Tuesday 2¢ – Has Why Lost Its Purpose?

This week’s 2 cents is on finding your why and brand purpose. I don’t mention Patagonia….. OK, maybe once…. but I think I got away with it.

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Like many marketing trends, broadcasting our purpose and our “why” was the hot kid on the block for a while, and people kept saying things like Patagonia and Apple. Now, the pendulum has swung, and it seems it has lost its flavor.

For a good reason.

For years, in B2B, when talking about our product features, we’ve hummed along to the tune that customers don’t care about our products; they only care about their problems.

But our myopia of introspection, thinking, and talking about ourselves remained when it came to why we do the things we do and the urge to express our higher purpose.

But there is a good argument that buyers don’t give a shit about that either.

The test for the effectiveness of brand purpose is whether, in whatever market category you are in, the buyer will sacrifice their convenience, the resolution of their need, and how much they intend to spend to buy something sold by people with a purpose.

Would they buy our slightly worse product than our competitors because we are nice?

I must refer to the poster child of brand purpose, Patagonia, right? It’s the law, so yeah, if their products were shit, didn’t signal a level of affluence and a specific fashion taste, and didn’t live up to the brand attributes of quality, people wouldn’t buy the products simply because they were nice, right?

But should we give up on the brand purpose and the process of discovering our why?

Is it time to garner all that lovely link bait and write that PURPOSE IS DEAD?

I’ve recently defected from various perfectly good social platforms to BlueSky, and by measurement of features and functionality, I don’t think anyone is choosing BlueSky for its flippers and flappers.

It’s often compared to Twitter circa 2009, and I don’t think it’s just about the community’s optimism; its functionality and user experience is pretty simple, akin to Twitter 15 years ago.

People are joining as the people who run the place seem nice.

Clearly, as this is a social media platform, the feeling about the supplier is overlayed with a bunch of other feelings about the community and that “people like us, do things like this,” as Seth Godin says.

Can I go a whole post without mentioning Godin? Jeez!

And yes, a social media platform is a different thing from whatever you do, but I still think there is value in communicating your purpose and why, if it’s relevant to your buyer, as brand attributes.

Sure, purpose won’t beat product fit or price, it’s not a first-class P of that high an order. But in a competitive market, or a sea of beige that is B2B, assuming you have a competitive product – it could be invaluable to a buyer to differentiate, understand a bit about you and help them complete their current job to be done: Make a choice.

Plus, many buying decisions involve a community aspect; we want to be like the others who also buy this product. That’s why social proof is such a powerful commercial driver.

It makes them feel that people like them do things like buy from you.

That’s aside from the value to colleagues, employees, and investors in understanding that we are not just motivated by cash.

That’s a post for another day – but I’m curious to know what you think – has “why” lost its purpose, or maybe has purpose lost its why?

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This was partly inspired by a chat with my chum Robert Rose on the Rockstar CMO podcast, and he has written a fab piece on the Content Marketing Institute blog – We’ve Gotten ‘Start With Why’ Wrong in Content. Here’s How to Fix It – and he suggests how we align it with the why of our customers. Good read.

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