Bringing brand purpose to life through strategic alignment

Brand purpose is a process of engagement. To bring purpose to life , it needs to be materialized into concrete policies and practices that strategically align the brand’s key stakeholders. By taking this perspective, brand alignment represents a strategic enabler to orchestrate the corporate brand relationships with internal and external stakeholders and to enhance stakeholders’ mutual understanding and value co-creation.

To ensure internal coherence, a brand should aim to strategically align employee behavior with the intended purpose. This requires a supportive culture, intensive training and appropriate incentives Externally, brands should strategically align their complex network of stakeholders. This interconnected web of relations plays a key role in realizing a brand’s purpose and can strongly amplify either the responsibility or the irresponsibility of the focal brand. Consequently, brand purpose research needs to adopt a systems approach. However, surprisingly, there is still extremely scarce research on how to activate brand purpose from a stakeholder perspective.