Business Purpose – Brand Context

Last month I blogged on the pur­pose of a busi­ness and the prob­lems that can arise when orga­ni­za­tions lack a clear sense of pur­pose, or when they define suc­cess nar­rowly in finan­cial (share­holder-cen­tric) terms. Today’s post focuses on busi­ness pur­pose and its links to cor­po­rate brand strat­egy.

In the con­text of brand strat­egy, pur­pose ener­gizes the organization’s “heart” — the inter­sec­tion of cor­po­rate strat­egy, the organization’s shared val­ues, and its fun­da­men­tal rea­son for being. Pur­pose is the “zen of the brand,” in com­pa­nies wise enough to define and be guided by a clear sense of cor­po­rate pur­pose.

Purpose as the Essence of Corporate Identity

Pur­pose ani­mates the brand, infuses it with mean­ing, shapes and inspires the moti­va­tions of employ­ees. When employ­ees iden­tify with the organization’s pur­pose, when it gives mean­ing to their work, cus­tomers ben­e­fit.  The brand promise will be grounded in some­thing mean­ing­ful and endur­ing – some­thing that should out­last the cast of char­ac­ters who lead the orga­ni­za­tion at any given point in time.

For the world’s best-loved brands, employ­ees who closely self-iden­tify with the pur­pose become pas­sion­ate brand evan­ge­lists; the com­pany, its prod­ucts and the peo­ple behind them inspire cult-like loy­alty among the cus­tomer base. Among yoga afi­ciona­dos, Lul­ule­mon, a designer and retailer of high-end yoga gear, comes to mind. Nord­strom was once like this, as was BMW.

Apple was like this in the early days, when I worked on their mar­ket­ing team. It’s painful to leave a job with a com­pany that’s infused with a strong sense of pur­pose, par­tic­u­larly when your self-iden­tity gets inter­twined with the company’s mis­sion. When you leave an orga­ni­za­tion like that and end up work­ing in “nor­mal,” run-of-the-mill com­pa­nies, it can feel like Par­adise Lost… Noth­ing is ever quite the same.

Beyond the “cult of Steve,” beyond its “cool fac­tor,” one of the rea­sons why the Apple brand has had such pow­er­ful res­o­nance among global con­sumers is the last­ing power of its guid­ing pur­pose – and its endur­ing impact on two gen­er­a­tions of Apple employ­ees. Despite occa­sional mis­steps, Apple has enjoyed a long tra­di­tion of delight­ing its cus­tomers.

A clear and mean­ing­ful pur­pose, one that inspires employ­ees to do their very best, can be a source of long-term com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, even when prod­uct gen­er­a­tions come and go. This has cer­tainly been the case for the core Dis­ney brand.

If you want a more aca­d­e­mic ratio­nale for this premise, check out Richard Ellsworth’s Lead­ing with Pur­pose, a well-researched book on the sub­ject of cor­po­rate pur­pose and its impact on cor­po­rate per­for­mance.