Brand Purpose: do you have a right to play?

The purpose debate rages on. At the beginning of the year, Terry Smith, the founder and Chief Exec of Fundsmith Equity, heaped criticism on famously purpose-led Unilever. “A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” For Smith, Unilever’s recent poor returns were the fault of a leadership team “obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business.”