A more meaningful Purpose

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Contents:

Rethink:

• Why Purpose

• Key definition of purpose

Reimagine:

• Creating a more meaningful purpose

Reset:

• Discovering your purpose

Rethink

Why Purpose

For an increasing number of businesses and their employees, the pursuit of profit is no longer enough.

According to an EY / Harvard Business Review survey (2020), 90% of executives recognize the importance of having “an aspirational reason for being which inspires and provides a call to action for an organization…and provides benefit to society.”

But what do we mean by purpose? Generally, purpose is a belief that what you do matters and that you make a difference. It is a sense of being guided by meaningful values and goals.

In Japanese, the word Ikigai sums this up - your ikigai is your life purpose or your bliss.

It's what brings you joy and inspires you to get out of bed every day.

In the context of business, purpose is evolving. Fifty years ago, purpose was about profit maximisation. The thought that business should stand for more than just profit is not new. But in recent years the importance of a more meaningful corporate purpose that creates value for multiple stakeholders has gone mainstream.

What have been the key drivers of this shift?

• The trust deficit – ever since the 2008 banking crisis there has been a dwindling sense of public trust in corporations and government.  This lack of trust is particularly noticeable among younger generations who tend to trust businesses less than their predecessors. Whilst, there may be many reasons for this, in a recent report on brand trust the Edelman Trust Barometer (2021), 71% of respondents noted that their trust in a brand depends upon the notion that the brand is not putting profit over people.

• The rise of conscious consumption - with climate change and social inequalities currently high on the societal agenda, consumer expectations have changed. The age of conscious consumption is here. A global study by New York-based Zeno Group (2020), reveals consumers are four to six times more likely to purchase, protect and champion purpose-driven brands. Consumers have raised the bar and are looking to companies to lead the way on important issues such as the climate emergency, economic instability, and ongoing racial injustices. 
  83% said companies should only earn a profit if they also deliver a positive impact.   However, it is the younger generations who are really leading the charge. 92% of Gen-Z and 90% Millennial respondents said they would act in support of a purposeful brand; compared to 81% of Gen-X consumers, 77% of Baby Boomers. Furthermore, 70% of Gen-Z and Millennials believe a brand should have a purpose they personally believe in compared to just 48% of Boomers. When it comes to cancel culture, not surprisingly it is the younger generations leading the way; 88% of Gen-Z and 85% of Millennial consumers said they took an unfavourable action versus 76% of Gen-X, 67% of Baby Boomers.

• The rise of conscious capitalism - When companies or brands are linked to purpose, 80% of them outperformed the market.  Businesses are increasingly starting to recognise the value of purpose with 181 of world’s largest companies having signed a manifesto to do business that is socially responsible.

• The rise of “Activist” employees - In a recent study by McKinsey (2021), employees expect their jobs to bring a significant sense of purpose to their lives. Covid has caused many employees to reflect on their purpose in life with nearly half saying they are reconsidering the work that they do. This was highest amongst Millennials who were three times more likely than others to say that they were revaluating work. Another study by Gallup (2021) highlighted that 87% of employees on average don't feel motivated, engaged, or have a sense of purpose at their workplace. People who live their purpose at work are more productive than people who don’t. They are also healthier, more resilient, and more likely to stay at the company. A study by Northweston University (2015) found when companies had a greater sense of purpose, their employees reported their work was more meaningful. And research by the University of Sussex (2018) found when leaders demonstrated clear purpose their people were happier and more productive.

So, purpose matters for business, for consumers, and for employees. But it is not always easy for businesses.  

In the current era of disruption, businesses find themselves caught between the short-term demands of shareholders and the increasing pressure for businesses to address global challenges.

But these two needs do not have to be mutually exclusive. Businesses can do good AND do well. As already highlighted, there is much discussion and research to show that purpose-driven companies make more money and are even better at innovation.

Nevertheless, it is evident businesses are not always getting it right. While the majority of consumers agree companies should have a strong purpose, most consumers do not believe companies today have a strong purpose, only 37% do (Zeno 2020). And in spite of companies’ best intentions, employees probably want more purpose from work than they’re getting. There is a stark purpose hierarchy gap. When asked if people are living their purpose in their day-to-day work, 85% of execs and upper management agreed but only 15% of frontline managers and frontline employees agreed (Mckinsey 2021). Also, regardless of role, only 18% believed that they get as much purpose from work as they want. 62% said that while they get some purpose from work, they want to get even more.

Part of the problem could be linked to the type of company purpose. Research by Kantar (2020) highlighted that whilst the majority of marketers (76%) believed their company had a defined purpose, only 10% felt it went beyond product/service promise to include societal commitment.

Given the benefits of purpose-driven companies, why aren’t more companies getting it right? The truth is it takes a lot of skill and understanding to pull it off well. The biggest gaps in ideal versus actual purpose are in leadership development and training, performance metrics and rewards, and talent management.

But also, it would appear that purpose anxiety is becoming a thing. While a sense of purpose can create a sense of well-being, searching for that purpose may be having the opposite effect. These days, many leaders are so afraid of cancel culture and being called out on green-, purpose-, or diversity-washing, that they are afraid of taking any action because it might be considered just an act or empty gesture. This anxiety is probably not without justification. People are starting to become cynical of preachy too good to be true purpose statements. In the latest Havas’ Meaningful Brands Survey (2020), 71% of consumers said they have little faith that brands will deliver on their promises. They are tired of brands pretending they want to act for the good of society when they are mostly out to generate profits.

Despite this cynicism, consumers are still desperately seeking brands that will make a meaningful difference – with 73% saying brands must act now for the good of society and the planet.

Key definition of Purpose

For the sake of clarity, it is important to clarify the distinction between purpose and related concepts such as vision and mission. Here is how I have defined the various elements:

In general, “purpose” has shifted from the organisation to the role of the organisation in society with themes such as meaningfulness, transcendence, contribution to society emerging. In business there has been a purpose explosion.

There is no standard way for a business to express its purpose. So, let’s be clear about what it is and what it isn’t:

• Purpose is not the what or the how– it incorporates the why.

• Purpose is not a promise - A brand promise communicates what a company promises to deliver and the key difference the company wants its customers to perceive. Brand purpose is the larger impact a company wants to have in the world and what purpose you serve. In other words, promise is brain and purpose is all heart. But the promise and purpose should be aligned e.g., Peleton ‘empowering people to be the best version of themselves anywhere, at any time’. This purpose isn’t ancillary to Peloton’s business, it is its business.

• Purpose isn’t corporate speak e.g., ‘Enable economic growth through infrastructure and energy development’ and it shouldn’t make you cringe, e.g. ‘To help make every brand more inspiring, and the world more intelligent’ (this was for a company whose product was stick on labels!). It should be simple, memorable, powerful, energising, and inspiring.  E.g. Nike ‘To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. If you have a body, you are an athlete’. Nike’s belief that everyone is an athlete is inspirational in itself. And their commitment to innovation is clearly evident throughout the business.

• Purpose isn’t CSR - It is not about social impact alone. Many brands feel they can just attach themselves to a social issue and that automatically gives them purpose. And they do this without evolving their culture or their operations. Linked to this is that purpose isn’t cause marketing. Purpose lives deep inside the individual or the group and cause lives outside. Cause is where people come together and join forces around solving a problem – and that can look very different based on the purpose. Causes can be outputs of a good Brand Purpose.  Remember you can have many causes but only one purpose.

• Purpose is not owned by the CEO or the marketing director. It is owned by the people who make up the company.

• Purpose is not merely a tool to advertise who you are and what you stand for to capture more market share. It is a company’s soul and identity and beacon for all decision-making.

• Purpose is not a SMART goal or objective – it should be free from language that limits the impact it can have in multiple situations. It should be timeless. However, this doesn’t mean it can’t evolve with time. Tesla’s original brand purpose ‘to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transport’ evolved to ‘to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy’.

  · Purpose doesn’t have to have a social or environmental goal built in.  Some companies are “general purpose” companies rather than “social purpose” companies (i.e., built to solve a social or environmental issue). But if you are motivated to do better business you should consider attaching a moral or ethical connotation. Purpose is the cornerstone to enable a business/brand to start doing good business. If you are “general purpose” company, it does not mean you can’t still tackle social or environmental issues as part of a wider portfolio of initiatives or evolve your purpose to be relevant for a new era. E.g., Airbnb’s with their clear commitment to inclusivity- ‘We help people to belong anywhere’.

• Purpose doesn’t have to be about solving the massive problems in the world. Purpose can be focused on everyday pain points e.g., Under Armour’s ‘Empower Athletes Everywhere’ and Crayola’s ‘encouraging children to be creative, and enabling parents to inspire them’. The key thing is that there is a belief that it matters and that you can make a difference For those companies that do want to focus on the big issues, aligning with the UN’s 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a great first step:

Based on my analysis of all the literature out there, my working definition of Purpose is:

The meaningful, aspirational reason for being. It is the driving force that guides decision making and fuels movement towards connection and motivation for ALL stakeholders.

But is ‘purpose’ one of those terms that is starting to lose its impact through overuse and destined to become clichéd? Words, just like fashion, food, cars have a shelf-life, especially when those words transform into a buzzword. Take the word ‘epic’. Once only used to describe things like oceans and the cosmos. These days it can be used in anything from a product launch to a social media post. ‘Epic’ has become so watered down that it sounds ironic. When everything is epic, nothing is. Over time, buzzwords eventually lose not only their relevance but their meaning. There is a psychological term for this – ‘Semantic satiation’ (Jakobovits and Lambert 1961), which refers to the phenomenon whereby repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.  It’s kind of like a “fatigue”. When a brain cell fires, it takes more energy to fire the second time, and still more the third time, and finally the fourth time it won’t even respond unless you wait a few seconds.  An analogy can be drawn here with song lyrics. Due to the repetition of choruses, the words and phrases become “satiated” and lose their meaning—and no longer really register as words. A marketing example is “Black Friday Malady.” Thanks to overuse, “Black Friday” is no longer the valuable hook it once was.  

Purpose is at risk of becoming a tired chorus – so what now?

We need to evolve purpose to be more meaningful.

Reimagining a more meaningful purpose-led culture

Creating a more meaningful purpose

What if you could turn people’s (employees and potential end users) disenchantment around and ignite their passion and belief in your business purpose?

What if you could close the “say-do” gap and truly unleash the potential of your purpose and drive meaningful change?

Purpose is not a formal announcement but instead a belief and call to action that is held by and guides the actions of employees. And, for this to happen, we need to go beyond words and connect with people on a deeper level – at an emotional level. Emotion is your super weapon when it comes to purpose. We’re emotional beings and up to 95% of decisions happen in the subconscious part of our brains - the Limbic System. People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves, and they buy into who you can help them become. When you connect with emotions the pay-off can be huge.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

So where do you start? It’s true that some brands/businesses are more predisposed to organically make emotional connections. But, any brand/business can evoke an emotional response. At the heart of business/brand purpose is human needs/problems, so there needs to be a clear understanding of how the business affects human lives both within and outside of the business.

Using the example of the first moonwalk. Kennedy declared to Congress the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. However, the real purpose was to reignite the feeling of being pioneers.

Coming back to my working definition of Purpose:

The meaningful, aspirational reason for being. It is the driving force that guides decision making and fuels movement towards connection and motivation for ALL stakeholders. 

A more meaningful purpose has three key components:

• It needs to be aspirational – this is the directional hope or ambition of achieving something worthwhile. This can be something that you continually strive for that the world needs rather than some specific and measurable end goal. What the “world needs” can relate to human needs/ problems or broader societal or environmental needs.

• It needs to be perceived as meaningful to key stakeholders (those who work for the organisation and outside the organisation). For this to happen, they need to believe in the significance of the purpose and thereby fulfilling their psychological needs. This requires strong alignment between brand/business purpose and their own purpose and sense of who they are. At a work level, if an organisation’s purpose conflicts with employees’ purposes, they will be unhappy at work. At a minimum employees need to have a strong sense of how their job role contributes to the purpose. Explicitly connecting the company purpose to the personal contributions an individual in the role brings to the purpose can have a significant impact on motivation. But the ideal is to embed and activate individual purpose within the organisation purpose. At a consumer level, if the brand/business purpose is not aligned with who they are and who they want to be, achieving continued loyalty, consistency, and relevance in their lives will be harder. This is only going to become more important as younger generations are growing up with a deeper sense of purpose than previous generations and are seeking out products that directly support causes they care about.

“To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.”

Peter Drucker

• It needs to be authentic – this relates to viability i.e., the ability of the organisation to act and live the purpose. When there is a strong fit with what the business is good at and its values the alignment between “say-do” is likely to be greater and the business can optimise its “story-living” as opposed to storytelling.  Connecting your purpose to the core of what you are good at (your brand/business promise) enables your marketing tactics to work harder and reinforce your purpose.

When all these three components are aligned the potential of your purpose to drive meaningful change can be truly unleashed.

Communicating the purpose narrative on a level to ensure emotional engagement is key. Consider attaching an emotional trigger word (or up to 3 words max) or even an image which is more emotive than words to your purpose. This should sum up what is at the heart and soul of your purpose and acts as a simple and emotive reminder about your priorities. Here are some examples: Taking Airbnb’s purpose of ‘We help people to belong anywhere’. Their emotional trigger word would be “belonging”. For Disney’s purpose: ‘to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling’, it would be “magical”. For L’Oreal’s ‘create the beauty that moves the world’, at the heart of this purpose is the power of beauty to move us and inspire confidence in who we are now and who we want to be. The emotional trigger word could be “confidence’.

So, ask yourself how do you want your brand/business to make someone (employee/end user) feel? What would be the consequences for society? How would the planet/humanity benefit? And does that word(s) motivate and give you an urge to act?

Reset

Discovering your purpose

It would appear that the key challenge with Purpose, is not in the why but the how, hampered by beliefs that your category/ brand does not lend itself to positive impact, to fear of being called out, to lack of training and development.

I believe there is a process whereby businesses/brands can discover and embed their Purpose outlined by this SEED acronym:

1. Stay true to yourself - authenticity is a game changer with purpose. In uncertain times and where transparency is increasingly important, authenticity conveys a sense of genuineness and truthfulness. Associating oneself with an authentic purpose combines inner satisfaction with the external expression of one’s own self. Authenticity can neither be copied nor permanently faked. Therefore, a deep dive into your brand establishing what your strengths are and what you care about/passionate about as an organisation is key. If you remain authentic to your values and what you care about, executing your purpose will be much easier. When you do what you believe in, the rest takes care of itself.

2. Empathy – understand what makes people across the organisation, end users, suppliers tick. Walk in their shoes to understand what they value and what is important to them. Give them a chance to reflect on their own sense of purpose, and how it connects to the company’s purpose. What aspects of the company do they admire/ are proud of?  What are their personal emotional motivators? What causes are they passionate about? Ask them to think about the impact the company has on the world. Understand which social and environmental issues they think the company needs to address.
   By integrating these sources, a business/brand can articulate a meaningful and authentic brand purpose.

3. Engage employees – build the positive impact strategy with clear targets and priorities. Allow employees the time to reflect on the role of the purpose on their day-to-day work and build it into their career plan. Help them discover and live their personal purpose by connecting it with the company's purpose. Clearly define the impact you want to have and develop these into programs/projects that ladder up to the overall purpose. Enable employees to understand how they can drive change through their job role and day-to-day decision making. To optimise a sense of meaningful purpose, employees don’t want to just know what the company is doing to deliver against the purpose - they want to contribute. Connecting employees to the purpose, can help them flourish, inspire them to bring more energy and creativity to their jobs and create a sense of community and belonging. Give employees the frameworks and practical resources to do this. Identify the key change-makers in the business who can become ‘purpose champions’. According to Erica Chenoweth, an American political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School, it only takes 3.5% of a given population actively participating to ensure change will happen. Thinking about your business, which 3.5% can you mobilise to put purpose into practice?

4. Deliver and measure the positive impact strategy – this is about putting your purpose into practice and infusing it throughout the business so that it becomes part of the business identity -i.e., leadership driven, and culture led. Bake it into the brand guidelines. Embed purpose into job descriptions and appraisals. Use purpose to ignite innovation. Measure your impact. Use data, insights, outcomes, stories to demonstrate your impact and communicate it to key stakeholders. You need to show you are having a genuine impact to avoid accusations of purpose-washing.
   Finally, keep reviewing. Monitor, measure, re-evaluate and re-assess regularly. Circumstances and context will change.

Brands that lead with a more meaningful purpose are changing the nature of business today. The stakes are high. Do it right and you will attract talent, allow employees to flourish, inspire new products and lines of business, grow customer relationships, and importantly make a tangible difference to people’s lives and potentially the planet. Purpose is good business. It is smart business. But it is also the moral and ethical thing to do.

If you’re a business leader, entrepreneur or start-up, who wants to discover your purpose or how to embed your purpose into your innovation, please get in touch with me to find out more.

References

EYGLOBAL, 2020. Why business must harness the power of purpose [online] Available at: <https://www.ey.com/en_uk/purpose/why-business-must-harness-the-power-of-purpose> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Edelman. 2021. Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust and the Coronavirus Pandemic. [online] Available at: <https://www.edelman.com/research/covid-19-brand-trust-report> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Zeno. 2020. Unveiling The 2020 Zeno Strength of Purpose Study. [online] Available at: <https://www.zenogroup.com/insights/2020-zeno-strength-purpose> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Mckinsey. 2021. Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave. [online] Available at: <https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Gallup, 2021. Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work. [online] Gallup.com. Available at: <https://news.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Northweston. 2015. The Power of Purpose: How Organizations are Making Work More Meaningful Northwestern University | School of Education & Social Policy. [online] Available at: <https://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/masters-learning-and-organizational-change/knowledge-lens/stories/2016/the-power-of-purpose-how-organizations-are-making-work-more-meaningful.html> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Hakner, J., 2018. ‘Purposeful leaders’ are winning hearts and minds in workplaces, study finds. [online] The University of Sussex. Available at: <https://archive.sussex.ac.uk/news/press-releases/id/40606?id=40606> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Kantar.com. 2020. Igniting purpose led growth. [online] Available at: <https://consulting.kantar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Purpose-2020-PDF-Presentation.pdf> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Meaningful-brands.com. 2020. Meaningful Brands powered by Havas. [online] Available at: <https://www.meaningful-brands.com/> [Accessed 10 January 2022].

Jakobovits, L. and Lambert, W., 1961. Semantic satiation among bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(6), pp.576-582.

Harvard Business Review. 2015. The New Science of Customer Emotions. [online] Available at: <https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science-of-customer-emotions> [Accessed 13 January 2022].