Living Business: Time To Activate Brand Purpose

What is Brand Purpose?

A brand purpose is essentially a brand’s reason for its existence beyond making money. It adds value not just to the lives of customers but to society as a whole. Having a brand purpose can help build a more emotional relationship between a brand and its consumer, which in turn, helps to boost sales as well as loyalty. It’s best defined as ‘a higher order reason for a brand to exist than just making a profit’. Here it’s worth mentioning Simon Sinek’s work around the ‘why’ of a brand.

Knowing precisely the ‘why’ of brand existence provides the foundation to shape everything else — ‘how’ (enterprise culture, brand experience) and ‘what’ (line of products or services to offer).

Jim Stengel, in his book ‘Grow’ published a study of 50k brands over 10 years’ time period and found that the brands that centered around improving people’s lives beat their competitors by significant margins. Here are it’s major findings:

• Top 50 businesses are the ones driven by ‘brand ideals’
• These 50 businesses grew 3x faster than their competitors
• An investment in them would have been 400 percent more profitable than others.

Clearly, brand purpose provides the differentiation that many of us seek. It is the core of every experience, underlying essence that makes a brand relevant and necessary. Therefore, a brand’s purpose must be as unique as the brand itself.

Today the relevance of brand purpose is even more important due the disruptions caused by various factors like evolution of technology, situations caused by pandemic related issues, changing market demands and behavior of consumers worldwide. More importantly, because the consumer expectations from brands are evolving to new levels. More and more consumers see brand purpose as an important factor when deciding to purchase a product or service. These expectations and demands are challenging brand to evolve in to the new. Such transformation trends in next few years will require major changes in business mindset and approach. Businesses that can sense and respond to market changes and commit to continuously evolve will particularly remain relevant.

Brand Purpose & Living Business

Many businesses struggle to recognize potentially game-changing market stimuli as they are more focused on dealing with real-world constrictions and pressures of running businesses. To achieve sustainable growth, they need to transform into a Living Business. This means they need respond to market disruptions effectively through gaining hyper-relevance without stepping off the treadmill of continually growing core business performance expectations.

Consumers are the most valuable stakeholders of any business who insist on transparency at the organizational level and expect meaningful products, services and purpose. They act as ambassadors of brands they believe in—and foils to the ones they don’t like. Although, price, product quality and user experience are important attributes, but businesses looking to build competitive agility need to find new ways to stand out.

For gaining hyper-relevancy business have to have a start-up-like agility and simultaneously accelerate adaptation, by nurturing the following key capabilities:

• Intuitive Decisions by effective use of data-led insights.
• Flexibility to repurpose people productivity into rebuilding responsive value chain for rapid adaptation.
• Nurturing AI and human talent to find and solve current & future problems.
• Quickly & thoughtfully respond to the new opportunities to create valuable new experiences.

COVID-19 – A Reason To Activate Your Brand Purpose

When business-as-usual has sputtered to a halt, markets are slowing down or rather crashing due to Covid-19 situations, it’s easy for brands to slide into panic chasing frantic measures of self-preservation and even collapsing. But what does the market want in such an extraordinary time? The answer is “Activate your brand purpose”. Navigating a brand from panic to purpose won’t be easy, but this can amplify reassurance for its people, new inspiration for customers, and forward momentum for its business. Here are three things which brands must consider while realigning & activating brand purpose:

• Communication: Communicate with your people, consumer and communities you live in. Identify shared values and areas where the brand product or service can make a difference. Consumers find businesses that actively communicate their brand purpose more attractive.
• Authenticity: Be precise and authentic. Consumers don’t fall for insincere attempts to pull at heartstrings. However, they reward authenticity, strong leadership and outspokenness.
• People Network: Build a partner network and collaborate with influencers, associate with a social cause, get involved in community work, crowdsource, innovate and be creative.

Brands that stand for something bigger than what they sell, tune into customers’ beliefs and take decisive action on current or larger social issues are more likely to rethink their customer relationships and connect with consumers on a deeper level. By activating brand purpose business can create an opportunity to build a community of loyal, valuable and engaged brand ambassadors —all working together to usher in the new era of engagement and competitiveness.