An approach for finding the right brand purpose

I've previously talked about the importance of thinking with first principles to achieve 10x rather than 10% growth.

That's the level you should always be thinking of your strategy at, but in the past months, I've seen a lot of writing about the role of brand strategy, specifically of purpose-driven brand strategies today, with some executions seeming more wishful thinking than strategic choice.

Which is where we start with Christopher Nolan's fantastic script for his film, Inception. Here's the most relevant excerpt:

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Cobb: Inception. Now, before you bother telling me it's impossible, let me ...

Eames: No, it's perfectly possible. It's just bloody difficult.

Cobb: Interesting. Because Arthur keeps telling me it can't be done.

Eames: Hmm. Arthur. You still working with that stick in the mud?

Cobb: He is good at what he does, right?

Eames: Oh, he's the best, but he has no imagination.

Cobb: Not like you.

Eames: Listen, if you're gonna perform inception, you need imagination.

Cobb: Let me ask you something. Have you done it before?

Eames: We tried it. We got the idea in place, but it didn't take.

Cobb: You didn't plant it deep enough?

Eames: No, it's not just about depth. You need the simplest version of the idea in order for it to grow naturally in your subject's mind. It's a very subtle art. So, what is this idea that you need to plant?

Cobb: We need the heir of a major corporation to dissolve his father's empire.

Eames: Well you see right there you have various political motivations and anti-monopolistic sentiments and so forth. But all of that stuff, it's um.... It's really at the mercy of your subject's prejudice, you see? What you have to do is start at the absolute basic.

Cobb: Which is what?

Eames: The relationship with the father.

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When people think of getting to simplicity, many think of Occam's Razor, and remember it as saying that "the simplest answer is the best."

It can be reduced to that, but that's not quite the idea of Occam's Razor.

Occam's Razor is a bit more scientific, a bit less reductionist than that.

Occam's Razor comes from "Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate," or "don't entertain pluralities without necessity," or, more simply, pick the route that makes the fewest assumptions in getting you to where you want to go.

Which should be common sense.

Every assumption carries within it a margin of error.

The more the assumptions, the more likely you are to compound your margin of error.

This is why you need to look past topline trends or narratives, and understand deeply the drivers beneath the surface.

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So what's a simple way of approaching the question?

Everyone has an opinion on this – mine is that when brand strategy goes awry, it's often because firms are unable to reach a place of brutal honesty when answering the three questions: Why, How, and What.

Because if you don't understand your Why and How deeply, your What is going to be messy and muddled, and that's what your target customers will (not) react to.

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Why:

You need to understand what your product or service viscerally satisfies – and this involves deep customer knowledge (at the level of relationships between fathers and sons, vs. at the level of "political motivations or anti-monopolistic sentiments") and why this makes you different from everyone else.

This distinction is important to keep in mind.

You are not here to explain to your customers why they're stupid or should be behaving differently. You exist to serve them, they don't exist to serve you.

And if you keep that position for long, you'll eventually (if not always) lose.

You have opinions or values? Great.

But you're looking to get someone to pay you their hard-earned money for something you're selling. So have the humility to start by understanding what problem you solve for them, and to start from there to figure out what your purpose is.

If it's not visceral, if it doesn't come from a deep place of truth, it will be subject to every customer's beliefs and prejudices and will never scale.

And this is true for B2B as much as B2C. When you're making a B2B decision, it can go into hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. That's a lot of risk in that decision. Why should they choose you if they don't think you have their best interests in mind? And remember that – their best interests, not what you think they should be.

If you can answer the question honestly, however, you will be able to align your firm's strategy, your employee engagement and customer engagement around it.

How do you find that answer?

Clay Christensen talks about "jobs to be done". It's still one of the best ways to get there.

So ask yourself what your firm and your offers are really doing. What are they for? What are they against? What do they enhance? What do they reverse?

Your strategy needs to start with this deep understanding of behavioral drivers – and honesty in your answers – internally and externally – in order to succeed.

That's why Peter Drucker famously said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast".

That's where the phrase "The Customer is Always Right" comes from.

Customers vote ultimately with their wallets.

So if you believe you don't need to understand what truly motivates them, or think business strategy is about telling them they're wrong, then best of luck.

Don't tell them they're wrong.

Make your way the better way, by understanding how it fits into their lives.

And then show them how it makes their lives easier, better.

"Aditya, this could make it quite narrow," you might argue.

But that's the point.

A purpose may or may not be a big, grand-standing statement.

But it always has to solve a real problem in a relevant way.

Broad means more assumptions. Broad means more scope for going seriously awry.

If you want to go broad, leave those ideas separate, and with your CSR department, don't try to bring them into your core brand world.

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How:

The founder of my old firm, Leo Burnett, once described it as "discovering the drama inherent in the product".

The founder of my present firm, Ogilvy, talked about "having a divine discontent with our work, because it serves as an antidote to smugness."

One of the concepts that Marc Andreessen made famous was that of product-market fit.

"How" connects the dots from why we do, to what we do.

This is how we execute the idea, with our character and intellectual and emotional depth and discipline.

Here's a great video explaining the difference in execution vision between Spielberg's Jurassic Park and its sequels.

Spielberg makes key decisions starting with something that might seem trivial, like the format – going against a default in order to find the right frame to make his version of the story more evocative.

This is the difference between a firm that treats strategy (why) and execution (how) as deeply interrelated vs. those that treat them as separate disciplines / functions, or assume that one takes precedence over the other.

Strategically, this can be about Amazon's methodical Vertical Integrations or Horizontal Expansions in order to make "consumption" more seamless and convenient for its customers.

It can be Apple, which often gets criticized for doing so, creating or using new standards and formats for its hardware or software.

But your how needs to come from a clear why, so your employees can truly focus on delivering it through your what.

It's why Facebook works as Facebook, Messenger works as Messenger, Instagram works as Instagram, Whatsapp works as Whatsapp, but whenever they try to make products (or behaviors) jump across those platforms, they fail.

Brand purposes need to be coherent and solving real problems for your customers, or they won't work.

Strong last-mile strategies, or experience design, or buying more share of voice can compensate for the sins of not being clear in the short-term, but are a failing approach in the long-term.

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You also need to keep in mind that we are all tendencies more than we are entities – we are continuously evolving and changing. It's the same, therefore, for what we know about ourselves and others.

This is why it's so important to keep a view on the core behavioral drivers, and stay aligned to them. And be willing to evolve or pivot based on what our customers *need*.

That's where we need to keep Cobb and Eames' discussion about Inception in mind.

That's where we need to remember that Occam's Razor talks of simplicity not as reductionism, but of minimizing assumptions.

That's where we need to identify the job that customers hire you to do for them, and start from there.

Go.