A brand with purpose

Despite your best efforts at creating a cohesive strategy, your thriving brand has come unstuck. When you can’t make that jump to the next stage of your business lifecycle, quell the desire to ‘sticky plaster’ the situation and instead take a step back and tackle from the top.

When you first launched your business, you had a vision and the few around you felt your passion, understood the brand goal and, with you at the helm, knew how to deliver it. This early success attracted investors, and with more investment a bigger team followed.

You were single-minded in your vision and everyone from the coffee maker to the new CEO seemed to be clear on this. World domination next (cue evil laugh while you stroke the white cat in your lap). Not quite. Confusingly, the growth that you expected is stunted or worse your business is now in decline.

Feeling the same frustrations, new investors share their thoughts on what to try next. After all, when they undertook due diligence before investing, the business was booming and everything looked rosy. Do you, as founder, have to continue to do it all yourself? Where’s that money they promised? Often blame by various parties for the lack of success, is attributed to the wrong product launch, focusing on the wrong marketing activities, new team members not understanding the brand or some event in the economy.

However, in most cases, the issue runs far deeper than these smaller, individual elements.

To arrive at that stage, something fundamental is missing from the business or has been lost along the way, namely, the business purpose.

Coming undone at the seams

As you grow, you will stretch out in all directions from staff to shareholders. A clearly defined business purpose is the elastic that will hold all this together.

A business purpose is your ‘reason for existing’, defining exactly what problem you seek to fix and what experience you wish to deliver. Distilling the essence of the brand from the bells and whistles of it can help you get back to what the goal of your brand really is.

This purpose needs to remain at the forefront of all strategic decisions and more importantly filter through, with no embellishment, to all areas of the company. Every employee should be clear in their understanding of the purpose and use this to drive all their actions and decisions.

Futureproof your purpose

Sometimes the purpose is defined in terms that are too vague and this can prevent growth. For example, Victoria’s Secret recent failings, were attributed to an outdated view of what their customers wanted and aspired to. Aspects such as the lack of diversity and ‘real’ women models turned off their core demographic who could no longer relate to the brand in the era of #metoo giving competitors that have long embraced diversity, gender equality and sustainability such as Savage x Fenty a distinct advantage.

Victoria’s Secret needed a robust purpose that allowed them to adapt to changing tastes and times. If the purpose was to ‘Make customers feel confident and good about themselves’ this would have allowed for growth by always striving to deliver products to meet new and changing tastes and concerns, but it could be that their purpose was limited to something along the lines of ‘create beautiful, sexy lingerie for women’ which is not the same thing. It does not allow for the inclusion of all genders, there is no mention of the emotional connection that needs to be evoked in their customer or to whom is this lingerie is designed to appear ‘beautiful’ and ‘sexy’.

The scale, speed, quality conundrum

You want to deliver a quality product or service and you want to scale the business at speed. The inherent issue of wanting it all however is the invariable need to compromise or cut corners. Is this deviation from your purpose an acceptable route?

A well-defined purpose by its nature will involve the need to develop a quality product, so if you wish to keep this at the heart of all decisions either scale or speed will have to give. There are several examples where speed has come at a cost to the quality of the product; Samsung’s infamous exploding Galaxy Note 7, is one such case. The product was raced to market to upstage arch-rival Apple’s upcoming launch. While Samsung, with its deep pockets, was able to bounce back from this, it took note of its mistake and spent serious time and money in quality testing its next launch and subsequently beat Apple to market with a full-screen smartphone, the Galaxy S8.

Losing your way

A purpose is merely a phrase in a presentation if it is not continually referred to and bought into play in all areas of the business on an ongoing basis. New team members, suppliers, agencies all need to be abreast of your company’s reason for being. We have seen, time and again a dusty, outdated set of brand guidelines that, upon leafing through, have little similarity to the brand we see presenting itself in our office, in press, in digital, in retail outposts or even on the brand’s own website. Often the only thing vaguely cohesive in all of this remains the logo… if we are lucky!

Bringing in a branding agency and working with them to get to the crux of what your brand stands for and its goals should deliver more than just a beautiful set of brand guidelines to neatly file in your marketing department and swiftly forget about. A good set of brand guidelines should form part of the induction in all new company relationships and cascade down and through to all company outputs. This does not mean the document should not be updated from time to time to stay relevant to your purpose in changing times, indeed it must, but it should be robust enough and designed with enough clarity for all associated parties to find relevance to their areas of work.

In a classic example from the 1980s, Pepsi launched a highly successful campaign focused on the results of blind taste tests where Pepsi was overwhelmingly chosen as the favourite over Coke. Coca Cola in panic, launched ‘New Coke’ to replace the existing long loved original coke. This was met with widespread anger amongst is customers and Coke was forced to revert to the original flavour within a few months amidst negative sentiment. A strong set of brand guidelines that recognised the emotional connection its customers had towards the brand and that reminded stakeholders of this would have helped Coca Cola focus on the brands own strengths than knee-jerk reactions to flash-in-the-pan competitor campaigns.

Culture revolution

Earlier we touched on the need for the brand purpose to filter down to all company stakeholders from shareholders to suppliers, but one of the toughest challenges in a business that’s growing rapidly or has changed ownership, is keeping employees, old and new, on the same path as owners and management. For example, a business with 50 employees will struggle to share their purpose and vision in quite the same way they did when it was just the founder sat round a dining table bouncing ideas off their first 5 employees. It is simply not enough to share your elevator pitch with new stakeholders, you need buy-in and the key to a successful buy in is down to company culture.

True belief in the values and purpose of a business transcends pretty fonts, pantones and photography styles and takes stakeholders to an elevated plane where brand outputs such as these are the result of a defined purpose and not an attempt to create one.

When a purpose can envelop the internal customer, the employee, the right elements will be in play to create a culture that always pulls the company in the right direction. In our earlier example, where we created a fictitious purpose for Victoria’s Secret, namely, ‘Make customers feel confident and good about themselves’, you can see how easily this fits with the employee, not just the end customer. Do your employees feel equally confident and good about themselves and their work?

Instilling that confidence and motivation in an employee, is a two-pronged approach. Hint: neither involves table football and beanbags. There must exist, in a company, a clear set of KPIs and processes that are used across departments and at management level so that all stakeholders are clear on the goal. This isn’t limited to simply the front line activities such as sales and marketing but should apply to all processes including internal activities such as finance, operations and HR. They all matter equally.  All too often we have seen success measured in contradictory ways across a business creating confusion among staff and the pursuit of activities that conflict with each other and ultimately sabotage the overall brand goal.

Secondly, there must be a process for new ideas, feedback and a culture that rewards and nurtures free thinking and regularly appraises working practices and processes to ensure they are not thwarting necessary change. Staying true to your business purpose means you must be willing to adapt and evolve however challenging this may seem at the time.

There will undoubtedly be times when a business hits different scale points and it will need help with these growing pains from external events such as fundraising and M&A to internal events such as recruitment, training and internal communication. A full 360 approach is needed.

External mentoring can often help reshape the business by taking a step back and reviewing a business ‘cold’, speaking to all stakeholders to gain the complete picture and going back to the ‘shop floor’ to work upwards to find the pain points.   

Your brand checklist

We know that everything makes perfect sense until you try to execute it, so maybe start with a simple checklist to help your business stay on track or use to refer back to when you’ve lost your way:

• Clearly define your purpose.  Ensure it filters into all areas of your company staying front and centre of mind in all company decisions.

• Examine the company culture. Do all stakeholders believe in the purpose and values of the company? Is there sufficient buy-in to this at every level?

• Watch out for the hurdles of scale. Moving from £5m to £10m to £50m will undoubtedly require step changes in practices to ensure your purpose isn’t shunted to the sidelines. Often such scale is accompanied by new ownership, which can exacerbate weak spots in your goal.

• Don’t be afraid to adapt, redefine and correct. When things are not working, step out of the detail and go back to purpose, culture and scale. Fix those first and don’t get bogged down in the detail. External mentorship may be a good route if too hard to step back.

• Go ‘back to the shop floor’. From time to time, hit the ground floor and see and experience what the customer does. Identify pain points and then prepare top down corrections to prevent future deviations from plan.

• Sing from the same hymn sheet. Ensure everyone is following the same KPIs and processes – work off the same ones so you’re all going in the same direction.

• Don’t dilute to satisfy others. In the pursuit of happiness with all your stakeholders from new investors to new recruits, be careful not to water down your purpose so as to lose your way completely.