Purpose Worksheet

As a foundation to your organizational values and style, we like to dig in and get a better understanding of the true purpose behind your organization. It can be easy to think that making money or producing your product or service is the purpose behind your brand, however, that isn’t the kind of purpose we’re looking for. We’re looking for the underlying reason you started your organization, the reason you continue to invest long hours to keep it running, your calling, your mission, your guiding light, your north star.

This purpose is often more overarching than your product or service, but if well-defined will drive every inch of it. Here are a few examples of purpose from companies you’re probably familiar with:

  • Method Soap – Helping customers to create healthy, happy homes

  • Hulu – To help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content how and when they want it

  • Google – Cataloging the world’s information

  • Phillips – Brining “sense and simplicity” to the world of technology

  • Dove – Advocating “real beauty” in real women

  • Apple – Challenging the status quo

  • Southwest Airlines – To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.

Seeing these purpose statements might shed light on the decisions these companies make: Method believes in order to have a happy, healthy home, you have to first make the product beautiful enough to leave out in plain sight, then be sure to create a product that is safe and gentle enough for even the most sensitive users. Looking at Google’s purpose statement helps you understand how every one of their product releases achieves that mission of collecting and cataloging data. And of course, understanding Apple’s desire to challenge the status quo explains their release of product after product that breaks down, then recreates the way we live our lives. The fact that these companies so clearly understand their mission enables them to make decisions based upon it, which allows them to produce a product or service that is so focused and clear that it is able to command a much higher price than another me-too company.

Purpose can be one of the trickiest pieces of your brand identity to uncover. Although your purpose has most likely been hanging around your company from the beginning, most of us didn’t take the time to really verbalize this concept at the inception of our organizations, and it may have become slightly foggy or morphed a bit throughout the years. You’ll likely have to peel back a lot of mental clutter to get to the real principle that drives your organization.

Questions to discuss

In Tim Williams’ book “Positioning for Professionals,” he includes a list of questions that can help get you thinking about the purpose of your organization. Going through these questions can help shake loose the cobwebs around your purpose. They might not all apply to you, but they’ll help you unearth your mission by looking at it from different perspectives.

1. Why does your organization exist?

2. What inspires you to come to work each day?

3. Besides making money, why are you in business?

4. What is the meaning of what you do?

5. What significant contribution do we want to make to the industry, the profession, or the world?

6. What are some of our “unrealistic” expectations?

7. What important problem would you like to solve?

8. What would you like to create that has never existed before?

9. What would happen if your company or brand ceased to exist?

10. What kind of lasting difference do you want to make?

11. What do you preach?

12. What are you crusading against?

13. What would your organization be like if you were leading a movement, rather than a business?

14. If your team were volunteers, rather than employees, what would they be volunteering for?

15. What would we want to achieve if we knew we could not fail?

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