I played a game at a conference last week. I pulled up the "About" pages of ten different DTC brands across five different categories and removed the company names. Then I asked people to match the mission statement to the brand.
Nobody got more than three right.
"We believe in a world where..." "We're on a mission to..." "We exist to empower..." It's all the same sentence with different nouns plugged in. And that's a problem, because if your brand purpose is interchangeable with your competitor's, it's not actually a purpose. It's wallpaper.
I think about Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" framework a lot. Probably too much. But the thing people miss about it is that your "why" has to be YOUR why. Not a category why. Not a generation's why. Yours specifically, rooted in something true about your origin, your founder, your community, your specific position in the world.
Let me give you an example. Nike's purpose isn't "to make great athletic shoes." It's "to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world." And then they define athlete with an asterisk: "If you have a body, you are an athlete." That's specific. That's expansive and inclusive in a way that's uniquely Nike. No one else can say that and have it land the same way because no one else has the decades of cultural work backing it up.
Nike's purpose isn't "to make great athletic shoes." It's "to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world." And then they define athlete with an asterisk: "If you have a body, you are an athlete." That's specific.
Now look at the average DTC brand launched in 2020. "We believe everyone deserves access to high-quality [product] without compromising on [value]." Cool. So does literally everyone else in your category. You've described table stakes and called it purpose.
The problem usually starts in the strategy process itself. Teams want purpose to be aspirational, which is right. But they also want it to be inoffensive, broadly applicable, and legally safe. By the time legal, leadership, and the board have weighed in, you've sanded off every edge that made it interesting.
Here's my litmus test for brand purpose: Can only your brand say this? If you swap in a competitor's name and it still works, start over.
Second test: Does it create tension? A good purpose should make some people uncomfortable. It should clarify not just who you're for, but implicitly who you're not for. If your purpose could be endorsed by every human on earth, it's too safe to be useful.
Third test: Can you make decisions with it? A real purpose is a strategy tool. It should help you say no to things. If your purpose has never caused you to kill a product, exit a market, or turn down revenue, it's decorative.
I'm not saying every brand needs to be Patagonia, filing lawsuits against the government and telling people not to buy their jackets. But I am saying that if your purpose doesn't cost you anything, it probably isn't worth anything either.
The brands that will matter in the next decade are the ones brave enough to stand for something narrow enough to be true. Everyone else is just filling space on an About page that nobody reads.