Every brand has values now. Look at any "About Us" page and you'll probably find the same five words rearranged in a different order: integrity, passion, innovation, community, sustainability. Pick any three, add a lowercase sans-serif font, and you've got yourself a manifesto.

But would you still hold that value if it cost you the sale? That's the line between a value and a veneer. A value is something you'll always defend, even when it's inconvenient, whereas a veneer is something you say because it tested well in a Tuesday afternoon stakeholder workshop. Both can look identical in a Powerpoint presentation, but only one survives contact with a bad quarter.

Brand purpose is usually where this starts

In most brand strategy frameworks, stated values aren’t freestanding, they’re presented as a part of a broader purpose: the brand’s reason for existing beyond making money. This means that testing the values on their own isn’t enough; your brand purpose that your values are supposedly derived from has to hold up too. That’s worth establishing before looking at what the evidence actually says about purpose done well versus purpose done badly.

The purpose paradox

Some people sneer at it, but the evidence around brand purpose is really interesting: Peter Field's analysis for the IPA - comparing 47 purpose-led case studies against 333 non-purpose ones from the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank - found that well-executed purpose campaigns drive tangible business effects.

Strong purpose campaigns averaged 2.1 large business effects against 1.6 for standard campaigns, and specifically strengthened trust in 35% of cases, commitment in 43%, and fame in 39%. 57% of the purpose cases studied performed strongly, and 41% of well-executed brand purpose campaigns drove market share growth, compared to 26% of standard campaigns.

So brand purpose works

Except (and this is the bit that is often overlooked), Field also found that badly executed brand purpose campaigns perform worse than brands that didn't bother with purpose at all. Not neutral - worse. Implying that a half-hearted value is worse than no value.

That should terrify anyone bolting a brand purpose statement onto a campaign brief just because a competitor has one.

Your audience is already onto you

Here’s an uncomfortable reality for anyone hoping people won't notice the gap between the brand deck and the boardroom.

YouGov's consumer segmentation work on sustainability and authenticity in Britain split the population into four groups based on how much they trust brand claims. Only 14% ( named 'Yours Faithfully') were both drawn to sustainable brands and inclined to take their claims at face value.

The single biggest group - 46% of Britain - in a segment YouGov rather brilliantly named 'Justify My Love', wants to believe brands but doesn't trust the label to prove it. The remaining 40% is split across the other two segments; unmoved by sustainability claims and doubtful of the labelling either way.

The underlying idea - that most of your audience is primed to doubt you by default - is unlikely to have reversed since this research took place 5 years ago. To translate that into plain English, we’re saying that nearly half the country wants your values to be real, but is actively looking for proof they aren't.

That's not a hostile audience; that's a hopeful one, braced for disappointment. These are the people you really don’t want to let down.

Why System1's data makes the case for genuine over generic

This is where it gets interesting for anyone who makes the actual ads. Like us.

System1's testing methodology scores creative on the emotional response it generates, and by their own figures only around 17% of ads tested achieve the three-to-five-star rating associated with strong long-term brand building. Their research also points to happiness specifically as the emotion most closely tied to long-term market share growth.

We don't think that's a coincidence, and we don't think you can fake your way to a five-star ad with a value you don't actually hold.

Real feeling is difficult to synthesise. Orlando Wood's IPA-published work with System1, Lemon, then Look Out, makes a related argument from a different angle: that advertising has been quietly losing the character, humour and distinctiveness that builds brands over the long term in favour of safer, flatter, more forgettable work.

Safe and flat is usually what you get when nobody in the building actually believes what they're being asked to say. Or when the brand values and purpose statement the creative work has to jump from has been created in the C-suite on a Friday afternoon and has never seen a real customer to test it with.

So, veneer or value?

Try this test, it costs nothing and takes five minutes.

Take your brand's stated values and ask, for each one: has this ever made us do something we didn't want to do? Has it ever cost us a client, a deadline, a margin point? If the honest answer is no, then you don't have a value, you have a decoration. And decorations don't survive being asked to justify their love.