Chapter 2:

Purpose, Passion, Promise, and Positioning

What is purpose and why does it matter? You’ve got insight; at least one problem you see people struggling with, and you are ready to create the solution. Time to get moving.

Having purpose is not a matter of writing a vision statement that ends up an empty slogan.

Purpose means knowing what you stand for — why you want to exist. With purpose backed by commitment, you can challenge yourself — and others — to put in their best efforts.

Purpose comes to life through:

Purpose defines the mark you want to make. Do you want to leave your purpose behind at the office doorstep? Or make your mark through the user problems you choose to solve, merging your personal sense of purpose with career and commercial pursuits?

Purpose comes from self-awareness, not brainstorming sessions or focus groups. It provides a basis for big and small choices. It triggers alignment across values, principles, and execution. When purpose is baked into the culture, things happen the right way and everyone knows what that right way is. And when there is a choice between the purpose-driven way and some other way, the team course-corrects. They work harder, work smarter, work better, have passion about what they are doing, and are closer to the brand’s constituents. The purpose-driven way is more sustainable (and joyful), especially if more matters to you than delivering short-term numbers.

Purpose is the fuel that gets entrepreneurs and corporate innovators so fired up that they will not be deterred from turning insights into concepts, prototypes, business models, in-market experiences, and results. Purpose and passion breed the intensity for transformative results. They drive brand positioning from core beliefs and motivations into how to build your idea into a product or service.

Stories in this chapter demonstrate how purpose and passion shape choices, decisions, and actions to create the trajectory from discovery to results.

Change makers who put thought into defining their purpose and then connect it to execution energize others with their courage and commitment.

How can you figure out your purpose? Look within your life for signals:

Brand purpose inspired by personal experience

Stu Libby is Cofounder and CEO of ZipDrug, a New York City startup taking on the drugstore chains with an alternative patient experience. The two 800-pound gorillas, CVS and Walgreen’s, together control between 50 and 75 percent of the market in fourteen of the top U.S. metropolitan areas.1

Stu spent over a decade as an ad tech executive, participating in the exit of DoubleClick to Google in 2008. Despite this accomplishment, for Stu, something was missing. “I knew my instinct to move on was correct when I told my new manager not to worry, that I didn’t plan to be around for long, and he had absolutely no reaction,” says Stu.2

Stu’s dad became ill and, following a hospitalization, required prescription medications. The experience of transitioning from hospital to home, and getting prescriptions filled, refilled, and in hand was not merely messy and inconvenient, it could have been life-threatening. Stu saw an opportunity to solve a problem that not only had financial potential, but that also reflected his values.

Sure, a major goal for Stu is to generate financial returns, and he certainly knows what that takes. His goal is also to close holes in the business-as-usual journey from illness to good health. Stu is using technology, data, and partnerships to enable the corner-drugstore experience in the digital world — an experience that ZipDrug aspires to make proactive, relevant, compassionate, and connected.

As a seed investor, I get to hear many founders’ stories. They often share how market needs are identified through personal experiences. In the best cases, personal experiences are followed by exploration of whether other people have the same or different needs, and in turn challenges founders to focus on questions of how their purpose connects to market opportunities. Why are they going after this problem? What is it they really want to achieve?

Can you pass the “walk over hot coals” test?

I like to understand founder motivations. Business cases and budgets, exit plans, and minimally viable prototypes are basic. Any entrepreneur also has to pass the “walk over hot coals” test: Do they demonstrate such commitment to what they are doing that they demonstrate capacity to walk over hot coals for, say, at least five to seven years, maybe more? Will they stick to it, or will their passion be diminished by daily pressure and frustration?

Think it’s different in the corporate world? Think again. If you’ve ever had to decide whether to grant business-building resources to a team inside an established business, or have been on the team seeking funding, recall to what extent evidence of the ability to pull it off was a factor. Purpose and passion provide execution power in any company to master the daily challenges of bringing innovation to market.

Purpose and passion drive straight down into the details — the nitty-gritty of navigating regulation and other non-negotiable implementation tradeoffs and market conditions. Sticking to your intention minimizes dilution by the sum of decisions that gradually undercut goals. In healthcare, Stu says, “Financial success is in the bowels of the industry.” At ZipDrug, from the CEO down, culture, policies, processes, staffing, strategy, and in-market activities are defined by the singular purpose which motivated Stu to found the company.

Purpose enabling value and growth:

Make a virtue out of laziness

Reconsider the innovation premise if you assume you can change people’s behavior. The most powerful default is the familiar. Prove that the innovation resembles something familiar to users, and that it is simultaneously the undoing of that familiar solution. Then, it is possible to get people to abandon what they know.

A mentor and globally recognized innovation thought leader once said to me, “Make a virtue out of laziness.” This is not to judge anyone’s work ethic — it’s just another way of acknowledging that inertia is the biggest barrier we all have to trying something new. Make it easy for people to change, starting with making them feel they are not really changing — that they are doing what they already do, only better.

Create auto-magical solutions.

From purpose and passion to promise and positioning

With knowledge and commitment to your purpose, get ready to shape positioning, the tool to express purpose in words, images, and actions. Everything you do should manifest your positioning.

Positioning was not always thought of so broadly. Pre-digitally, positioning was a communications technique in the domain of the marketing team and the advertising agency. Today, ads and marketing communications are only the surface layer of how positioning comes to life for any brand.

Paul Barnett, a serial creator, and founder and CEO of Now What, The Creative Question Company, began his professional path in advertising, and is a trusted partner to leading brand executives. The common denominator among his clients: all are change makers. Paul is an innovation instigator. He is an active listener, insight-gatherer, interpreter, and question-asker. Paul has a special ability to translate what he sees into stories that inspire action.

What Paul is hearing and observing among brand executives is a movement away from messaging exercises built only on market research, and toward positioning executed as experience grounded in purpose.

In the pre-digital era it was okay to execute on a linear path. Hand the insights gathered through discovery over to functional experts working alongside marketing, sales, and product. Document requirements to prototype and build. Send these to engineering. Write the creative brief and review with the agency, who then creates storyboards and media plans. Meet with customer service to anticipate use cases. Work with legal to establish necessary disclosures. Finish the forecasts, and cut and paste financials into the plan. Develop selling sheets, and head off to the marketplace.

Now, Paul sees brand executives tying positioning to purpose, strategy, and culture. Time invested in brainstorming and conducting competitor message audits is being reallocated to discerning the nuances of value and growth creation. Macro trends are forcing change makers to challenge what used to be taken for granted: What business are we in? How do we infuse our positioning into our culture? “It’s been surprising to me,” Paul says, “how client attention to these questions versus the traditional notions of bringing product to market has itself become a trend.”3

Paul’s philosophy resembles Stu’s ZipDrug strategy with what may seem like unexpected consistency, considering his clients are big, established companies, not startups. A difference: Startup founders get to establish their purpose from day one. They don’t live with the overhang of a larger company, whose purpose may be unclear, at odds, or nonexistent. Setting or resetting purpose in an organization with a legacy takes leadership from the very top, and commitment to alignment down to daily operating details.

In the past, positioning efforts mainly influenced communications. Now, ads are like a transparent coat of gloss, and much more is required to execute positioning that is credible and compelling. Customers and employees may not be asking straight out for purpose, but more and more are affected by its presence and relevance.

So, what is the “much more” that change makers are taking on to get beyond marketing messaging? How are they getting to the substance of their brands’ purpose?

They are asking questions and listening.

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said.4

Change makers are asking questions of customers, employees, and themselves to get to the truths of a business’s purpose, and to confirm the links between purpose, business model, and executional and performance outcomes.

The 90s way and today’s way

Lori Marcus chairs direct-to-patient engagement for Harvard Business School’s Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. An adviser and board director, Lori has also created value and growth as a marketing executive at brands including Pepsi, The Children’s Place, Keurig Green Mountain, and fitness startup Peloton. All of this experience has convinced her of why purpose must connect to culture and in-market execution.

Lori says, “There is the ‘nineties way’ of figuring out brand promise and positioning, and there is what must happen today.”5 Back then, positioning focused on finding the competitor hole that defined the point of difference, building a “brand pyramid,” and moving from a wide base of features to the point of the pyramid — the point of emotional connection. Positioning execution focused on advertising and communications, packaging, shelf space, and sales support.

Today’s way: Purpose is the foundation of a pyramid leading to positioning.

Positioning is a big decision, not to be shortchanged. To get it right:

Purpose and positioning-based execution take work. Applying principles that have been traditionally centered in marketing across functions requires a strong leap, especially inside companies used to vertical silos and within-silo cultures. But it’s a leap worth taking because the result is a differentiated experience, and a stakeholder-focused way of operating.

So why do businesses, even when they do a great job on brand and offer positioning, fail to deliver experiences that are consistent with purpose? Execution requires aligning attitudes and behaviors — the many small pieces that make a culture — across the organization and business model. And the leader who aspires to change culture assumes the risk of breaking some glass. Capabilities must be adapted, metrics updated, silos flattened, talent exited and recruited.

Lori offers a point of view on a possible, albeit provocative fix: She imagines the CMO can be the “CEO of marketing,” not the executive overseeing communications, research, and media. The difference? What if one executive has authority for the levers to attract and engage customers? Their mindset must be to orchestrate and lead, not to control. To deliver on the positioning 100 percent of the time, and not just as a communications exercise, but on every aspect of the business model that is a candidate for alignment.

Or, as Lori says, “If you are in charge of the brand, by definition you are helping to define the company,” including culture. The chief customer officer or chief experience officer role comes in and out of fashion. The title is empty if the alignment across the organization is not enabled by CEO sponsorship, appropriately defined authority, shared purpose, linkage to brand, and a customer-centered, collaborative culture.

For an organization that historically hasn’t done so, assimilating purpose can turn out to be too transformational. Employees will be excited about purpose that elevates their roles. They will want to get on board. But only C-suite leadership can drive the requisite culture shift. If the higher-ups aren’t ready to change, the business cannot become purpose driven, and positioning will not show up beyond ads, sales, and marketing messaging.

If the status quo is not likely to change, the change maker committed to purpose may have to decamp to better ground.

Finding purpose as an outgrowth of insight, aimed early on at execution, is transformative — and worth the effort — for organizations accustomed to a more traditional product development paradigm who are now seeking to innovate.

Identify supporters, fence sitters, and resistors

Establish expectations up front of how you see:

Walk in your team members’ shoes to imagine their take on what’s in it for them.

Have the conversations to figure out who is on board, who is undecided and open, and who is firmly entrenched in the past or some other direction. Bring the supporters into your fold, and work to win swing voters. The resistors? Don’t let them wear you down.

Don’t overthink the answers, which may be hiding in plain sight and just require that you pay attention, look in the right places, and listen.

Oftentimes long-tenured employees have a unique appreciation for the brand — including during what may have been brighter days — and carry the sense of purpose in their heads and hearts. You just have to ask them and honor their perspectives.

And of course, listen to and watch your customers. Vast data sources and sophisticated analytics tools are bringing new ways to understand the market. But simple, qualitative insight techniques should not be discounted, and can turn out to be invaluable. When Lori set forth to lead the positioning work as CMO at The Children’s Place, she was delighted to hear moms recount amazing childhood stories about the brand. To a person, they talked about “play” and their wonderful memories of when the stores had playground-like structures — including a slide. Over and over, people’s faces lit up as they talked about color and play. So for Marcus, the choice to lean into the optimism of childhood and the emotive effect of bright colors was obvious.

Implementing purpose

Leaders who understand and influence the culture’s capacity to support innovation stand a chance at succeeding. Culture nurtures or destroys progress, affecting how everyone engages as missionaries to bring the purpose to life. Change makers run a gauntlet — encountering roadblocks, frustrations, and mistakes. That is the nature of their work.

Advice on how to build purpose into daily operations and culture:

You have control over finding and achieving purpose. Not asking questions to challenge how well you are doing is not a change-maker option.

The Three Cs of Purpose, Passion, Promise, and Positioning

Capabilities

The tools of discovery do not get put away once core insights are gathered. Use them for purpose and positioning, whether looking within yourself for personal insights, or among those who surround and affect the brand and its impact. Continuing to ask questions is a more important role than trying to know all the answers.

How to ask the right questions

  1. Say nothing. Silence creates space for more insights. Some people find silence uncomfortable; they keep talking to fill the emptiness. Others are grateful for the opportunity to reflect and organize their thoughts.
  2. Ask for more. “That is so interesting, can you tell me more about that?” What’s great about this question is it is an open-ended invitation, and avoids confirmation bias. Revelations won’t come out until a few rounds of repetition.
  3. Poke at claims for truth, but do so gently. “Wow, that’s amazing — how do you know that?” is another great question-tool for a world where big claims abound, and are sometimes hard to connect to facts. Use this one to detect fabrications and overstatements, and to direct conversation toward tangible evidence.

Emulate Albert Einstein

At Now What, asking questions is the norm. Try the team’s practice — a one-hour meeting each week, adhering to the “Einstein Rule”:

Employee orientation: The gift of three questions

New Now What employees receive “the gift of three questions” in a simple and memorable ceremony to bring each person into the company’s question-asking culture. “It costs nothing and does more for your brand,” says Paul, than typical new employee orientations. “It puts into action what we believe in and what we value.”

Asking questions takes courage. Too many people fear that asking signals ignorance. Questions stimulating dialog will pull people toward the purpose and find their roles to deliver the brand’s promises.

Connections

How to connect beyond the usual suspects: Creating a community of hand-raisers

Identify the change makers, influencers, and sponsors within the organization or your external network. Simply share what you are doing and your philosophy, and then keep track of those who respond with offers of help or advice, or other efforts demonstrating they are on board. Within a company this can take the form of department or division updates, or intranet postings. Within your network consider a quarterly personal newsletter. The community of believers made up of those who respond will be an expanding resource. You may be surprised by who steps up to assist.

Identifying the “hand raisers” is a high-impact, low effort technique, especially when resources are tight, that can seed rewarding relationships and opportunities. In one of my two stints as a chief innovation officer there was almost no staffing support. But I was able to uncover sleeper cells of innovators around the organization through internal communications. As a result, I built a list of people I could count on to bring expertise and elbow grease to projects.

A great one-liner to connect past to future

A certain amount of resistance to innovation happens when people tied to past success see the next big thing as a repudiation of their contributions.

You can take the edge off this emotional reaction by following a simple rule that will signal respect and empathy: “Compliment with an i, and then complement with an e.”

Here’s an example applied to the case of introducing client segmentation to a group of insurance agents among whom the norm for prospecting has always been to mine their own social circle:

“You have done an amazing job within your network figuring out who can benefit from our products. We can offer a new tool to try out that might allow you to build even better results by tagging your contacts with a segment identifier. Others are finding this is helping prioritize leads …”

Culture

Cultural attributes for successful purpose, passion, promise, and positioning include:

Chapter summary

Notes

1. Corey Stern, “CVS and Walgreens Are Completely Dominating the US Drugstore Industry,” businessinsider.com, July 30, 2015.

2. Stu Libby, CEO, ZipDrug, in discussion with author, August 2016.

3. Paul Barnett, CEO, Now What, in discussion with author, August 2016.

4. Dwayne Spradlin, “Are You Solving the Right Problem?” Harvard Business Review, September 2012.

5. Lori Tauber Marcus, board director, adviser, and marketing executive, in discussion with author, September 2016.