Alex Roddie - Alpen Glow Journal

Matt Barr - Looking Sideways

Gavin Fernie Jones - Reaction Collective

Jolyon Varley - OK COOL

Tijana Tamburic - Female Narratives

Charles Ross - Outdoor Compass

Jamie Gamache - Lowkey Films

Hannah Person - Enviral

Caroline Keylock - Strategy Consultant

Stefan Lepkowski - Karol Marketing

I want to offer an alternative contribution. Something that will continue the thinking and explore the central themes and emergent ideas from the event. This is the first of a four-part series exploring those themes.

THEME 1: Post-Purpose & Brand As Citizen

“9 times out of 10, brand purpose is a thinly veiled attempt from marketers to feel better about themselves, selling stuff that people don’t need. I’d go as far as to say marketing’s aggressive adoption of progressive liberal values has (inadvertently) increased the platform for the far right.”

Yep. I wrote that. And yep, I felt a tad uncomfortable when Panel Host Matt Barr read it out in front of a room full of people who work in marketing.

When programming this panel (Title: Brand Purpose & Effective Storytelling) I wanted them to dig into the conventional wisdom that “purpose” is always a good thing. Writers such as Nick Ashbury have written extensively about the problems with purpose & I encourage you to go read his work. But, in a nutshell, purpose all too often obscures the profit-driven motives of brands and, frankly, makes for boring, uncreative and overly earnest storytelling that makes your skin crawl.

During the panel, Bronwen Foster-Butler (CMO, Finisterre) introduced the idea of “Purpose 2.0”, which, as I understood it, is purpose that isn’t built around a slogan or a manifesto but around what a brand actually does. I liked this idea; it neatly circumnavigates the primary complaints against purpose and sets out a show-don’t-tell mandate for purpose-driven brands. A second toss of the coin if you will. But for me, there are still issues here, not least that the brand is still the protagonist and owner of the story.

Welcome to the debate, Gavin Fernie-Jones from Re-action Collective, who took the conversation into a new paradigm. Gav’s point rested on the following idea: the brand-consumer relationship dynamic is dying, and people need to shift their thinking away from being passive consumers and instead into becoming active citizens who work together in collective agency.

Agency is something I think about a lot in the consumer narrative. Purpose-led brands assume the “consumer” has agency over their purchasing decisions. In the panel conversation, I heard someone say, 'Every pound you spend you can spend in protest’. I disagree. For me, the amount of choice an individual has is largely determined by the social, economic, and cultural capital available to them (see Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu). I.e the richer and better connected you are, the more choices you have.

And because of all that, purpose ends up doing something particularly uncomfortable: it pushes responsibility down onto individuals. It asks people to “make better choices” through purchasing decisions. This is what purpose doesn’t capture, it individualises systemic problems. It keeps the consumer in the role of being personally responsible, while the brand stands behind the camera, nagging at them to do better, even if they can’t.

I think there is an emotional truth there that people inside marketing feel but don’t always say out loud. Purpose has reached its limit. We’ve stretched the concept so thin you can see the dystopian market logic sitting underneath it.

What Comes Next: Brand As Citizen

Gavin spoke well about the transition from consumer to citizen, and the work he’s done with Re-action Collective speaks volumes to his understanding of that subject and his internalisation of the work of Jon Alexander in his book Citizens (listen to this Looking Sideways episode for more info). However, I felt the conversation at Outdoor Connections wasn’t able to translate the idea of how this might apply to brands very well. It left me asking the question: if consumers are citizens and need to reorganise collectively to develop stronger agency, where do brands fit in, and how can they contribute effectively to this ecosystem?

This, I think, is where the idea of “Brand as Citizen” comes in. The idea is simple. A citizen is someone who recognises they are part of a collective, accepts shared responsibilities, and participates in shaping the systems they rely on. Brand-as-citizen does the same. It acknowledges individual motive (profit, market share) while also recognising its share of civic responsibility and acting as a member of the community rather than the hero of its own story.

Brands already hold enormous privilege in the form of economic capital, influence, access, distribution, networks and time. If citizenship for actual people depends on having some combination of time, confidence, resources and social belonging, then brands are some of the most privileged “citizens” in the system. They have more agency, more tools and more reach than the individuals they market to. Strategy queen, Zoe Scaman, wrote eloquently about this when she said:

“Brands will collectively spend over $1.07 trillion on advertising this year. That’s more than the GDP of 175 countries. That’s cultural influence at a scale that most activists can only dream about... The problem isn’t that brands engaged with social issues. It’s that too many engaged superficially, inconsistently, and opportunistically. They wanted the badge without the work….”

And this is where “Brand as Citizen” could become the next step on the purpose journey and the missing link in Jon Alexander’s work. It doesn’t ask brands to virtue-signal or wrap their commercial ambitions in moral nonsense. It asks them to be transparent about the fact that they’re profit-making entities, then communicate and act responsibly within that reality. By acknowledging their structural position, they can exist alongside communities rather than above them.

And when you start from that position, the storytelling changes too. Purpose-led storytelling tends to buckle under its own weight because it tries to manufacture meaning when most people sense that the real story is somewhere else. I think this is what Gav means when he says ‘we don’t need better storytelling, we just need new stories’. And I get what he’s saying, but I have a slightly different take. Better storytelling is civic and democratised at its centre. It starts in the community, but it is championed and supported by brands. It flows through them. They support it with their buckets of social and cultural capital, but they do not go looking to create new stories; they allow the citizen communities they are part of to be the protagonists and creators of the stories.

If any industry should understand this instinctively, it’s outdoor. Outdoor culture was always grassroots and bottom-up. Every brand origin story is “we made the gear we needed to realise our objectives in the outdoors”, and every epic adventure story starts with a real protagonist. If we truly want brand stories that matter, the only place to find them is back in that world, by listening, and letting the community set the tone.

For those who haven't seen it:

Look, don't get me wrong. It's entertaining, chaotic, funny and shareable, and my god we need more of that energy in the outdoor industry. Anyone who's been unfortunate enough to post up next to me at an event recently, or spent more than three minutes in a work-related conversation with me, will have heard me banging on about how we need to dial back the authenticity and dial up the entertainment in outdoor brand content. People expect entertainment as a bare minimum requirement for stopping the doom scroll.

So, it came as a surprise to me that I found myself feeling a little hollow after watching the Engineered For Whatever brand film. What was missing... and why is Russell Crowe shouting 'Are you not entertained?' in my head?

And then it struck me: this campaign is all spectacle and no substance. Like a meme, it’s entertaining and easily shareable, but ultimately hollow once you've scrolled on. So, why no meat on the bones here? I think it comes down to the fact that the claims made in the ad are not unique or ownable by the brand. Columbia's core message here, 'engineered for whatever', is a broad brushstroke; swap the logo out for any other premium outdoor brand and it could work just as well. Your jacket works in unpredictable conditions? Yup, so does mine (and everyone else's).

Now we're getting into it. Entertainment is important, but it should be table stakes only. It's a device creatives should use to get people to stop and lend us a moment of their attention, but once they're watching it has to be backed with either emotional or product truths that are ownable and distinctive. It's this combination that makes a campaign really work. It should be impossible to imagine that the campaign could come from anyone else.

Who's done it well in the past? Not many in the outdoor industry, if I'm honest. We're not even at those entertainment table stakes I just mentioned. But there are a few notable examples that I think fit within the genre and do both entertainment and truth well.

Guinness – The Surfer

Tick follows tock follows... my god it's a good ad, isn't it? There's entertainment galore; it's arrestingly beautiful, poetic, cinematic and jam-packed with metaphor, but it's also just so... Guinness. Good things come to those who wait is a truth every Guinness drinker (and every surfer) knows to be true. There is no other beer that gets two-thirds poured and then sits on the bar for a few minutes before you get the final top-up and serve. It takes what could be a negative product truth and reimagines it as strength, anticipation and perseverance.

Patagonia – Don't Buy This Jacket

At first glance this doesn't lean directly into entertainment, especially in the memetic sense, but the subversion of everything you expect from an advert is entertaining. It's radical, it's shocking and it's pure Patagonia. Backed up by decades of activism, it aligns well with their identity and again, you just can't imagine it from another brand, can you?

Nike – Find Your Greatness

This one is always top of my list for how to do the whole package perfectly. Just Do It distilled down for the everyday participant. A monumental shift for Nike away from elite performance but without diluting their brand message one bit. It's humorous, empowering, intimate and inclusive – I'm entertained and I want to be part of it.

The common thread here should be pretty clear: a stone-cold banger of a creative idea that is inseparable from the brand's identity. Making sure that the audience stops, pays attention and then remembers who made it. For me, Columbia pass through stage one but fall at stage two. It's a generic premise dressed up with some cool stunts. Only time will tell, but I doubt 'Engineered For Whatever' will find its way into the hall of fame next to the best of the best.

The outdoor industry needs a creative shake-up. Entertainment has been lacking and so has distinctiveness. So much of the creative work is stuck in a self-referential loop of authenticity over everything; we're missing out on making stuff that people enjoy and actually remember when it comes to purchasing. The net effect on the industry is that marketing, and especially advertising, is being seen as less and less important for brands. Budgets are being cut and creativity is undermined in the boardroom. We all collectively need to do better. Kudos to adam&eveDDB for shaking things up a bit – my god did we need it. But virality without substance is hollow, and the experiences which pull us all back into the outdoors time and time again are far from hollow. We can and should strive for even better work.

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