Brand Purpose, or: The Ideology of the Turtleneck
Every brand now has a purpose. Not a business purpose — that would be too vulgar, too honest. A purpose purpose. A reason for being that transcends profit and connects the brand to something larger: sustainability, equity, community, wellness, human potential. The language is always vaguely spiritual, as if the brand were not a legal entity organized for the extraction of surplus value but a secular church ministering to the needs of the soul.
I want to understand how we got here, because it was not always this way. For most of the twentieth century, brands were permitted to be what they were: commercial enterprises that made things and sold them. Coca-Cola refreshed. Tide cleaned. Ford transported. The relationship between brand and consumer was transactional and everyone understood the terms. You gave money; they gave product. End of story.
The shift began, one might argue, with Apple. Specifically, with Steve Jobs and his turtleneck. The turtleneck was important because it was not a suit. It communicated that Jobs was not a businessman but a visionnaire — an artist who happened to run a corporation. The turtleneck said: what we do here is not commerce; it is something finer. And the products extended this claim. The iMac was not a computer; it was a statement about how life should be lived. The iPod was not a music player; it was a thousand songs in your pocket, which is to say, it was freedom, spontaneity, the aestheticization of everyday life.
The Purpose Industrial Complex
The purpose movement in branding has its own institutional apparatus: consultancies, conferences, awards, manifestos. Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" TED talk, which has been viewed over sixty million times, is perhaps its foundational text. The argument is simple: people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Purpose is the engine of loyalty. Meaning is the currency of modern brands.
This is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete in ways that matter. What Sinek and his followers describe is not purpose in any philosophical sense but purpose as a marketing strategy — le pourquoi instrumentalized as a competitive advantage. The brand that has a "why" outperforms the brand that merely has a "what." Purpose, in this framework, is not an end but a means. It is a technique for producing consumer attachment, as measurable and optimizable as any other element of the marketing mix.
The problem is not that brands have adopted purpose but that they have adopted it cynically — or, worse, sincerely but without understanding what sincerity requires. Pepsi's 2017 ad featuring Kendall Jenner handing a can of soda to a police officer at a protest is the canonical example of purpose gone wrong. The ad attempted to associate Pepsi with social justice, but it did so with such breathtaking superficiality that it produced the opposite effect. The backlash was immediate and devastating. The ad was pulled within twenty-four hours.
But the Pepsi incident is interesting not because it was an outlier but because it was typical — typical in its ambition, if not in its incompetence. Every brand now wants to be on the right side of history. Every brand wants to stand for something. The result is a marketplace saturated with purpose claims that are, for the most part, indistinguishable from one another. Everyone is for sustainability. Everyone is for inclusion. Everyone is for community. The différance, to borrow from Derrida, has collapsed: all brands now say the same thing, and the same thing means nothing.
Althusser in the Marketing Department
Louis Althusser's concept of ideology is useful here. For Althusser, ideology is not a set of beliefs imposed from above but a set of practices that constitute subjects from within. Ideology, he wrote, "interpellates individuals as subjects" — it hails them, calls to them, and in the act of recognition, constitutes their identity. The classic example is the police officer who shouts "Hey, you there!" The individual who turns around — who recognizes themselves as the one being addressed — has been interpellated. They have become a subject of the ideological apparatus.
Brand purpose operates as a form of interpellation. When Patagonia says "We're in business to save our home planet," it is not merely describing a corporate mission. It is hailing a particular kind of consumer — the consumer who cares about the planet, who wants their purchases to be meaningful, who identifies as conscious, responsible, engagé. The consumer who responds to this call — who buys the jacket, who tells friends about the brand's environmental commitments — has been interpellated as a subject of Patagonia's ideological apparatus.
This is not manipulation, exactly. Patagonia's environmental work is real and substantial. But the mechanism by which brand purpose functions is ideological regardless of the sincerity of its content. It constitutes consumer identities. It produces subjects who understand themselves through their consumption choices. It transforms shopping into a moral act and brand loyalty into a form of political expression. And in doing so, it obscures the fundamental nature of the relationship, which remains, at bottom, commercial.
The Turtleneck as Signifier
Let me return to the turtleneck. Jobs's turtleneck — the black Issey Miyake mock-neck that became his uniform from the late 1990s until his death — is one of the most effective semiotic devices in the history of modern business. It communicated, simultaneously: asceticism (I am beyond fashion), focus (I do not waste time on trivial decisions), creativity (I am an artist, not a suit), and authority (I am so powerful I do not need to dress the part).
The turtleneck spawned a genre. Mark Zuckerberg's gray t-shirt. Elizabeth Holmes's black turtleneck (a direct homage to Jobs, as she readily admitted). The Silicon Valley uniform of hoodie and jeans. Each of these is a costume — a deliberate sartorial choice designed to communicate the absence of deliberate sartorial choice. They are anti-fashion fashion, just as brand purpose is anti-marketing marketing.
Holmes is the most instructive case because her turtleneck was revealed, eventually, to be covering nothing. Theranos had no working technology. The purpose — revolutionizing healthcare, democratizing diagnostics, saving lives — was a fiction. But the fiction was sustained for years, backed by billions in investment, because the semiotic apparatus was so convincing. The turtleneck, the stage presence, the mission language — all of it produced such a powerful effet de réel that the absence of an actual product went unnoticed.
One might object that Holmes was a fraud and most purpose-driven brands are not. This is true. But the ease with which the apparatus of purpose can be deployed without substance should give us pause. If the same signifiers can be used to communicate genuine commitment and total fabrication, what does that tell us about the reliability of those signifiers?
What Would Honest Purpose Look Like?
I sometimes imagine what a truly honest brand purpose statement would look like. Something like: "We exist to generate returns for our shareholders by selling you products at a price that exceeds our cost of production. We have identified that consumers in our target segment respond positively to brands that appear to have a social mission, so we have adopted one. Our sustainability initiatives are real but are also calibrated to their return on investment. We care about the planet insofar as caring about the planet is good for business."
No brand will ever say this, obviously. But isn't it closer to the truth than "We believe in the power of human potential"? And if it is, what does that tell us about the relationship between brands and truth? Between purpose and performance? Between the turtleneck and what it covers?
Barthes wrote that myth is "depoliticized speech" — speech that has been drained of its historical and material context and presented as natural, eternal, obvious. Brand purpose is myth in exactly this sense. It takes a commercial relationship — one that exists within a specific economic system, with specific power dynamics and material interests — and presents it as something transcendent. Something beyond commerce. Something pure.
The turtleneck, you might say, is the garment of purity. It covers the throat, the site of speech. It is a kind of silence. And perhaps that is what brand purpose is, finally: a very expensive, very well-designed silence about what brands actually are and what they actually do.
But then again — does anyone still believe them?