure, that comes into play, but people are really rationale thinkers. Yeah. Think of how true this rings to you, that as human beings, if you give me a good enough reason to rationalize why I wanna buy that, I'm gonna do that. That's why people pay for Nikes. It's why people are buying a Tesla. It's because they've been given a good enough reason to rationalize why I'm gonna spend that much more money to get that thing versus the other thing that's cheaper and maybe even technically better, because I'm building a rationale for it. Yeah. an argument for why I want it. Think about luxury watches. They're not marketed because they're exquisite, perfect machined timepieces. They're marketed because you can pass it down to the next generation, because it's a piece of art and you deserve it. And people rationalize that purchase. They'll buy a $30,000 watch because they're rationalizing the reason to buy that watch.