The Purpose Gap with Dylan Williams

Chief Strategic Officer at Droga5 in London, UK., and Managing Director at Accenture Interactive.

For the majority of my career, I’ve been focused on manipulating markets and shifting and changing the shape of the market on behalf of my clients.

We are in the business of helping companies to grow by increasing lead generation and consumer demand. Our conviction was based on the belief that we were shifting demand. Hoping that a piece of communication would shift the attention from A to B. We realized recently that in fact, we weren’t shifting demand, we were just creating more demand. Changing along the way the nature of that demand, from people needing things to people wanting things.

We’ve fostered instant gratification driven by emotional desire more than physical need.

As a consequence people in my generation, professionals with 25 successful years in our industry are awakened to the fact that we have contributed disproportionately to the existential crisis that now faces humanity. Which doesn’t make us feel good.

The good news is that the same techniques and tools that were used to inflate demand can now be used to address the problem. We can use the next 25 years to regress some of the imbalances we’ve helped cause in the first place.

The brands we are going to seek in the future are the brands that deliver on their promises, and turn good intentions into actions.

It’s not enough to just have a purpose and to orientate your company around an articulation of your reason for being beyond making a profit. It’s a necessary but insufficient condition. To actually encourage companies to take up the opportunity, sided by the people of the world, and lead the positive change we all want.

You can’t just have a purpose, you have to act upon it.

Individuals are just like organizations. We have the best intentions, but they are overtaken by routines and habits. The 25% of us who keep our new year resolutions by February 1st, do so because we went from articulating an intention to turn it into a series of little goals.

What are we going to do today to make the boat go faster?

The purpose gap is the gap between the companies purpose statement and living that purpose out in the world. What can we do to help close that gap between intentions and action?

There is such a thing as having too many purposes for a corporation.

You can integrate all the resources needed to achieve many different goals into one system that works to achieve something very significant in time.

The Climate crisis is the big, far-reaching goal we need to address first. There is no point in addressing any other goals if the planet dies. We have a decade to pursue a single-minded goal. Working back from that goal, the best thing we can do this year is to hire more women in positions of management. Evidence suggests that having more women in senior management immediately fosters a more ethical mindset: more matriarchal, less narcissistic, and more open to collaboration.

This decision increases the probability of not only achieving one goal but of achieving all of them.

Ethical transformation

Ethical transformation is achieved by recognizing that purpose is necessary but insufficient, turning purpose into a series of goals, and working at how those goals integrate through time so that achieving one increases the probabilities of achieving the next. And knowing that the single most important goal we can all organize around, individually as consumers and collectively as organizations are saving the planet. Giving ourselves a decade to do it.

My definition of sustainability is doing things today that enable you to do them tomorrow.

I feel very positive about something I was very negative about just 2 years ago. As individuals, 7 billion little islands can only do so much. What we need is to unified forces to forced badly-behaved organizations to change up. Make my money matter movement in the UK lead by Richard Curtis has been able to measure a significant change in private funds, and two years ago that was unthinkable.

Only when you recognize it you can do something about it

About 10 years ago I took my small children back to an island in Thailand that I had gone to pre-family and I was struck by how much it had changed. From crystal clear water to an ocean full of plastic.

I stepped into the trash of some of my clients. It brought to bed to me that I’d contributed to all this. I had a set of effectiveness awards and recognition for being a good strategist because I had sold a lot of X brands and I had those brands floating at my knees.

Back in the day, we didn’t even think about looking at the supply chain of our clients to understand how things got manufactured. Of course, we excuse ourselves a little bit by saying” we didn’t know because we didn’t have the internet! But we just didn’t ask.

I’ve learned that the average consumer is smarter than you think.

The Supply Chain

As power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side of the economy, and as digital technology has rendered companies increasingly transparent through the supply chain we can now use people power on the demand side to really change the behavior of corporations, and organizations in a way that is unprecedented in history.

Today we can look at every step of the supply chain and analyze how we can help our clients create new proof points, new reasons to believe that support the vision and mission of the brand.

65% of electric cars owners still charge their car with grey energy unknowingly. It’s not enough to own an electronic vehicle, you still need to know what national grid you are plugging into. And on the supply side, urge car manufacturers to strike a deal with green energy providers. So when you buy a car you switch your home energy supplier to align with the choices you’ve made. In every category, there are equivalent anomalies that we can start to address.

Sweeping positive change

We used to believe that strong working cultures are created by spending a lot of time together in the same space. But there is a downside to that way of building culture.

We spend all our time speaking with people like ourselves but we spend no time in the real world; We feel very comfortable in our bubbles. And in spite of all the resources spent in future casting, trends analysis, sentiment analysis, social listening across all aspects of life, no single person predicted Brexit, or Trump, or Bolsonaro and for the same reason, we are blinded to climate change.

The lady at the checkout at the local supermarket is a wonderful resource of wisdom.

Because of Covid, we are today more understanding of work-life balance. We want to travel, move around, meet different people, and experience life firsthand. This will change the way we understand our working life. We all are going to have the chance to understand what drives us.

We are going to come up with something we never thought possible because we are going to be more connected to normal people living a normal life.

You have two ears and one mouth and you should use them in that proportion.

We are walking into a golden age of Innovation.

Platforms like Tik Tok are very powerful media to effect positive change, to scale behavior change quite rapidly all over the world.

Brands that want to thrive in the future need to join the real world, be sensitive to the myriad of local cultures that make life worth anything, and behave in a way that positively contributes to those cultures short term and long term.

The story of the brand starts with how it’s made, how you treat your workers, how it’s brought to market, what you do when it’s finished, how you create a circular economy based on production that is sustainable. And it is a much more interesting story to tell for writers and photographers and directors and technologists. And it’s based on truths instead of myths. And that to me is exciting!

Follow Dylan on Linkedin

Read Dylan’s chapter on Ethical Transformation (page 144) from the Book “Build Brilliant Brands”