Finding Purpose.
For all the good done to bring purpose into the mainstream by Simon Sinek, there have also been some marked challenges. Chief among them is the interpretation of purpose as something beyond a fervent passion and enthusiasm to solve a real problem in people’s lives. For many, “Starting With Why” has become the search for a calling far beyond the business or solving a problem.
This focus on purpose as higher calling has led to a dismissive backlash. Over last few years purpose as corporate North Star has lost its lustre. A couple of years ago the business world couldn’t get enough, with everything from detergent to door stops shouting their purpose from the mountaintops. Today, they decry purpose as overdone, they’ve been there and done that, and it’s on to the next, deeper, more meaningful way to craft and communicate brands. But here’s the rub…what could possibly be more meaningful than purpose? The problem is not with purpose, but the multitudinous ways we have been defining it. This misuse of language, has stripped it of meaning. In this case, we took the purpose of a company — to solve a problem in the world with a product or service, and conflated it with having a higher calling, some purpose beyond what the business was created to do.
This focus on brand strategy and marketing that looks past the problems people need to solve in their lives is a slippery slope. It leads to woke-washing, to the plethora of “we’re all in this together” spots, and leads to purpose as marketing speak and jargon, rather than action derived from conviction. Just ask Cadbury how their chocolate bar for diversity has worked out for them.
As a strategist I believe in purpose, and have to admit to its overzealous application. I was excited by the prospect of creating meaning in my work and for the brands I worked on, and so would propose purpose divorced from the customer problem and passion that drove the company to exist in the first place. I’ve learned the hard way that slapping a higher order purpose on a brand at the expense of their true calling only leads to failure.
Conversely, I have witnessed that aligning around a company’s purpose — the reason a company, or product was first created, is the route to business success. Working with designers has helped reinforce that conviction.
When you are part of the inception of a product or service, when you work with the design team to create something from nothing, you begin to see purpose through a new lens — through the eyes of a Founder’s intent.
Working with design, helped me realign my planning worldview. Brand strategy does not live at the centre. Entrepreneurs don’t created businesses around brand strategies. Founder’s don’t begin by sitting down to generate a brand name, define the voice, or develop brand standards. No, they look at the world, they look at people and the problems they have in their lives, and they dream up better solutions.
This is the Founder’s Intent. Founder’s intent is as much an articulation of the problem as it is the crafting of the solution.
This is not about hero worship or the cult of the individual. Founder’s intent is not actually about the founder, it’s about the problem they identified, and it’s about the role the company can play in people’s lives’.
Numerous studies have shown that companies with purpose are more profitable than those without, but it’s not just any purpose. Having a strong CSR stance or initiatives doesn’t make you profitable, but understanding your founder’s intent can. It focusses the company on the job at hand, namely the problem that people need help with, the problem your company was created to solve. This is the path to progress and profitability.
But how do we find our intent you ask?
The process is two-fold — one inward looking, and one outward looking. First we must begin with the company, its founders and their original intent. This is the DNA. By mining it you find the defining truths of a brand, and gain insight into the core problem the company was founded to solve. The trick here is that DNA is not enough, because the world does not stand still. We must be willing and able to pivot and change in order to remain relevant. Think IBM here, moving from a hardware company to a services and software company all the while maintaining the coherent thread of making the world smarter.
The thing that allows us to pivot is the second, outward looking part of the process. This is where we look at people’s lives and the challenges they face. We then define ways our company might help outright solve those problems, or at the very least, help people to make progress toward their desired goal. In this phase we are looking critically at our DNA in the context of the world and where it is going. This allows us to extend the founder’s intent into the modern world and if needs be, to pivot the company in order to continue to deliver on that intent or purpose.
In working to uncover true purpose, not manufacturing it, the focus on the founder’s intent brings clarity and discipline to the brand building process. It delivers strategies that not only inform marketing, but more importantly inform products and services, the business, and the employees.
In short, Founder’s Intent offers a roadmap to the whole organization long after the founder’s have gone, helping everyone who works at the company to see and feel a very real and tangible purpose every day.