Marketing With Purpose Kit: The Truth Behind Purpose-Led Brands

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Marketing With Purpose series of the Bliss Business Podcast where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers.
I'm Tullio and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. So let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Laura Peever, Head of Marketing at Sportball. Laura is a marketing leader and brand builder who believes the most powerful brands are created through messaging and they're built through action. At Sportball, she leads brand strategy and growth across a global franchise system, helping scale a business dedicated to developing confident, active kids through fun first sport experiences. Guided by the belief that marketing's role isn't to manufacture purpose, but to reveal it. Laura is passionate about helping organizations move beyond purpose as a positioning exercise and embrace it as a discipline that shapes how they operate, grow and serve. We're going to explore the truth behind purpose-led brands, and I'm excited to dive right in and to see what it really takes to build a brand where purpose is lived every day, not just communicated.
Laura, very excited to speak with you today. A lot of people, for them, being purposeful is performative, so I'm looking forward to digging in here. But before we dive in, I'd love to hear, why was the truth behind purpose-led brands the topic you chose to explore with us today, and why is that important right now?

**Laura Peever** (2:09)
Amazing. Thank you, Tullio. First of all, I want to say thanks so much for having me on the show and the opportunity to have this conversation. The intersection of business and purpose or business for good, or the number of names that goes by is a personal passion of mine. I could talk ad nauseam. I'll try not to do that today. But I've been having these kinds of conversations with friends and colleagues and peers over the years. To bring that to your audience today is really exciting. Purpose-led brands are by no means new in my career span. The history of purpose-led brands could be a whole other episode. But what I've really witnessed is the growth in customer demand, the number of new emergent brands, as well as the legacy brands that are trying to find their purpose or re-connect with their original purpose.
What's driving this trend at a macro level? I think generally as a society, we're in a little bit of a crisis of meaning. In this digital world that's increasingly feeling, whether it actually is quite chaotic with less human conversation and connection, despite having all the conveniences at our fingertips, it's no surprise that we're looking for more meaning and purpose in our lives, where do we spend the most time? At work. And yeah, exactly. And it's the why we're here and what impact are we going to make with this one big, beautiful short life that we have.
So I think we've, in a way, hit the self-actualization peak on the Maslow's Hierarchy.
And so in this context, I think it's really natural to connect with brands that offer meaning and a bright spot in the world. And I will say, you know, it's no surprise that every brand in that context wants to find its purpose and use that to connect with customers. But the one learning that has been reinforced time and again throughout my career is that being a truly purpose led brand never starts with marketing. So sorry to disappoint everyone who is here to, you know, talk exclusively about marketing. Marketing doesn't create purpose. It can only expose whether it's actually there in the first place. And the brands that win are the ones that are building purpose and how they operate and then letting marketing tell that story. And in that way, I'm actually doing one of the easiest jobs at Sportball. You really have to truly leverage purpose as a marketing lever. There has to be an ongoing commitment at the highest levels in the organization to the project of improving your own little corner of the world with the expertise and resources you have.
It's a culture and a value system that's reinforced from the top.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:47)
You know, we tell here at Zero Company clients all the time, you can't promise something to the market you don't live. People will call, customers will feel that. So there has to be alignment.