The hidden cost of purpose

Independent brand strategist Garrett Reil examines why a sector that has invested heavily in purpose-led branding has produced the least differentiated market positioning – and what it would take to change that.

I’ve spent years working with clients cultivating the idea of purpose. Building strategies around it, making the case that organisations that know why they exist behave differently from ones that don’t. The idea is right. But how it’s deployed matters.

On recent evidence, it’s time for a more nuanced conversation.

I audited brand positioning and language across 75 firms in one professional services sector – consultants in engineering and construction – rating competitive positioning and scoring each across seven dimensions of brand voice. I started by stripping the names off 75 brand statements.

I couldn’t tell the difference.

Engineering a better world. Shaping a better future. Delivering a better tomorrow. Sincere, probably. Indistinguishable, for sure.

The statements aren’t wrong in themselves. A purpose that’s genuinely particular to a firm – anchored in its history, culture, behaviour – can be truly powerful. The problem, for me, is using them as market positioning when they’re functionally identical to what the firm next door says. They stop differentiating and start describing the category. Nearly four in five firms in the study use language so similar to their competitors’ that swapping the firm’s name changes nothing.

A result I didn’t expect was where it became even more pointed.

Several of the firms I found hardest to place had undergone high-profile rebrands. It represents significant investment. Delivered with craft, their award-winning visual systems look nothing like the sector’s traditional aesthetic. Yet their verbal positioning sits below the sector average on distinctiveness. Distinctive visual identity and competitive positioning turn out to be independent variables. A distinctive look without a distinctive position is half a brand.

So, what’s driving this convergence? It’s not laziness. I don’t believe it’s copying. The causes run deeper than any agency process.

The sector moved toward purpose-led positioning almost simultaneously, for understandable reasons – pressures around sustainability, social value and the built environment. And when well-respected firms occupy a territory convincingly for long enough to become a benchmark, their language starts to feel like the template – not imitation exactly. Maybe a gravitational pull. The brief carries benchmark examples. The process builds consensus. Language that survives is language nobody objects to. Inclusive, aspirational, carefully non-specific.

This pattern isn’t unique. Across professional services, the move to purpose-led positioning follows a similar arc. Genuine intent, convergent outcome.

Lurking beneath is a fundamental problem.

Purpose and positioning do different work. Purpose rallies your people; it’s a cultural foundation, motivator beyond profit, even a behavioural guide. Positioning does something else entirely: tell a client why they should choose you over the alternative.

Purpose, asked to do both jobs, is stretched into territory it’s not designed for. It’s flattened into a claim. Easily compared, found wanting, then discounted. You lose the differentiation positioning would have provided. Worse, you lose the cultural integrity a meaningful purpose would have provided. Both are weakened.

Purpose, asked to do the work of positioning, is being stripped of what makes it useful.

Some avoid this and not by accident.

Here’s a well-known example from the sector. Arup’s ‘Shaping a better world’ is not a statement hastily adopted in response to market conditions. Tracing to Ove Arup’s 1970 Key Speech – it summons what the firm exists to do and how it should operate. The firm’s employee ownership through a trust is a tangible expression of the same conviction. Effectively it’s a constraint built into how it operates.

But when the same words are used by firms where it’s an aspiration, they’re only telling the reader what sector they’re in. Not why to choose them over the next firm.

The principle holds up beyond Arup. A firm that can trace its purpose through heritage, principles and operations has strong foundations for purpose to operate as positioning. It holds because the organisation doesn’t just declare it. It embodies it.

Most firms haven’t done that work. Not lack of conviction – many are genuine. But defining what you specifically believe, anchoring it to how you actually operate, and committing to something specific enough that someone might argue with it is harder than drafting a purpose statement. It requires honesty about what the firm is, not what it aspires to be.

That points to a different question before the brief is written. Not what do we want to say. But what do we believe or do, specifically, that nobody else in our competitive set does. And can we demonstrate it, rather than just claim it?

And yes, that’s a harder brief than most. But it’s work that’s worth doing.