Brand Purpose without all the nonsense
or, How to get excited about your brand without being a delusional idiot
Brand Purposes. They’re either the most important thing your business can have or an exercise in delusional narcissism, depending on who you talk to [Clarification: I see a lot of commentary about this practice and the people that criticise it misunderstand it—mostly because many practitioners have misused it. This post is my attempt to offer some common sense and to show that it’s a valuable tool even on the humbler end of the spectrum.]
Like most things, we can reach a sensible conclusion by removing the nonsense and talking like normal people. Here goes:
- If you run an ambitious business, then you should be clear about what it is your business is trying to do.
- Once you can explain simply what it’s trying to do, it will be easier to get other people to help you do it.
That’s it.
I mean, there’s more to it, but before we fall into any rabbit holes, just understand that there is a version of the ‘brand purpose’ conversation that makes simple, unquestionable sense.
The trickier bit is working out exactly what the thing is your business is trying to do, and articulating it in a way that makes your employees’ and agencies’ jobs easier and more effective.
I’ve worked with lots of founders, CEOs and CMOs and I hear pretty much the same thing from all of them: ‘We kind of know what we’re trying to do, but we just can’t quite say it simply. And as we grow it’s getting more important that everyone gets it.’ Often, they’ve been struggling with it for years.
So why is it hard for smart people, who’ve managed to get traction in a market with their idea, to say simply what they’re trying to do?
The answer is that lots of founders (at least the ones I meet) have a very instinctive sense of why their product matters, or could matter. And because at the beginning it’s just them and a few friends getting the business off the ground, this subconscious understanding has been been sufficient, bleeding its influence into decisions through osmosis. It’s only when the business starts to grow that this stops being enough. That’s when how it’s explained and how it’s implemented needs more structure.
I’ll use Wonderbly (formerly Lost My Name) as an example—one of the UK’s fastest growing startups, where I used to be Head of Brand. From the beginning, Wonderbly’s CEO, Asi Sharabi instinctively knew that a beautiful personalised children’s book had the potential to be magical. That if this medium was given the love it deserved (and hitherto denied), it would surely translate into a commercial success. He wasn’t wrong. That first title is now the world’s best-selling children’s book. But as the company grew, it was hard deciding what new products to make and why. Sure, it could have been a cold commercial decision: find out what themes resonate with customers, and make more books with a similar formula. But as an ex-marketer himself, Asi knew that his customers were buying into something bigger than a book. And ‘something bigger’ is the secret sauce to building a successful brand.
Speaking to happy customers helped us to realise that these beautifully personalised kids’ books were doing a much bigger job than just fulfilling the role of a gift. They were a way for grown-ups to show a child (and/or the child’s parents) how special that child is, or how special they can be. This was something that other personalised books couldn’t live up to, because the quality of the execution and the message in the stories just didn’t back up the promise. We realised that Wonderbly needed to bottle this idea, because this is what people were really buying. So we decided that our ‘brand purpose’ was to “make every child feel loved, unique and capable of anything”. (Actually, we called it our Company Purpose, which is a healthier way to think about it. After all, your brand is the outcome of everything your company does.)
You might be thinking: Hang on, you “decided” this was your purpose? You can’t just decide. And you’d be right. It was more a sharpening of something that had been lurking in our collective subconsciouses for a long time. Something we were already doing to a degree, without quite realising it. Which meant that each department at Wonderbly was making decisions without a clear sense of what the company should be trying to do and be. Clarifying this goal, and translating it into a simple framework helped to steer our product strategy and our comms, building on a purpose that motivated all of us.
Finding your ‘purpose’ (or mission if you prefer), is a bit like therapy. It involves unpacking lots of internal thoughts and disparate behaviour until you recognise which things matter and why.
But here’s the thing. If you’ve never had any thoughts, conscious or otherwise, about creating value beyond the direct, utilitarian function of your product, you probably don’t have a meaningful or useful brand purpose. You could. But it will be a messier path getting there, involving radical shifts in the business, and a longer blog post than this to explain the process.
That’s because identifying your purpose isn’t only about positioning your brand from a marketing point of view. It’s about business strategy. What you offer has to match up with what you say, which has to match up with what people want. Sometimes the answer will be hiding in an existing product or service and the challenge is to extract it. Other times you might identify a consumer need, establish a very clear purpose/mission to fulfil that need, and then try to build the right product. Many times it’s a bit of both. But I’m not going to tackle any of that here because I want this post to stay relatively simple. Rather, I’m going to leave you with a useful way to avoid slipping into a toxic trap that does more harm than good:
In the Wonderbly example, you’ll have noticed the language “something bigger”. This sounds a lot like a phrase you may have heard, and many people hate: ‘Higher purpose.’
This phrase is partly responsible for a huge misconception about the value of a brand purpose. It’s been abused by consultants and ridiculed by cynics. The danger of ‘higher purpose’ talk is that it fuels narcissism and clouds common sense. People want to believe their company is going to change the world (and have to convince VCs the same). They read about Patagonia and they think if they bolt a social cause onto the side of their company, or come up with a moonshot phrase that claims they’re going to heal the world or shift the direction of Earth’s orbit, that it will catapult their brand into the stratosphere. Which is all nonsense, of course. A brand purpose neither needs to be a moonshot or a social cause.
You can’t just invent a purpose that isn’t grounded in reality. It has to be something that your business can credibly fulfil and that people want to buy into. A car wash isn’t going to ‘cleanse the spirit of humankind’ and a made-to-order bowtie retailer can’t ‘get the world to radically rethink necks’. Why? Because it’s bullshit. You don’t need a fancy consultant to tell you that — just sniff the air a little and you’ll get a whiff of it.
If your purpose is too high, people will think you are too.
So how high should your purpose be? Well, here’s a useful diagram to guide you. Let’s look at three potential purpose statements for that car wash:
You’ll know if you’re in the Twatosphere because the air is thin up there and no one will know what you’re on about. But you also don’t want to be looking down at your product in the Seller’s Cellar. You should be looking up at your customer, noticing what they want; what matters to them. Let’s call this mid-level The Reasonable Reach—you’re looking at the emotional needs of your customer and what role your brand can credibly play. And if you’re a founder with a great idea, you’ve probably already thought about this a lot but might not be able to describe it yet.
Semi-facetious charts aside, here’s something more useful: Your brand purpose should be built around the most meaningful impact you can have on a customer that they will find hard to get anywhere else.
And that’s what’s missing from the chart above. That chart won’t help you find your brand purpose because it doesn’t look at what makes this particular car wash different, or what the current world of car washing (if there is such a thing) looks like. It’s just there to remind you not to get carried away, and not to get caught up in your product and not notice what affect it can have on people.
Brand consultants reading this will be wincing at the simplicity of this post. It has only a light mention of the importance of uniqueness. And I haven’t talked about cultural relevance. I haven’t even talked about how building a brand around an idea helps short-cut purchase decisions, or that emotions drive purchases more than rational arguments. I also haven’t said a word about translating these single purpose statements into something actionable.
I’ve left those things out deliberately to keep this post simple. People get lost in the endless nuances and complexities of this kind of work and before you know it they’ve forgotten what the point is. And it’s in this haze that the bullshit creeps in. I think it’s useful to start with the simplest building blocks. If you understand those, you’re in a pretty good starting position.
So there you go. One more time:
- If you run an ambitious business, then you should be clear about what it is your business is trying to do.
- Once you can explain simply what it’s trying to do, it will be easier to get other people to help you do it.
- Focus on the most meaningful impact you can have on a customer that they will find hard to get anywhere else.
- Don’t aim too low and miss what people are really buying into, and don’t get too high and lose touch with reality.
That’s it. And it’s simpler to do than you’d think. I’m going to do a follow-up post designed to help you do it for yourself.
Who wrote this post?
Andy Whitlock helps startups (mostly) to work out what they are trying to do, and creates tools to implement this across their business. He does this through his consultancy The Human Half and likes talking about himself in third person.
Nice things his clients have said…
(You may want to look away if self-promotion makes you cringe):
“Within a week Andy managed to lock down years of vague opinions, thoughts and feedback and convert them into a clear, achievable framework we used to drive our whole rebrand project.”
— James McGregor, CEO, Biteable
“Andy got under the skin of our brand with pretty staggering speed. In just a handful of days he brought clarity to our brand strategy and explored its application with real inspiration and creativity. I don’t know how he does it.”
— Ben Farren, CEO, Spoke
“Not only is Andy one of the best strategic thinkers around — he brings to the table a brilliant mix of creativity, long-term vision and operational business nous. I cannot recommend him enough.”
— Asi Sharabi, CEO, Wonderbly
“Andy is a bit of a genius. He has an incredible ability to listen to what you and your company are trying to say and then say it back to you one hundred times more concisely and effectively.”
— Nick Marsh, CPO, Wonderbly
andy@thehumanhalf.com
More where this came from
This story is published in Noteworthy, where thousands come every day to learn about the people & ideas shaping the products we love.
Follow our publication to see more product & design stories featured by the Journal team.
