If you are reading this, you probably know that brand purpose—once the shining city on the hill of modern marketing—has suffered an identity crisis. What started as an earnest attempt to graft moral weight onto consumer goods (think: Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” or Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign) has metastasized into a kind of moral posturing, where the actual impact of a brand’s so-called purpose is often inversely proportional to the loftiness of its claims. It’s a system, to borrow from the ever-quotable George Orwell, where “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Or in this case, to make shampoo feel like social justice.
But here’s the twist, the pendulum swing, the Hegelian synthesis: the future of brand purpose might not be more purpose at all. It might be—brace yourself—actual emotion. Real, sticky, gut-punch, high-dopamine, limbic-system-activated feeling. Not an abstraction like “sustainability” or “empowerment,” but the old-fashioned, from-the-belly, pre-linguistic stuff: longing, nostalgia, giddy delight, maybe even love.
Consider the rise of brands like Almost. You might not have heard of it yet, but you will. It’s a direct-to-consumer jewelry company that sells rings that aren’t engagement rings but might as well be. Their whole ethos is built around the delicious ache of not quite yet, the in-between, the hovering possibility. The website features love letters thIat weren’t sent, pictures of hands almost touching, poems by Rilke. Their tagline? “It’s just the beginning.”
Or take Frost, the ice cream brand that sells flavors like “8th Grade Sleepover” (which tastes vaguely like strawberry Lip Smackers and sugar cookies) or “Sunday Phone Call With Mom” (Earl Grey and honey). They don’t tell you they’re about connection or nostalgia or self-care. They just make you feel it, straight in the chest.
Luxury fashion, interestingly, has always known this. The best luxury brands don’t sell products—they sell mythology. Think of Chanel, which isn’t just a fashion house but an ongoing narrative about rebellion and timelessness. Or Hermès, where a Birkin bag is not just a bag but an artifact of patience, exclusivity, and the tactile joy of craftsmanship. But the newer wave of luxury fashion brands is pushing this emotional connection even further.
Take Mirage, a label that creates only 100 pieces per season, each accompanied by a handwritten letter from the designer explaining the inspiration, the moment of epiphany when the sketch first came to life. Or Nocturne, a Parisian brand that makes garments meant to be worn only at night—velvet coats with silk linings that feel like a secret between you and the moon. These brands don’t scream their values at you. They whisper them, seducing you into a private world where the product is merely an artifact of a feeling.
Then there’s Golden Goose, the brand that took scuffed sneakers—previously the universal signifier of neglect—and transformed them into a cult object of desire. Golden Goose doesn’t just sell shoes; it sells the story of a life well-worn, a life filled with adventure, late-night walks through cobbled streets, impromptu road trips. The distressing on each pair is meticulously designed to look accidentally perfect, evoking an effortless cool that no amount of box-fresh whiteness could ever achieve. And that feeling—the quiet, confident patina of a sneaker that looks like it has seen the world—is what its customers are really buying.
These brands are not trying to save the world. They are not pretending to be movements. They do not “raise awareness” or “spark conversations.” They simply make you feel something—something messy and personal and uncommodifiable, except, of course, it is being commodified, but in a way that feels less like exploitation and more like recognition.
David Ogilvy, godfather of advertising, once said, “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” And there’s something fundamentally humorous about this whole cycle, isn’t there? The way brands keep discovering, again and again, that what actually works is not what people say they want (corporate responsibility, sustainability, ethical labor practices) but what they actually want (to feel something real, even if it’s fleeting, even if it’s fake).
So here we are, at the dawn of a new era of branding that is, in fact, a very old era of branding: emotion-first, feeling-driven, less about meaning and more about experience. A full-circle return to the idea that brands are, at their best, not saviors, not activists, but simply storytellers. And if they tell a good enough story, one that bypasses our rational minds and hits us where we actually live, well—maybe that’s purpose enough.