Consumers are increasingly interested in how brands engage with social issues, such as economic disparities, climate change, and other human rights concerns. In a 2025 special report on brand trust by Edelman, 61% of survey respondents said they found it “very or extremely important” for their preferred brands to help them do good in the world, and 75% said the importance of that had increased for them in the past five years.
Tom Hassell, president of the socially conscious apparel company Life is Good, has a saying that reflects the significance of running a purpose-driven company: “Business for good is good for business.” In other words, helping worthy causes and those in need isn’t just an honorable thing to do; it can also drive sales.
A purpose-driven marketing strategy emphasizes purpose and positive impact to engage your customers and grow your business. Learn how to identify your brand purpose, choose meaningful initiatives, and create campaigns that connect with customers while driving measurable results.
What is purpose-driven marketing?
Purpose-driven marketing is a strategy where a brand aligns with a social cause and weaves that commitment through its advertising and external communications. Unlike one-time campaigns, it reflects the company’s core mission and values. The brand purpose is sometimes broad: creating community, for example, or empowering young people. But it can also focus on a specific problem or issue, like fighting food insecurity or providing access to clean water.
Demonstrating your commitment to something people care about helps them find a meaningful emotional connection with your brand. When you weave a social purpose into your company’s marketing activities, it helps you stand out from your competitors, improve brand image, foster brand loyalty, and attract potential customers with the same shared values. “Your customers will reward you for it,” Tom says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
In the Edelman survey, more than half of people in all age brackets said they were more likely to buy from a brand that ensures clean air and water in the local community, combats climate change, promotes racial equality, or combats economic inequality. This indicates that a commitment to purpose-driven brands isn’t just a Gen Z trend. All generations of consumers can deeply care about purpose.
Cause marketing vs. purpose-driven marketing
Cause marketing has some overlap with purpose-driven marketing, but the two strategies aren’t the same. Both involve advocacy around societal issues while also promoting a company’s product or service, but purpose-driven marketing is inherently rooted in the DNA of a business. Cause marketing is less holistic. It’s typically limited to discrete campaigns, which can involve partnering with an outside organization over a set period of time.
Any company can implement a cause marketing campaign, even if that cause is not at the core of its mission. For example, as part of its corporate social responsibility efforts, a fast fashion brand might produce a limited-run tee for Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October) and donate a percentage of the revenue to a cancer research nonprofit. Understanding this distinction helps you choose the right approach for your brand—and avoid strategies that could backfire if customers perceive your efforts as inauthentic.
How to create and execute a purpose-driven marketing strategy
- Identify your brand purpose
- Choose specific initiatives
- Integrate your vision into your marketing plan
- Design your campaign assets and copy
- Deploy your campaign and collect data
- Refine your strategy over time
With consumers more likely to buy products and services from purpose-driven brands, incorporating a purpose-driven approach can boost sales. Capitalize on this consumer mindset with these basic steps for designing a purpose-led marketing strategy:
1. Identify your brand purpose
If you’re starting your own purpose-driven company—or reorienting your existing company around a cause you’re passionate about—be intentional about shaping a brand purpose that inspires your team, aligns with your brand personality, and resonates with your target audience.
First, articulate and solidify your core values: What kind of company do you want to build? Who do you serve? If you don’t have a mission statement, this is a good time to write one.
2. Choose specific initiatives
Once you’ve established your brand values and the broader impact you want to make, identify specific causes that will bring your purpose to life. For example, you may decide to focus on local efforts. Research the best ways to make a difference in your area to find out which causes are in the most need of funding and which organizations are most trusted and impactful.
Once you’ve sussed that out, outline how your company can play a role. Possibilities might include the creation of a nonprofit arm, an ongoing partnership with a particular organization, or the development of new products to raise awareness for your message.
Once all stakeholders have signed off on the company’s role and you’ve gathered the necessary resources, begin executing your vision. In other words, go ahead and create that nonprofit, extend that invitation for a partnership, or give your product department the green light to get started on that new product line.
3. Integrate your vision into your marketing plan
Your marketing plan should document each campaign with:
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Desired assets and content formats
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Target audience
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Timeline with deadlines
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Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rate and engagement rate
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Chosen marketing channels, like social media platforms or a landing page on your own website
If a campaign will center around a specific event, also devise programming and create a proposed schedule.
Your planned social media marketing posts and other assets should put forward your brand purpose as well as highlight the good work your company is trying to do. Consider developing documentary-style videos, a newsletter, a dedicated blog, or even a podcast to amplify your positive impact. The more platforms you use, the more opportunities there will be to connect with a new audience through your shared values.
4. Design your campaign assets and copy
Strong purpose-driven messaging can increase engagement and conversion, but only when it communicates your mission quickly and clearly. Begin creating your assets and drafting marketing copy that reflects your brand purpose, making it clear what actions your company is taking to align with it, and how your target audience can support your mission.
Tom advises creating a short but memorable tagline, like Life is Good’s “10% for Kids,” which reflects the company’s partnership with the Playmaker Project, an organization that benefits children navigating adverse childhood experiences. As he explained on Shopify Masters, “The vast majority of people will look for a shorthand way to understand what it is you’re doing to give back,” so try to communicate it quickly and clearly.
5. Deploy your campaign and collect data
Once you begin executing your purpose-driven marketing campaign, you’ll want to lean on tried and true marketing analytics to assess results.
Metrics like email opens, click-throughs, conversion rates, and social media shares will help you chart the performance of your purpose-driven marketing efforts, learn which approaches and issues your customers find most engaging, and discover where you’re getting the most return on investment (ROI) from this chunk of your marketing budget.
Qualitative feedback from surveys and focus groups will also give you a sense of customer perceptions and preferences in their own words.
6. Refine your strategy over time
Use your collected data to refine future campaigns and your purpose-driven marketing strategy as a whole. Perhaps your conversion rate analysis reveals that you should pour more resources into email marketing versus social media content, or that a specific initiative didn’t resonate with your target audience as deeply as you had hoped.
By remaining true to your brand’s mission but allowing the data to inform your subsequent marketing decisions, you can evolve your purpose-driven marketing strategy to satisfy both your commitment to social good and your bottom line.
Examples of purpose-driven marketing
These four brands demonstrate different approaches to purpose-driven marketing—from donation models to craft preservation to environmental advocacy:
Life is Good
Harnessing customers’ desire for positive impact has helped turn Life is Good into a widely recognized brand. Early on, brothers and founders Bert and John Jacobs decided to donate a portion of their profits to The Playmaker Project—hence the brand’s iconic “10% for Kids” tagline.
“Our Net Promoter Score, which I view as the ultimate report card from our customers, is a 91,” Tom explains. “The average score in the apparel industry is a 39.” Customers say the company’s work with kids contributes significantly to their satisfaction.
Parks Project
As founder Keith Eshelman explained on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, the origin of this purpose-driven apparel brand was a desire to leave well-maintained parks and trails for future generations and to “get people to gather around the idea of conservation.” The first Parks Project products were shirts featuring a handful of National Parks and other federally protected places, each marketed with a different conservation narrative: “Muir Woods, with the storytelling around funding a nursery; Yosemite, around the story of habitat restoration; and Point Reyes, with a story of restoring trails,” Keith says.
Parks Project became an official partner of the National Park System in 2016 and, these days, it regularly collaborates with other outdoor-focused brands and organizations. Its values and goals are communicated throughout its online presence. Their tagline, “Leave It Better Than You Found It” (or simply “Leave It Better”) has a permanent spot on its website, for example, and the running donation total (more than $2.7 million to date) featured on the website header and in the brand’s social media bios. Other purpose-driven marketing strategies include volunteer events and National Park Pass giveaways.
Rasa Jaipur
Indian clothing brand Rasa Jaipur is dedicated to preserving craft in its home state of Rajasthan—especially the region’s quintessential style of block printing—by employing hundreds of craftspeople who make textiles the traditional way, many of whom have worked with the company for nearly 30 years.
There’s a section of the website about Rasa’s impact, including how it uses only natural fibers as a rebuttal to fast fashion and works with craftswomen from nomadic communities to create sustainable livelihoods. But the company also dives into the specifics of the block-printing technique itself, complete with a photo gallery of team members, which illustrates to customers the hard work that goes into making each piece. Social media posts regularly feature the artisans at work, an approach that honors the people behind the craft while demonstrating the care that went into the product.
TOMS
The shoe brand was an early leader in purpose-driven marketing with its iconic “One for One” model: the company donates a pair of shoes to children in developing countries for every pair purchased. Toms has since pivoted to donate one-third of its profits to support child-focused grassroots organizations across the world, now considered a more effective way to make the desired impact.
A section on the homepage also directs customers to a dedicated landing page, designed to provide transparency into this side of the operation with statistics, details about partner nonprofits, and an annual impact report. Toms also displays its B Corp certification in the website footer, and its “Better Tomorrows” slogan appears throughout the brand’s site and social media profiles.
The importance of being purposeful in all your business operations
Purpose isn’t simply a marketing stunt for your customers; you should practice what you preach. Allow your purpose to influence your business decisions, whether it’s choosing more sustainable materials, working with contractors who use ethical labor practices, eliminating single-use plastics in the office, or hosting regular employee volunteer days. These details can also create material for future marketing campaigns.
According to Tom of Life is Good, creating a purpose-driven culture can also boost employee satisfaction. A genuine passion for making an impact “will fuel the work of the employees in the company,” he says, “because everybody loves working for a company that has a higher purpose.”
Purpose-driven marketing FAQ
What is a purpose-driven marketing strategy?
When a company adopts a purpose-driven marketing strategy, it means that the choices and methods are representative of the brand’s purpose—why it exists and what it hopes to achieve, outside of the realm of making money. A purpose-driven marketing strategy involves advertising and other messaging around the brand’s mission and what it is doing to contribute to related causes.
What are a company’s values?
A company’s values are the beliefs and principles that are the foundation for everything it stands for, including the company culture, the organizational structure, and how it presents itself to the world. Values can be wide-ranging, but they usually articulate a desire to make a positive impact, whether driving innovation, protecting the environment, or creating a welcoming workplace for all employees.
What is an example of purpose-driven marketing?
Parks Project, a conservation-focused apparel brand and an official partner of the National Park System, is a great example of the power of purpose-driven marketing. The company set out to help protect the country’s wild lands and help people connect with nature, goals that Parks Project has furthered through marketing efforts like National Park Pass giveaways and limited-run product collaborations with environmental nonprofits.
How do you avoid looking inauthentic with purpose-driven marketing?
To avoid looking inauthentic, choose actions that fully align with your brand values. Follow through with any promises you make to match donations, donate a portion of each sale, or otherwise support a cause. Be transparent about your involvement with other organizations and avoid misleading consumers about your activities.
