The inspiration for our studio Whistlejacket really dawned when I was visiting a client at my previous agency, for a briefing session on their brand. They were a well-known clothes retailer based on the South Coast and their office was fantastic - a living embodiment of their brand and all they believed in. I can't say too much or else you'll guess who they are but trust me, it was brilliantly done. Wandering from reception to the room where we were meeting was probably all the briefing we needed.
The room where we met had held an internal, marketing team brainstorm the day before, and the outputs from that session were all on the wall. We were to be briefed on what they had decided. There was (from memory) a mission, a vision statement, a brand narrative, several values, personality and character, a brand proposition, imagery cues, goals and several other things I can't remember. It emerged that while the final outputs had been agreed the day before - this was in fact the result of several months' work from a myriad of teams, stakeholders and company influencers.
We worked our way across the room - it took a while - and then I asked what I always ask. "OK - well how can we help?". The client looked gloomy. "Well", she said, "everyone agrees with all this. Or at least everyone can find something in here they agree with. But what do we DO with it now? We're never going to do anything that ticks all these boxes"
And so the idea was born: to start an agency built to untangle the knottiest of challenges by developing simple, single-minded, incredibly easy to remember unbreakable ‘threads of steel’. Strip the complexity out. From Day One, we called these ideas ‘Purpose’. (You know, before it was cool and everyone pinched it).
I was reminded of this session and how we got going the other day by an excellent Linked In post from Tom Morton when he postulated that many of the big tech companies are now mission focussed. As Tom puts it (bold type is my emphasis)(English spellings are mine because Tom has been over the water TOO LONG):
"Like purpose, mission is about positive impact. But it’s more explicitly about positive impact of the core business, and a commitment to build change: a different level of realness and intensity. Google Deep Mind’s goal is to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity. So they use AI to predict protein folds in all 200 million strands of human DNA, then gave it away to accelerate drug discovery. Virgin says we want to democratise space travel, so we’ll need to develop our own reusable spacecraft. So they did. And a spaceport for launching them".
Now, I was on this like a flash. To me, Tom is using the work Mission like I use the word Purpose. Purpose isn't Corporate Social Responsibility or Sustainability or indeed 'Doing Good'. It's about focussing on a single change that you'd like to see in the world and making it happen.
Tom was ready for me. He agrees Purpose isn't CSR. But pondered whether purpose was more about direction , about vision, about leadership, whereas Mission was more about team, about action, about delivery. And I have spent half a day wondering if he's right. He's certainly got a valid point.
But I've spent longer thinking about something else. That actually I could have a good ponder about the nuance of mission vs purpose, vision vs delivery, what vs why. And there's probably value in that. But I'm thinking back to that hot room some years ago with a wall full of strategy and a despairing marketing director wondering what to do with all.
And maybe it doesn't matter too much if my focus is the mission or the purpose or the vision or the why. Maybe it's just important to have a focus at all.
