The trust gap is growing. In 2025, purpose has to be proven, not just preached.
If your brand mission starts with “We exist to…” and ends in a buzzword, it’s probably not working.
Worse, it might be actively eroding trust.
In 2025, audiences don’t need another brand claiming to empower, disrupt, democratise, or reimagine. They’ve seen it all. What they’re looking for now is something rarer and more valuable: credibility. And that doesn’t live in a mission statement. It lives in your model.
This piece is your call-out and your cheat code: a breakdown of what’s broken in brand messaging right now, and how to rebuild a mission that’s not just good on paper, but good in practice.
Step into any brand deck right now and you’ll find the usual suspects masquerading as meaning: “empowerment,” “community,” “innovation,” “wellness.” That same tired cocktail of corporate virtue, dressed up to signal purpose but too vague to provoke belief. Lofty enough to impress in the boardroom, empty enough to disappear the moment it steps foot outside.
Take a closer look and it all starts to swirl into a superfluous, soft-focus sameness. Language engineered for all-hands applause and agency creds, not real-world interrogation. Brands are still churning out manifestos like modern scripture: airbrushed missions, feel-good values, big proclamations with no working parts to back it all up. Audiences have stopped tuning in. More a survival tactic than cynicism, though there’s that too. By now, phrases like “we exist to empower” feel less like a call to action and more like a warning sign: you’re about to be sold a feeling that can’t be meaningfully articulated, let alone verified.
The era of mission-driven-mush
The real failure isn’t the language, it’s the lack of receipts.
Continue reading on our Substack, Public Opinion.
