When Yves Briantais told friends and colleagues he was joining the Carlsberg Group as its CMO last year, the most common response was, “Oh, probably the best beer in the world, right?”.

Coming into the organisation, he knew right away that Carlsberg had to double down on this brand line.

“How many brands in the world enjoy such an asset that everybody knows it?” Briantais says. “It was impossible to move away from it. To me, it was clear we had to double down.”

This comes to life in the brand’s new motto, he explains. “We exist to help more people access more of the best.”

Since joining the organisation in August, one of Briantais’s priorities has been establishing a series of “big brand ideas” across Carlsberg’s global portfolio, which includes Tuborg, 1664 and Somersby.

“We’ve started to develop what we call our ‘big brand ideas’, so the advertising platforms that we’re going to be using for hopefully 20 years,” says Briantais.

Purpose is absolutely not dead.

Yves Briantais, Carlsberg

Before Briantais joined the brand, it had been focusing on cementing its hop leaf symbol as a new brand asset. Now, as it focuses on the new brand idea, connected to the ‘Probably the best’ asset, it seems to have moved away from this focus.

A prerequisite of developing these brand ideas was each brand being “crystal clear” on who it is and what it stands for, he notes. In the case of the Carlsberg brand itself, it made sense to not only draw on the famous asset of ‘Probably the best’, but also tap into the history of the brand.

Carlsberg’s Danish founder, JC Jacobsen, was renowned for his philanthropy. He set up the Carlsberg Foundation, a non-profit organisation created to fund the sciences. It was one of the first organisations of this type founded. He also had what Briantais terms a “passion for excellence”, something that continues in the business to this day.

Carlsberg is a brand that is still closely tied to its founder’s roots, so he believes it made sense to tap into this.

“This idea of having access to the best has never been more important than today and we authentically can do it because it’s in our DNA,” he says.

Purpose as essential for brand survival

Carlsberg’s goal to “help more people access more of the best” is intended to inform years and even decades of advertising activations, but it also acts as a purpose for the brand.

Briantais is aware that purpose has fallen out of fashion in many marketing industry circles, but rejects any notion that the idea of purpose is now redundant.

“Purpose is absolutely not dead,” he asserts.

Brand purpose was extremely popular going back a decade or so, but has fallen out of favour even with the likes of Unilever, once seen as one of purpose’s biggest advocates. Briantais is critical of how brand purpose was enacted by many organisations.

“I think what many brands got wrong is that they came up with purposes that were totally unauthentic, or brands like butter or mayonnaise thought that they were going to change the world,” he says.

Good intentions lead to bad marketing’: Why purpose is missing the mark

However, he urges brands to avoid “throwing the baby out with the bath water” and rejecting the idea of purpose altogether because of those that have got it wrong.

Purpose is where brands’ “functional point of view” and “emotional point of view” are brought together, says Briantais. Some brands will need to be more functional than others, he says, but that doesn’t mean they still don’t have a purpose.

“I don’t believe a brand can survive without a purpose,” he asserts.

Unlike the often-cited examples of the past, brand purpose needs to be authentic and realistic.

“If you are are a beer brand, you’re not going to change the world, but can we give people access to a more social life, to better products,” he says.

He was speaking alongside agency partner Fold7’s chief strategy officer Yelena Gaufman, who added that Carlsberg’s purpose is “inherently tied to the business”, as opposed to existing separately.

“It’s a virtuous circle. The purpose that we’ve created is good for our consumer, our drinker, our audience, and it’s good for us because they have access to the best good for us,” says Gaufman.

Brands showing up in a fragmented world

The new brand idea created for Carlsberg has already sparked off “tonnes of ideas”, says Briantais. These are coming from its creative agency, and even from board meetings, he says, something indicative of the power of the new platform.

While the idea of helping more people access the best is a global idea, how that comes to life in different markets will vary, he says. He will leave it to local teams to work out how access to the best is communicated in different markets.

As well as tailoring specific executions to specific markets, Briantais also believes it is imperative to ensure that, particularly in a fragmented media landscape, creative is designed for the particular channel it appears on.

The challenge I see today in many companies, and still with Carlsberg is that when you brief an agency, the natural reaction is to start with the TVC .

Yves Briantais, Carlsberg

The creative and media briefing process should start with a big brand idea, and then filter down into understanding the consumer journey and the job to be done with the campaign, meaning working out the goals for what the work wants to achieve. Then the agencies need to work out the media plan, and “only then starting creating”, says Briantais.

“The challenge I see today in many companies, and still with Carlsberg, is that when you brief an agency, the natural reaction is to start with the TVC and do a cut down of the TVC to put on YouTube, on Facebook, Instagram etc,” he says. “We need platform-fit content. And that can happen only if you start with the consumer journey and the media plan.”

While it’s important to ensure that the brand produces content fit for particular media channels, it remains absolutely essential that Carlsberg and every other brand in the group’s portfolio shows up in every channel “looking and feeling like itself”.

For Carlsberg, that means showing up in green and white, in a witty way, utilising its assets. If brands show up looking like themselves, they can minimise the impact of fragmentation, Briantais says.