Companies often don't have an effective strategy. Instead of having concrete plans, they simply write out a vague sentence and hang it on their office wall. That's not realistic. To have any real success, you need a better and more comprehensive plan for your brand and its purpose. A true brand purpose strategy is not simply a clever marketing ploy or a slogan to put on your advertising materials.
The purpose of your brand is to establish your company's true reason for existing beyond just to make money. With proper execution, it guides product development, provides direction for sales teams, and shortens the time it takes to complete a transaction.
When you create a false promise of purpose, it results in the loss of trust in the marketplace. Customers (B2B and everyday) are tired of false promises.
Customers today are testing your claims against your actions and want to know that you can provide them with solid proof. This guide will show you step by step on how to develop, measure, and defend your corporate why.
How to Build a Modern Brand Purpose Strategy
The architecture of a modern brand strategy should move beyond the basic mission statement. The "why" is your permanent reason for being. Your "why" is the foundation of your business, and what you are doing now to achieve your goals is your "mission." Where you see your company in 10 years is your "vision."
If you don't differentiate between the three, you will remove yourself from the ability to plan for the future, and many executives are left relying on simplistic frameworks or basic graphs. This is not enough in a market where competition is fierce and ever-increasing.
A sound logical structure has to support your claim when challenged by both investors and customers. Customers expect you to be able to show a clear line connecting what you say and what you sell.
The Three-Part Model of Purpose
The three-dimensional model of purpose, based on the most recent NIM study, will change the way we view corporate motivation. Based on a review of 1,531 cases, the data supports a strong strategy across three dimensions:
Financial: To be effective and grow, a company must continue to exist. The marketplace respects profit-driven companies.
Customer: Your company's mission must genuinely be to help those who pay for its products.
Impact on Society: Third-party effects show the effect a company's actions have on the community as a whole.
Balancing Market Impact and Profit
While financial success is what many early investors consider most important, third-party effect-focused brands experience substantial increases in their net promoter scores (NPS). The balance of these two components cannot be faked.
Companies who promote themselves as a product that is necessary to a customer's life but fail to deliver on this promise will not be successful. In order to truly succeed, companies must align their financial goals with the benefits provided to society.
Matching Your Cause With Your Brand
It is necessary for your company to have a mission that is consistent with what your company sells. For example, if a data software company suddenly claims its main goal is to help save the oceans, the potential customers will laugh.
You must create a connection between what you do every day and how it affects society as a whole. A cybersecurity company protects the privacy of individuals; a logistics company connects the communities of the world. When a company's cause and its product are aligned, a company can be believed in by the marketplace.
Matching Values with B2B Buying Habits
The key component of B2B buyer behavior and company value alignment is the buying committee. Software and service companies typically have extremely long selling cycles. Your tool will typically be used by someone other than the person that ultimately signs the check.
Therefore, you need to communicate with the entire group of decision-makers. When it comes to industry vision and mission, that will matter greatly to founders. To finance leaders, however, it will only matter in terms of how much risk and reward there is.
Therefore, your brand purpose strategy must convey the trust and stability needed for you to land large enterprise deals. You need to demonstrate to each of the members of the buying committee how your corporate values help protect each of their departments.
Passing the Procurement Test
The procurement team doesn't care about how you feel about it or the way your organization talks about it (the marketing tone). They focus solely on security, compliance, and risk management. The only real evidence of your brand purpose is found in your legal documents.
The brand purpose of your company is expressed in your SOC 2 report, your GDPR compliance, and HIPAA frameworks. It clearly articulates how you specifically handle sensitive data and work to protect the operations of clients. When entering the enterprise space, having documented evidence of trust is the quickest way to get a contract signed.
Moving from User to Buyer
If you are targeting the upper market, you must adjust your core message. Small businesses want a quick, easy-to-use tool; large enterprises want a safe partner with aligned values representing your organization.
Your corporate "why" must demonstrate that you are building a strong foundational partnership to support their large and growing business for the next decade.
Measuring the Success of Your Brand Purpose Strategy
You are able to quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of a brand purpose strategy. This isn't just conjecture; it is based on empirical data. The NIM study shows a very clear correlation between placing emphasis on positive third-party impacts and superior NPS results.
When customers connect emotionally with purpose-driven companies, they are 77% more likely to stay. Customers who are emotionally connected with purpose-driven companies produce lifetime value three hundred six percent (306%) higher than those who are not connected.
Customers who believe in the purpose of your company are likely to remain loyal longer and spend more.
Tracking Sales Speed and Financial Growth
When compared to standard competitors, companies with a purpose-driven mission grow three times faster. A study done about Unilever shows that of Unilever's 28 sustainable living brands, 75% of the company's total revenue growth is attributed to those brands.
In addition to the total company sales growth, Unilever's 28 sustainable living brands have grown at a rate of 69% faster than the rest of the brands in Unilever's portfolio. You can see this in your own sales reports.
Having a clear, shared value system minimizes the time spent debating over very small pricing changes and speeds up the entire deal cycle.
Tracking How Long Employees Stay
Your internal team is your largest and most significant target audience. Purpose-driven companies experience employee retention rates that are 40% higher than non-purpose driven companies.
The cost to replace trained staff is very high; therefore, in addition to the immediate expense of hiring new employees, there is the long-term impact on growth. According to an overwhelming majority of business executives, 75% of whom indicate a value-based strategy will attract and retain top performers.
Additionally, it's important to track how many candidates reference your core values in their initial interviews. Follow how many of your best employees remain employed beyond the critical three-year employment milestone.
Defending Against Fake Claims and Backlash
The Danger of Empty Promises
Both consumers and enterprise buyers can quickly see through empty promises. This results in significant backlash on social media and immediate lost sales. The concept of "green trust" is extremely difficult to establish and very easy to lose.
In today's marketplace, negative remarks about your brand's environmental friendliness will quickly circulate among those who are looking for it; if you sell cheap, toxic materials, the public will catch on quickly and the reputation you have spent years establishing will be destroyed.
The only protection against public relations debacles is integrity. If you distribute an inaccurate representation of what your company is all about, you need to check that your operations are doing what you are about to state is your mission.
Before you issue the statement about your company, perform a thorough evaluation of your business practices, including your supply chain and partners, and ensure that what you state is actually happening. If a gap exists, address the operational deficiencies prior to launching the marketing plan.
Until your organization is fully operationally compliant, do not launch your marketing plan. Performing an authenticity review of your company's business practices will avoid having to perform a public apology for a marketing mistake.
Lowering Social Media Risks
Although you may have altruistic intentions, it is likely that you will receive negative feedback from the audience; over 68% of people said they feel they can influence corporations to change by publicly crying out for help to the company.
When the public pressure is on, you need to present factual evidence, demonstrating how your behavior aligns with your goals; never, under any circumstances, argue about emotions on social media. To win the argument and calm the marketplace, provide transparent, validated verification of your actions.
Using Your Purpose to Guide Product Plans
To create your product roadmap, your product management team should use your core values as the guiding principle to decide what product features to develop next; if a particular feature conflicts with your primary mission, do not include it in your product roadmap.
By taking this level of control over the planned features of a product, you demonstrate your commitment to the marketplace and maintain focus for the members of the product team, while also preventing feature overload. Having a product roadmap that focuses on core values creates a much better user experience.
Supporting Customer Service Representatives
Every day, your service team speaks to customers on behalf of your business. It's critical that the team understands why your business exists (i.e., what's driving your company). Are your service representatives empowered to resolve poor service experiences as soon as possible?
If your stated purpose is to put your customers first, then your systems have to enable your service representatives to respond quickly. If you're using systems like Zendesk (or your internal CRM), they must be adapted to provide service representatives with the tools to be effective.
When the customer service experience is awful, all your values mean nothing.
Defining Company-Wide Guidelines
Have your leadership team complete the 15-word test. Have each of your leaders write down your company’s purpose statement in 15 words or less. If each of them has written something different, you have failed to develop a unified brand purpose strategy.
Clearly defined internal guidelines create clarity in how sales, product, and HR reference the message on a day-to-day basis. All employees should communicate in the same manner.
How a Brand Purpose Strategy Creates Profit
The definition of a corporation's motivation is no longer simply an additional component to your marketing strategy, but a core element. Research indicates that 82% of consumers consider values when making purchases.
Additionally, 93% of the businesses experiencing high growth align their key performance indicators (KPIs) with the articulated purpose of the company. With a clearly defined and communicated reason to exist (why), you have an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage (faster enterprise sales, stronger pricing power, and retention of your top employees).
While the market severely mounts a backlash for any false claims made, thus the outcome will be no contracts due to misleading people with meaningless messages. Companies that can combine their public commitment with their daily operations will win the next decade; they will be able to easily pass all of their procurement checks and see greater lifetime value per customer.
Therefore, if a company has a true purpose behind it, that is, if its reason for being is aligned with the daily activities of the company's business, then it will create a systematic discipline through operations that will foster sustainable financial growth.
Q&A: Common Problems When Growing Your Business
How can you prove ROI when the buyer is focused on price and not purpose?
Buyers are looking to close deals quickly and to reduce the risk involved in making a purchase, not just to secure the lower price. In B2B markets, a company with a strong mission creates a higher level of trust amongst buyers and ultimately eliminates the perceived risk for the buying committee. Track your win rate and length of sales cycles before and after implementing your value proposition, then test if shared values allow for shorter negotiating windows regarding price and allow quicker time to revenue.
What do I do if my internal culture is in direct opposition to my external communications?
You need to stop all external marketing activity and begin to manage the gap between your operational execution and your operational promises. It will not be long before the market recognizes the lapse, causing irreparable harm to your brand and the ultimate loss of trust in your company. Conduct an internal audit of your authenticity to determine where your organizational culture does not live up to your commitments. Align your products, hiring practices, and customer support operational policies to your stated values before you invest in any future external marketing campaigns.
When entering the marketplace at an enterprise level, will my core purpose change?
The reason you exist should remain consistent, but how you articulate it must evolve as your company matures. As a small business, you had a competitive advantage based on your speed and your disruptive capabilities, whereas the enterprise buyer has a much higher demand for a stable, secure, and long-term relationship. You must effectively translate your foundational reason for existing into messages that resonate with procurement departments and CFOs. The purpose will remain consistent, but the proof that you provide will need to grow proportionally to the size of your customers.