Bringing brand purpose to life through strategic alignment

Purpose is a process of engagement (Kaplan, 2023, p.297) because, to become alive, needs to be materialized into concrete policies and practices (Aguilera, 2023) that strategically align the brand’s key stakeholders. On one side, a brand should strategically align its employees to ensure consistency between the intended purpose and their actual behaviours (Morrisson and Motta, 2024). This requires intensive training and appropriate incentives (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Luo & Kaul, 2019; Smith & Besharov, 2019; Wry & Lounsbury, 2013). On the other, brands should also strategically align its complex network of stakeholders. This intricated web of relations plays a key role in realizing a brand’s purpose (Iglesias et al., 2023) and can strongly amplify either the responsibility or the irresponsibility of the focal brand (Kaplan, 2023). Consequently, the brand purpose research needs to adopt a systems approach (Besharov and Mitzinneck 2023). However, surprisingly, there is still extremely scarce research on how to activate brand purpose from a stakeholder perspective (Iglesias et al., 2023).
Given this, the main objective of the present research is to explore how brands can strategically align their stakeholders’ network to make their purpose alive.