Communicating your Core Purpose
Never before has the purpose of an organisation been so important to consumer choice and brand building.
This process can be used by organisations in all industries, of all size, and is designed to be a high-level brand strategy workshop to be completed over a few days. Access to a meeting room with a whiteboard, notebooks and space and time to think, are all encouraged.
It will depend on the size of the organisation, however, you should aim to include key decision makers behind the organisation of various responsibilities. When we conduct brand strategy workshops, we ask our client to include roughly five key decision-makers. However, this kind of brand workshop also works well when taken on by two directors or even solo freelancers.
In this post we cover 6 key topics:
Context — To begin, you will first need to align everyone in the workshop by understanding the context behind the organisation. We also discuss together what would make a successful visual identity/ rebrand and what this would mean to the organisation and its employees.
Vision — In the second part of the worksheet we cover corporate vision, discussing our ideal roadmap to outline key goals and milestones.
DNA — During the third section, we look into the corporate DNA, digging into and then mapping the service/ product offering.
Values — The most emotive and humanising part of a brand exists within its core values and what it stands for in the consumers perspective. We then look into the What?, How? and Why? of the organisation, to reconsider and evolve our mission statement.
Personality — Once we have distilled our values into a core three, we can then consider from what personality the brand can express itself from. A hugely important part of positioning your products/ services within a market, we look at Jungian Archetypes to find out what kind of voice that our brand should speak from.
Landscape — Once we have focussed and deep-dived internally, we can now look outwards at our industry’s brand landscape.
1. Context
Looking internally is naturally a difficult challenge for any size of organisation. To do this effectively and together, we need to start from the ground-up.
Our first activity is to audit our current brand. To do this, it’s best to first ask ourselves some fundamental questions; Who are we? What are we promising our customers? What are our roots, and where and how did our organisation begin?
We can then consider where our brand exists, both physically and digitally, what are the key touchpoints that our customers come in contact with. To get a holistic view of our identity, it is best to create a few slides of our brand’s touchpoints; screengrabs of websites and social media profiles, images of head office, products, even uniforms and stationery. The more we have, the broader we can see.
We can then together consider the following questions; How does our organisation express itself visually, emotionally? Is our current branding functional? Does our branding feel connected to our positioning or confused and need unifying? Is it still visually relevant? Are we communicating our values and mission in the best and most consistent way to the market?
2. Vision
The first tool is a road map to consider the past, present and future of our organisation.
We should first discuss the past, what are the key milestones in our history that have bought us to the position that we are in today? Next', we should consider what are our future (blue sky) goals? And finally where are we right now, what are the present milestones we need to achieve in the coming months for us to begin to reach our future goals?
3. DNA
Functionally, what do we do? It is often so useful for the decision-makers to consider fundamental questions. This question sets everyone on the same base of understanding to work from. As a team we can have a collective understanding in not just what we do and sell to our customers, but where is most key areas of the business, in terms of revenue and growth. We are not hoping for a precise measurement here, it is more about getting everyone to see the same, top-level view of the organisations market offering.
—Service Map
The best tool to visualise our organisations market proposition is to use a levelled doughnut chart to map key service areas. It is best not to go ultra-detailed, ideally, you can split our product/ service into four to six sections.
4. Values
Our consumers need to clearly understand the purpose of our organisation (aside from simply turning a profit!) if we are to thrive. We need an emotional hook that the customer can resonate with and feel apart of something bigger. Values do more than align a large organisation, they align our teams internally with our customers externally.
A fundamental part of our approach to brand strategy process is to work with the client to filter down to just three key brand values. It is important to narrow the values so that we can present a clear, unified direction. The audience will best understand clearly communicated core values.
The outcome we want to reach is three core brand values and our organisation’s mission statement.
—Value Breakdown
We begin this section by discussing our values together and collecting all of them on post-its on a whiteboard. These can be far-reaching and blue-sky which we can then filter in the next part. We can ask ourselves a few questions to get the ball rolling: What are our strengths? Why do we think our customers choose us?
—Value Map
By trying to be everything to everyone, we become nothing to anyone. We need to focus and show the world we’re serious about our product/ service offering and the customers we serve. To help us think critically we use this value mapping tool.
Discussing openly, we first narrow down to four core values and plot at the corners of the map. Once finalised, we then look together to find four more sub-values, that sit between our core values and connect these. For example, if two of our core values are ‘people-first’ and ‘responsibility’ the sub-value which connects these two values could be ‘staff-development’. Another example, our two core values are ‘to inspire customers’ and ‘to innovate’ the sub-value could be ‘forward-thinking’. You will need to take ownership of your values, and find that four core values, linked by four sub-values, should encompass your organisation truthfully and as a whole.
—Value examples
Industry leader, to inspire, to empathise, humility and honesty, people-first, high-quality products, to promote individuality, foster talent, integrity, to help others.
—Value Pyramid
To filter further, a value pyramid is then used to help us reach three core brand values. We dissect the brand map by discussing which key values become the strongest threads through our discussions. To help align, we need to be able to back up our statements, so we flesh our the three strongest values with concise descriptions.
Foundation - Starting with the foundation value, this is commonly a human and emotional attribute that we can build upwards from. It should give the brand somewhere to fight from. This value should illustrate the driving force behind us. Examples of foundation values might be ‘responsibility’, ‘trust’, ‘passion’, ‘empathy’.
Differentiator - The differentiator value will be extruded from the foundation value, building onto it, into something more literal, less abstract and more real-life. This value should ideally be something that sets us apart. Examples might be ‘family-owned’ and ‘traditional heritage’ or ‘knowledge and innovation focussed’.
Driver - The final and top value will be the one most real, least abstract, and most actionable. Examples to consider, we exist to ‘revolutionise the industry’, ‘inspire future generations’, ‘to foster community’.
It is critical that these values link to each other naturally and most importantly hold truth and feel honest to the brand. We cannot honestly say that our organisation is people-first if we are not caring for our staff and fostering talent internally. To achieve this, we must be critical, and not be tempted by any cliches like ‘sustainability’ or ‘human’. We need to be as critical as possible, it is extremely useful to go through these three value stages twice or three times.
—The What?, How? & Why?
From the literal, products and services, we work through the what, how and why to reach the emotional purpose of the organisation. The ‘why’ can be further developed into a corporate mission statement. It should be clear of waffle, cutting straight to the core purpose of our organisation.
We can consider the keywords found in our value pyramid. The mission statement needs to land in the pivotal centre of who we are, it needs to be concise, we need to be strong and passionate, it needs to be an unquestionable truth about us for it to resonate with our consumers.
Corporate mission statements examples:
Nike: ‘To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.’—Nike’s smart and concise mission uses emotive words like ‘Inspire’, ‘innovate’ and ‘athlete’ makes us feel like anyone can be an athlete and because of this, we’re all athletes.
Apple: ‘To bring the best user experience to its customers through its innovative hardware, software, and services.’—Again, the emotive word ‘innovate’ doesn’t put Apple in the box of product/ hardware, they provide ‘services’ which humanises their mission and is so core to the brand with the Genius Bar.
Dyson: ‘Our mission is to inspire a new generation of engineers.’—Forward-looking, Dyson doesn’t simply focus on innovation, they communicate that they are human and people-first by fostering future talent. They back this up by donating to Design universities. The James Dyson Building of the Royal College of Art.
Aesop: ‘Our objective has always been to formulate skin, hair and body care products of the finest quality; we investigate widely to source plant-based and laboratory-made ingredients, and use only those with a proven record of safety and efficacy.—A little lengthy, they communicate their mission without buzzwords eloquently with the phrase ‘we investigate widely to source plant-based and laboratory-made ingredients’ showing not only are they sustainability-minded, but they are also innovative.
Cathay Pacific: ‘Our vision is to be the world's best airline. Being the best means that we always strive to excel in everything we do. Our dynamic team provides the highest quality service so that our customers are happy they chose Cathay Pacific.’—The first sentence is strong enough, but they go further, to talk about their people-first values, not only in their customers but also within their team. The keywords ‘strive’ and ‘dynamic’ again, are emotive, inspiring words used to focus on their high-quality and personable service. Aside from the first sentence, Cathay’s mission statement would fit a luxury hospitality brand and goes well beyond just an airline.
Patagonia: ‘Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’
— This is a true cause, an emotional driving force behind the brand and is backed up in truth by giving millions to worldwide causes each year, inspiring trust and warmth in their customers.
5. Personality
—Brand Archetype Wheel
Jungian Archetypes were developed by Psychiatrist Carl Jung to categorise personality types.
First applied to the advertising industry in 1939, these archetypes help position products to foster greater brand loyalty. With our client, we talk through each of the archetypes and see what resonates. The brand must fall into only one of the archetypes, so again, we work with the client to filter down to the essence of the brand, finding the singular personality archetype that is the truest expression of the organisation.
For personality to function, it needs to be expressed. We use the chosen archetype to understand what the brand needs to express from its visual identity.
6. Landscape
We must look at our competitors and peer organisations to benchmark our positioning and to discuss any opportunities for differentiation. Much like our internal visual audit, we do the same for our competitors. We can then follow this up by asking similar questions we asked of our own branding; Does their brand identity align with their promise?
How does their organisation express itself visually, emotionally? Does their branding feel connected to the positioning or confused and need unifying? Is it still visually relevant? Are they communicating their values and mission in the best and most consistent way to the market?
A final word—
I have found that the best results are developed from running through this process with the client a couple of times. During the first run-through, I would encourage your team to amass as many ideas as possible at each point on a whiteboard, consider each idea in discussion to find the most valuable. I then encourage all parties to meet again a few days later to give time for the ideas discussed to be digested, before meeting for the second run through to discuss thoughts and finalise. The filled-out strategy deck can then be presented by team leaders and used as a reference moving forward.
I sincerely hope this can help you and your organisation, and give some structure to a naturally daunting task.
About BrandWerks —
BrandWerks is a design resource company focused on advancing the practice of brand strategy.
We know that brand strategy can be a difficult beast to master. We create brand strategy templates and resources that help designers, agencies, and brand strategists master brand strategy.
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