I need to tell you about a meeting I had last month. A CPG brand brought me in to help them find their purpose. They make snack crackers. Good ones, actually. Solid product, loyal customer base, strong distribution. But somewhere a consultant had told them that they needed a purpose beyond profit, and now they were tying themselves in knots trying to connect wheat crackers to social justice.
I told them they did not need a purpose. They needed a point of view. They looked at me like I had suggested they commit a felony.
Here is my controversial take for 2026: the brand purpose era is ending. Not because purpose is bad. But because purpose without specificity became a commodity. Every brand has a purpose statement now. They all sound identical. "We exist to empower people to live more [adjective] lives through [category]." Fill in the blanks. It means nothing.
The data backs this up. Consumers are not choosing brands based on purpose statements anymore. They did for a window, roughly 2018-2023, when having a purpose signaled progressiveness and authenticity. But now every brand from toilet paper to private equity has a purpose and the signal has been diluted to zero.
What I am seeing work instead is what I call Point of View Marketing. It is different from purpose in three important ways:
It is specific rather than universal. A purpose tries to speak to everyone. A point of view deliberately excludes. When Patagonia says "don't buy this jacket," that is a point of view. It alienates some people. That is the point.
It is about the category, not the world. Purpose usually ladders up to some cosmic good. Point of view stays grounded in what you actually do and what you believe about your space. Trader Joe's point of view is that grocery shopping should be fun and surprising and cheap. They do not need to save the ocean to be beloved.
It is demonstrated, not declared. You never have to read a Trader Joe's purpose deck to understand what they believe. You just walk into the store. The point of view is in every Hawaiian shirt, every handwritten sign, every discontinued product they refuse to bring back because the new one is better.
My cracker brand? They have a fantastic point of view that they had never articulated: they believe snacking should not require a PhD in nutrition. Their product is simple. Understandable. No adaptogenic mushroom powder, no ancient grain you have never heard of. Just good crackers made from things you recognize. That is a point of view. It is specific, it is about their category, and it is demonstrated in every product they make.
They have a fantastic point of view that they had never articulated: they believe snacking should not require a PhD in nutrition.
They did not need a purpose. They needed to name what they already believed and have the confidence to stand in it.
That is the work in 2026. Not inventing a purpose. Finding the point of view that is already embedded in what you do, and turning up the volume.