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FINN Partners Purpose Alignment Index

June 20, 2023

The FINN Purpose Alignment Index is a proprietary research product designed to quantify the influence of a company’s or brand’s purpose-related commitments and efforts on consumer buying decisions. The Index can be deployed across any industry sector to enable brands and corporations to understand how their product and purpose priorities factor into consumer purchasing decisions in a highly competitive marketplace. This proprietary index enables clients to hone purpose-centric market strategies and communications plans based on the predictive impact on brand perception and customer likelihood to support a brand for its social impact.

To illustrate the Index’s value in action, we conducted a study in March 2023, enlisting more than 2,500 consumers in the US and UK to share their views on seven brand purpose factors spanning economics and cost, reputation, functionality, customer experience, ESG/social impact, social influence, and marketing. The index also uncovers deeper consumer purchase drivers across 40 subfactors, including data privacy, trustworthiness, transparent business practices, and workforce diversity. Among the study conclusions:

  1. Social impact is more important than product features when customers are making final buying decisions. Consumers consider both what they buy and whom they are buying from, weighing the company’s reputation as an employer, transparency of business practices, and workforce diversity and inclusion efforts. Among the 40 social impact ranking factors, keeping customer data private and secure (#4) and operating in a trustworthy way (#5) rank higher than new features (#6) and product innovation (#10).
  2. Generational differences are highly pronounced when aligning product and purpose priorities. Gen Xers and Millennials rank social impact/ESG factors in the top half of their buying priorities and are cost conscious. Gen Z and Millennials are the most likely to purchase a personal technology product and social impact issues take prominence over price sensitivity in their buying decisions.
  3. UK consumers rank six social impact factors higher than US consumers and consider twice as many social impact factors in their top 20 brand purpose preferences. Except for treating employees well, US consumers consistently rank social impact factors lower than UK citizens. UK consumers rate factors such as transparent business practices and a company having a diverse workforce more highly than US consumers, who don’t include these considerations in any of their top 20 sub-factors.
  4. Sustainability and the environment are important considerations, but they rank higher in importance among women consumers than men, who ranked that sub-factor 19th among their top 20. And while respondents rated a company’s environmental impacts and sustainable business practices as extremely important, they felt that most companies perform poorly in these areas.
  5. “Walking the walk” matters more to UK and younger generational buyers than product features. The data suggest that brand performance combined with purpose and social impact will ultimately sway consumers and build a company’s market share.

VIEW SOCIAL RANKING FACTORS HERE