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Business Purpose – Brand Context

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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.

What Is Purpose (brand context)

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. [Read more…]

The Purpose of a Business

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I’ve been mus­ing on the ques­tion of Pur­pose while read­ing the Wall Street Jour­nal and online busi­ness press, try­ing to under­stand how so many bright peo­ple can have caused so much last­ing dam­age.Purpose

Why Do Companies Exist?

There are those who think that busi­nesses exist for solely util­i­tar­ian rea­sons: to sat­isfy cus­tomers, gen­er­ate prof­its, cre­ate share­holder value or make the founders rich. You get the drift… Thou­sands of busi­ness pun­dits will tell you so.

Oth­ers think that busi­nesses should be ani­mated by some larger, endur­ing val­ues-based Pur­pose, one that serves as sort of a moral com­pass to inspire and keep the orga­ni­za­tion and its peo­ple on a cho­sen course.

Clas­sic exam­ples of com­pa­nies with a clear sense of Pur­pose include:

  • John­son & John­son: “to alle­vi­ate pain and dis­ease”
  • Merck: “in the busi­ness of pre­serv­ing and improv­ing human life
  • Dis­ney: “to bring hap­pi­ness to mil­lions”

Those of us who worked at Apple in the 1980s were inspired by this mantra: Chang­ing the way peo­ple live, learn, work and play. We were indoc­tri­nated in this belief sys­tem, start­ing with Ori­en­ta­tion, our first day on the job (think brain­wash­ing, Apple style!)

It’s safe to assume that this notion still ani­mates the com­pany.

[Read more…]