On purpose, on trend, on brand

The best bit in the new book “On Purpose” by Smith and Milligan is their brilliant three-point framework “Stand up, Stand Out, Stand Firm”.

Stand up for something: define your reason to be; as they say identify “an authentic and credible sense of purpose - a reason ‘why’ you exist beyond the desire to make profit”.

Stand out from the crowd: be distinctive, be different from what others do.

Stand firm to your beliefs: stay true to what you stood up for in the first place.

It’s a great framework for defining, building and maintaining a brand purpose but it also provides me with a structure for this review of their book.

STANDING UP FOR BRAND PURPOSE
Smith and Milligan certainly stand up for the need for and the value of creating and delivering a brand purpose:
“Quite simply, showing you have an authentic and credible sense of purpose - a reason ‘why’ you exist beyond the desire to make profit – drives commercial value in an increasingly competitive world.” As they point out there are many examples and quite a lot of evidence to back this up, including those of 19th Century entrepreneurs like W.K. Kellogg and Joseph Rowntree to more recent studies like the one that forms the basis of Jim Stengel’s book ‘Grow’.
However when they go on to argue that “It is now critical for any business to demonstrate it has a purpose before, and beyond profit, that it seeks to improve the lives of its customers as a primary goal. Failure to have such a purpose, to be clear about it and to ensure it directs everything you do, will lose customers, employees and ultimately business value” I have to say that even as a supporter of brand purposes I feel they are over-stating their case. Do we think successful brands like Primark, Lidl and Ryanair really have noble purposes? In fact, Apple have never claimed or published a brand purpose.
I recognise that my assertion won’t be popular everywhere but I’m not and never have been a believer in hard and fast marketing rules.

STANDING OUT
Championing brand purpose isn’t new and in fact it’s currently what half the marketing cognoscenti seem to be championing. The other half are championing the more marketing driven Bryon Sharp approach but that’s another story. On this basis this isn’t a book that really stands out. However with a nod towards the third point “standing firm”, Smith and Milligan successfully build the links to translating brand purpose into an area of their expertise and one they have explored in previous books like ‘Uncommon Practice’.

STANDING FIRM
Smith and Milligan make a convincing case of the need to connect and translate brand purpose into brand experience. They provide cases and tools, which they believe will help brands stand out by defining, designing and delivering distinctive, valuable customer experiences across multiple channels.
Within this section, they suggest that it is important to focus in on the brand experience or customer journey, arguing that you can’t and shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone and by making choices you can make yourself more distinctive and a truer reflection of your purpose.
If I have a quibble with this section it’s that some of the case histories are a bit long. There is a good breadth of brands from different sectors and the content in there is powerful but you do have to work for it.

So overall:
Standing Up – Tick, Smith & Milligan stand up for brands with purpose and their translation into branded experiences;
Standing Out – Question mark, while very much on trend the book isn’t particularly new or different in its thinking;
Standing firm – Tick, the authors remain consistent is their promotion of creating distinctive and valuable branded customer experiences.

Read more from Giles Lury of The Value Engineers here.