Published on May 1, 2025
The best purpose statements weave values into the corporate DNA. Corporate purpose statements are founded on what companies and organizations do best to advance or improve people’s lives. Companies that excel at purpose move beyond a statement of corporate social responsibility. They reinvent themselves from the inside out, based on their purpose, and then measure their impact.
Purpose Brand’s 2025 review identified 170 purpose statements from Fortune 500 companies, compared to 111 in our 2022 report. Most companies have mission statements, a mainstay in corporate governance frameworks. By contrast, a purpose statement reflects a company’s stake in customer and community prosperity. Only 1 in 3 companies take this extra step to connect their brands to motivational values.
While some companies view purpose as a reputation-enhancing initiative, others make it a cornerstone of their communication with stakeholders. While neither approach is inherently superior, this contrast is clear from the placement of companies’ purpose statements. In presenting purpose statement examples, we noted that presenting purpose as part of “Our Story” is different from detailing it only in an environmental, social and governance (ESG) report or a career recruitment microsite.
Diane Primo, Purpose Brand’s CEO, identified the emerging space for brand purpose in The Purpose Report. Purpose should be leveraged. Consumers care about purpose-driven initiatives and want companies to care too: 4 in 5 people surveyed believe a brand or company should have a purpose beyond making money. Companies that incorporate brand purpose into their corporate governance stand to gain.
These purpose statement examples from Fortune 500 company websites represent aspiration, not necessarily reality. Each reader must examine a company’s culture, content and actions to understand whether a company is purposeful.
A purpose statement can be a corporate branding slogan incorporated into logos or a positioning statement deep within a corporate social responsibility report. Many Fortune 500 purpose statements are featured on the company’s website home page or About section, and here we’ve linked to each of them. These purpose statements show how major companies value their products as a social good in themselves, independent of the values and principles that produced them.
Customers purchase goods and services as a means to an end, and a purpose statement captures that ultimate end goal to improve their lives and the lives of others. They may not be labeled as such, but branding frequently repeats the phrases to reveal the change consumers want to see in the world.
Purpose statements are key to corporate branding. Many slogans reflect the company’s focus on customer objectives. Of the 111 companies that Purpose Brand identified in 2022, 52—nearly half—since then have adopted taglines, trademarks or other marketing phrases that reflect stakeholder values even more clearly. The new examples of corporate purpose statements “in the wild” show how engaging and motivating branding starts with purpose.
These 170 companies in the most recent Fortune 500 ranking find their corporate purpose meaningful enough to share it with the world explicitly.
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