409. Purpose 🌼
Why purpose matters and how to clarify your company's purpose to aid your brand
Hi there 👋
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Kevan
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Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
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On Purpose
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose.
As these things tend to go, my thoughts will often start with a work problem before shifting to a personal, existential place and then reverting back to work. What is the purpose behind these companies that we are building?
Why do they exist?
What is my life’s purpose?
Why do I exist?!
(On the What is my purpose? question, I’ll spare you my most vulnerable thoughts in this edition and write about it later. For now, here’s a cool article that resonated with some of the purpose-laden thoughts and feelings running through my head.)
Purpose is the bedrock of your brand
Whenever I set about to help a company identify its brand strategy, I come back to the 3 Ps framework, popularized by Arielle Jackson and used by startups throughout tech. The three Ps are purpose, positioning, and personality. Everything starts with purpose.
Your purpose is how you want to change the world for the better.
~ Arielle Jackson
There are lots of different ways to find a brand’s purpose. If you search for brand exercises, you will find a TON. One of the most popular ones is the Jim Collins vision framework, which includes elements like vivid description and BHAG. The brand purpose framework I like to use is called The Big IdeaL. The Big IdeaL comes from Ogilvy, one of the top advertising agencies in the world. It’s used by a number of great tech brands, including Wistia.
Your purpose is why you exist.
Your mission is what the company strives to achieve every day in service of its purpose. And your vision is the category-changing (or even life-changing) description of the world you want to create.
In a perfect world, your company would have all three of these things in place. Well-articulated. Easily reference-able in Notion or Slite or the knowledgebase of your choice.
But we marketers don’t usually live in perfect worlds, do we 😉
So if we agree that we need this type of clarity on why our company exists but if we don’t yet have it, then it becomes part of our job as marketing leaders to go get it.
How to find your company’s purpose
Of course, this purpose-defining is not something that the marketing team can do itself. It is not a one-off campaign or a channel strategy. It is everything.
And so you must involve key members of the leadership team and voices from across the company. I like to make sure there are at least representatives from product, people, engineering, customer-facing teams, and the C-suite, not to mention you and your marketing leaders (brand especially).
In terms of the exercise itself, I’m particularly fond of the Big IdeaL (see above). But I did come across a new fantastic framework that I’m itching to try.
It’s called the Purpose Wheel, created by Kristin Kelly and Nathan Carter at IDEO.
With the Purpose Wheel, you get the group together and start at the center of the circle by imagining what would be true for your company if each of the five center statements were true for why you existed.
For instance … ask yourself, “Beyond profit, why do we exist? We exist to encourage exploration!” 🥹
Do this for all five statements and come up with answers to the following questions:
What actions, behaviors, or experiences would have to happen in order for that statement of impact to be true?
How might this kind of impact inspire your culture?
How might this kind of impact change the way you make business decisions?
As you go along, you’ll find that some statements resonate stronger than others. At the very least, they’ll all get you thinking. Then after you’ve agreed upon a center statement that works with your brand, you can go further out of the circle to see the “how” of bringing the “why” to life.
Here’s an example from Patagonia and a few other brands:
We exist to Enable Potential
Creating impact by inspiring greater possibilities. (Tesla, Nike)We exist to Reduce Friction
Creating impact by simplifying and eliminating barriers. (Google, Spotify)We exist to Foster Prosperity
Creating impact by supporting the success of others. (Pampers, Warby Parker)We exist to Encourage Exploration
Creating impact by championing discovery. (Airbnb, Adobe)We exist to Kindle Happiness
Creating impact by inciting joy. (Dove, Zappos)
Over to you
How do you find purpose for your company?
Did purpose exist or did you have to articulate it yourself?
How do you find time to prioritize this stuff?
I’d love your thoughts! Feel free to reply to get in touch.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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