Purpose has quietly become a B2B discipline
For years, purpose has been associated with consumer brands and big campaigns. But when we measured who actually communicates a purpose beyond the product, the arrow pointed the opposite way: it is brands that sell to businesses that lead. We have classified the purpose communication of 297 Danish brands from their own texts. Here is the picture.
Four in ten have a purpose that can be read
We have read the brands' own front-page and about-us texts and assessed whether a purpose beyond the product is communicated: why the company exists and what it wants to change. The result: four in ten brands have a clear or defining purpose in their text. Just under a third only hint at it faintly, and at just over one in four it is not there at all.
That punctures one myth straight away: purpose inflation is smaller than the debate suggests. There is not "purpose in everything" in Danish business. There is purpose at some, and silence at a surprising number.
The surprise: B2B leads
The conventional story says that purpose belongs to consumer brands. Our figures point the other way: among brands that sell to businesses, markedly more communicate a clear purpose than among those that sell to consumers: 61 percent (49 of 80) against 25 percent (31 of 125). The difference is large, and it persists even when we compare only brands within the same industry; there it is still around 35 percentage points. Among B2B brands almost none lack a purpose entirely (4 percent); among consumer brands it is a large minority (42 percent).
The explanation probably lies in the buying process. Professional customers today demand responsibility, documentation and direction before the contract is signed; purpose has become a selling point in the tender material. The consumer brand can still win on price, product and availability alone. Purpose is, in other words, no longer (only) a campaign choice. It is becoming a requirement in the professional value chain.
And the founder? Almost invisible
A related finding: in an age when personal visibility matters more than ever, only about one brand in five lets a founder or a named person be a visible sender in its text. The person-led brand is far rarer than the debate about personal branding suggests, and for the companies where there actually is a person with a story behind it, the space is thus relatively vacant.
What this means for your brand
If you sell to businesses, your company's purpose is no longer whipped cream: your customers look for it BEFORE they choose you, and if they cannot find it, they choose someone where they can. If you sell to consumers, the sum is the reverse, but just as cash-hard: the field around you is quieter than the debate sounds, so an honest and concretely worded "this is why we exist" is one of the cheapest ways of standing out right now. In both cases the same requirement applies: your purpose must be readable from the outside, by a stranger, in under a minute. If it is not, it does not exist in the market, however genuine it is on the inside.
How we measured (method)
The figures are based on 351 brands analysed in brandvju as of October 2026, all measured with the same method; purpose could be classified for 297 of them. Purpose, sender and responsibility communication are classified automatically from the brands' own, publicly available front-page and about-us texts, and each classification is tied to verbatim quotes from the text. We measure what the brand itself communicates outwardly, not whether the purpose is lived up to. Brands whose websites refuse automatic reading or have very little text are left out; coverage is almost identical for B2B and consumer brands.