Purpose-Driven Community over Seller-Buyer Relationships – A New Era Has Started

The backbone of an organization is its people. During my first internship I told the unit’s manager that our employees’ satisfaction is directly linked to our customers’ satisfaction. With that directly linked to our revenues in the end. Why? – We all know the increasing retention rate leads to an increasing turn over. Fair enough. This means as happy as the employees are as happy the customers are as finically healthy the organization is. 

If people know what they are doing it for, they are committed, engaged and driven. Have you ever listened to somebody who really loves what he/she does, and you could feel their passion? This is how impact is made and this is what a smart business leader wants from his employees. However, this is an intrinsic motivation, which is not being taught, trained or supported by traditional business structures. If we look at brand building, every aspect is doing its part and impacting the overall positioning of an organization. Thus, when you create an environment where people are able to flourish, live passion and being able to discover purpose; you make your employees one of the biggest gifts in life looking at the level of happiness and fulfilment as well as the health of the organization. I call this a sustainable approach since it is touching the biggest challenges when we talk about employee experience; it results in commitment, passion, a high degree of engagement and loyalty. This drives organizations in development and innovation forward. Happy employees who are discovering their personal why are becoming very connected to themselves and this carries an authentic message to the outside world, which inspires and impacts and above all builds real and authentic relationships. 

Employees in that mode treat their customers as friends and build on that. Furthermore, if you grow on personal level, you see how things are connected and how we can grow and move forward together as individuals and with that with organizations. Co-creation, collaboration empower a team spirit, which goes away from a classical seller-buyer relationship. In sharing information, experiences and knowledge and being transparent, the movements go quicker and change is made faster due to a 360 degrees feedback loop and approach. 

As we grow on personal level and get more connected to ourselves, we discover our most inconvenient truth and find out where we want to make impact in a bigger picture and where we want to contribute. We turn our most inconvenient truth into purpose, and get connected with people sharing this purpose to take this challenge on together. We create a community with a shared purpose and aligned values. This willpower results in unbeatable energy; when you impact something bigger and you are able to make a positive change together, this feeling will last. You are not being recognized by a bonus payment or a company car but you are recognized by people and how you made them feel. 

To put into practice with the example of a consultancy company; in the bottom of the pyramid the organization is able to provide excellence service experience with the service their provide. A good service is something that is (depending on the industry) a basic expectation of a customer as Chip Conley already mentioned in his Relationship Truth Pyramid. In his pyramid, the next level is about meeting the desired need of the customers. You do this, in actively involving your customer. Co-create, collaborate and make him/she part of the team. The relationship changes drastically from a seller-buyer relationship to a team member with the insights of what the customer really needs and desires. It is practically the HOW you execute the WHAT, which is the basic consultancy service, which can be assessed easily somewhere else as well. 

Human beings seek for meaning, we have known this since studying Maslow and ourselves. If you think of a consultancy company and the higher purpose of this group of people is for example “Making work more fun”, they could start bringing people together to learn from each other and share experiences to change the industry from inside out. In practice, this could be organizing events, building a digital platform to make knowledge access easier and so on. This feeling of working with a group of people on something with the potential to make a big impact and changing the world to the better, is long-lasting because it is moving people. I read in an article about Patagonia that lasting brands move people, not just goods. This is exactly what this is about. This is a new definition of brand building and above all a dying era of traditional marketing has started. 

Thus, let’s level up, create more meaningful work places and with that a more meaningful life and a better world and build sustainable, long-lasting brands!