The obsession with the academic’s ‘brand purpose’ mantra has led agencies and marketers astray
Back in 2009 the advertising industry went crazy for a TED talk delivered by Simon Sinek. No doubt everyone is now familiar with his thesis that within the Golden Circle of the what, how and why, why is the most important question you can ask of your brand or your business. It is still one of the twenty most popular TED talks of all time.
I liked it at the time, but I didn’t fetishise it and attempt to apply it to every project or problem as the marketing industry sometimes has a tendency to do. There can be more than one theory, more than one strategy, more than one model of how and why something works, as Paul Feldwick’s book, Anatomy of Humbug, makes abundantly clear.
However, at the time, it was the only theory in town. Every brand, every agency, every company was eager to show that they understood that the reason why they did what they did, was the most important thing to convey.
Except it isn’t.
Not everywhere, all the time.
Such was the obsession with his mantra that agencies and marketers embarked on the journey towards ‘purpose’ that has taken many brands away from the tangible and understandable to the overly conceptual and aloof.
For many brands of course, having a clearly defined and culture-shaping purpose is important and it has successfully differentiated them from the more mundane competition in their market. The problem is that in thinking about ‘why’ to such a degree they’ve ignored the importance of ‘how’.
My contention is that any media company or indeed agency (whether media agency or creative agency or any other flavour of agency) should have been obsessing about the ‘how’ much more than the ‘why’. The role of an ‘agency’ is to provide a service on behalf of another business. They are active, intervening and in modern parlance can be seen as ‘interfaces’ themselves. They mediate and move others along. Behaviour is everything. A code of conduct. Their behaviour is the only way of demonstrating what they believe in, I mean really believe in.
Agencies themselves do not need a purpose. They need principles. Remember BBH’s principles, one of which was that they refused to pitch?
Principles of behaviour are what builds trust in media and agency businesses. That’s why when agencies are pitching, most clients are not thinking about the solution that the agency is proposing but rather what it would be like to work with these guys day in day out.
If you want to embed accountability into your offer to clients or customers, you can only do so through principles, not purpose.”
But agency principles got crushed in the stampede towards purpose. The recent Facebook debacle demonstrates just how this can happen. Facebook is an impressive brand and business. Many very talented people, each of them with integrity, work for the social media behemoth. Most people know that the purpose of Facebook is to make the world more connected, or ‘connect everyone in the world’ if we’re talking about their plans to bring internet access to all.
Nothing wrong with that, and it’s been a laudable and ambitious purpose to have. But there comes a time when the purpose becomes the entire focus. A time when any means will do to achieve the end. And the end in itself transforms into an ideology.
The means by which one strives for the purpose becomes increasingly separated from the expected behaviours that have come to be known of the company. Is that what happened with Facebook – did they overreach towards the purpose and in doing so, sacrifice their principles?
Probably not, because beyond ‘move fast and break things’ there really aren’t that many publicly articulated principles by which to judge Facebook. Their focus was always on purpose. In Sinek language, it was all about the ‘why’ and not about the ‘how’. [advert position=”left”]
The problem being that all the devilish detail is usually in the ‘how’ – the tone, the behaviour, the etiquette, the spirit, the code, the conduct – that’s usually how a person judges how trustworthy another person is, rather than by their mission statement on life. And that is how brands are judged, especially if those brands happen to be media brands or agency brands.
Having and abiding by one’s principles is getting more important not less. As the advertising industry blends increasingly with tech, and artificial intelligence becomes embedded into everyday practice, the only way to judge the trustworthiness or truthfulness of an agency is by those principles. And when things go awry, it is those principles that will help everyone else judge whether anyone, and if so whom, is to blame.
My point is that accountability relies on principles not purpose.
If you want to embed accountability into your offer to clients or customers, you can only do so through principles. As Dr Joanna Bryson makes clear in her talks on AI and ethics, tech companies, computer programmers and AI programmers should want to show that they have done the right thing.
“We need to be able to tell who is at fault if data goes to the wrong place,” she says in what is a hugely prescient comment given the Facebook situation.
Being able to show that the AI did the right thing, or that we did the right thing but there was an unforeseeable consequence, is going to be paramount in a connected, coded world. Once again, it is principles and behaviours that become more important than purpose in this future scenario.
Sinek is not wrong. But when Sinek’s theory is applied ubiquitously, it ends up being wrong. And if we are heading anywhere in the future, it is into a world in which the ‘how’ will prove to be of more value than the ‘why’.
Tracey Follows is the founder of Futuremade and writes on the subject of strategic foresight each month for Mediatel
@traceyfutures
@MediatelNews
