Why a Purpose-Driven Brand Matters

Your purpose is your unique reason for existing at this time, place and space. It is who you are and is aligned with your pocket(s) of genius. You have at least one pocket of genius. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

You can know your specific purpose. It is uniquely tailored to reflect who you are. It is meant to capture your heart and mind for your entire life. That's why purpose is bigger than a dream. It will show you how you can best impact the world. The size of your contribution is based on your level of authentic ambition. Some dream of impacting their communities, others their state, others still their nation, while the most ambitious seek to impact the world. The bigger the ambition and more significant the purpose, the harder, longer and more intense the preparation. This preparation is designed to mold your character so that aligns with your authentic ambition while teaching you how to operate from a place of compassion, empathy and gratitude, not fear, greed, power, and control.

Your purpose is summed up in 1 or possibly two words and has a corresponding sentence to demonstrate the grand challenge you are meant to dedicate your life to solving while revealing who you are to help by solving it. Don’t settle for vague generalities that can be applied to the human race or your specific religious beliefs.

How do I know this to be true? I recently took a leap of faith and discovered my specific purpose is intense ownership. My purpose statement is to reawaken, give permission, and equip women and girls to take back a very intense ownership of their lives. All of my hopes, dreams, creative ideas, the hell I’ve survived and overcome along with the lessons I learned were designed to point me to my purpose of solving intense ownership, just like your hopes, dreams, creative ideas, and your experiences will point to yours. I knew many of the pieces that related to my purpose prior to learning what my purpose is, but I didn’t quite grasp how they worked together.

By investing in myself so that I’m not wasting additional time, energy and money on the wrong things, wrong relationships, and wrong projects, and discovering my purpose, I’ve become more happy, grateful, peaceful, passionate and determined than ever to accomplish solve the multi-faceted challenge of intense ownership and help others do the same.

In the same way that it is so much harder for a professional designer to design their own website than it is to do that same work for others, the same works for discovering your purpose.

“We all need safe people who can help us reframe our fragments into something beautiful.”

Shanelle Roberts

Find someone whom you can trust to help you make sense of the fragments in your life that point you to your purpose, so you can receive confirmation on what your purpose is. It can be life-changing. I know it has been for me.

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You have 0% chance of discovering your brand's true identity without knowing your purpose.

You may have a vague inkling of what your purpose could be. Do you really want to run the risk of not knowing for sure and wasting precious time, energy, and money on a possibility when certainty is available to you?

Your company may have a logo and a color scheme and some thoughts on how to visually position yourself in the marketplace, and some aspirational words and/or phrases to capture what values your company deems important, but true branding runs deeper than aesthetics and aspirational ideals. Branding is at the core of who you are as a person and as an organization. It must capture you at a heart level, not just in your mind. Effective branding is about understanding, embodying, expressing, and owning your unique purpose. It is what helps your company grow its identity capital in the marketplace.

Knowing your purpose is the foundation of branding. What architect doesn’t plan for, include and secure his/her building’s foundation? Only someone who’s looking for short term financial gain. Purpose-driven people create something with the intention that will last beyond their lifetime. They can see beyond themselves and into future generations. Removing purpose from your foundation leaves your business vulnerable and your life with a hole in your heart. Your life and business will lack that anchor knowing your purpose provides to help you delineate what’s important and what’s in alignment with who you are versus what’s not.

When you take the time to identify your purpose, it allows you to better educate your audience about your value. It helps create trust with those who share the same values. Otherwise, it’s like fishing for the loch ness monster at noon with rubber tires. You might snag something, but the likelihood that it is what you were chasing is very slim.

By taking the time and investing in finding out your specific purpose, you are elevating yourself as a leader and raising your brand to an exponential level by distinguishing yourself from the rest of the pack. You make the competition obsolete with your measuring stick now focused on the metrics that matter – continuing your own transformation, tracking the metrics your purpose is meant to serve, and continually strengthening the relationships you have in life and business so that they remain healthy and aligned.

Investing in getting your branding right matters. Research from Forbes shows us that branding impacts businesses in the following ways:

• Consistent brand presentation across all mediums and platforms increases revenue by up to 23%
• 64% of consumers say that shared values create a trusted relationship with a brand
• 48% of consumers expect brands to know them and help them discover new products and services that fit their needs

At Smart Chic Labs, we recommend using your purpose to shape how you craft your brand’s assets and messaging. It allows your company to better position itself in the marketplace and help you attract more like-minded clients. 

Not all clients are the right clients. Knowing your purpose allows you to better screen the people you work with, do business with and are in relationship with. Sharing your purpose gives you credibility and demonstrates your unique value when you speak to the issues affecting potential clients. By educating them with tailored content and social proof on how your company’s solution(s) can meet their needs, help them achieve their wants, and allow them to fulfill their desires, you are crafting a compelling case of why doing business with you versus other companies in your space will yield the best outcome for them. This is important because according to Lucidpress, 45% of consumers will unfollow a brand on social media if their platform is dominated by self-promotion. Purpose-driven branding helps keep the voice of your brand authentic. It focuses on serving your clients by finding creative solutions that will bring extraordinary outcomes for your clients which turns them into loyal fans of your company.

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If you can only do one thing for yourself in life and business, find your purpose. Once you discover it, keep several things in mind as you look to either brand or rebrand yourself or your company. When branding your business, you should be looking for a design firm that will be able to translate your purpose word(s) and statement into an identity that is simple & timeless. Your logomark should be something that is unique and will scale well. That means it should look good on a tab in a browser and on the side of a building.

Be very careful about how you choose to use design trends in your brand. While skeuomorphism was a big design trend driven by Apple and the launch of the iPhone, companies who used that trend to help define their company’s identity were left feeling dated and out of place almost overnight when flat design replaced skeuomorphism on our computers and mobile devices.

When rebranding your company, it is imperative to articulate why the rebrand is necessary. There are good and bad reasons to rebrand a company. Rebranding a company shouldn’t focus on following the design trends of the day. You may take some inspiration from what’s trending, but I wouldn’t recommend a full rebrand as a response to what is popular at the moment. The best and most iconic brands in the world leverage that inspiration, but don’t necessarily cave to the pressure of being trendy. Apple, Disney, Chanel are great examples of this. Their core brand assets haven’t changed in decades, but they adapt their look and feel that accompanies their core brand assets as needed to keep up with the ever-changing technology landscape.

Many companies - large and small - feel pressured to adopt the latest trends in order to feel relevant to their audience. Some companies – like Starbucks - have done a great job of continuing to update their brand in a way that feels authentic to their company. Other companies - like Burberry, who has been around since 1856 - have lost some of their uniqueness and elegance that you would expect from the luxury clothing retailer known for being a trendsetter when they recently rebranded their company. Their rebrand feels more like they’ve succumbed to the pressure of the digital age’s design trends regarding the prominence of using sans serif fonts since sans serif fonts are considered easier to read on digital devices. The latest brand update feels much more masculine and sterile. Their prior branding efforts felt more timeless, elegant and gender-neutral. While I’ve admired their past work with women’s trench coats, this new direction does not inspire me to shop with them.

Hiring the wrong design firm or consultant could lead you with less than desirable results, which impacts how your customers will view your company. This will lead to more time and money to invest to fix your brand. If you’re looking for something quick and cheap, there are a plethora of brand &/or logo designers just waiting to trade time for money.

John Ruskin said, “It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”

At times, companies – especially startups and small businesses - struggle to determine the value of their brand in relation to their business. They assume their $99 logo and the colors they chose online one weekend is good enough because they found an article or two online telling them that those were the most important parts of their brand. Organizations can treat their brand as an afterthought or as a task to be addressed once they’ve proven their product or service is viable in the marketplace, forgetting that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Most of the time, a company's leaders haven’t clearly articulated their competitive advantage and the unique value they offer to their team. These leaders lack insight into their own purpose which would help them determine if their current venture is in alignment with who they are and if their team members are also aligned. Imagine what that does to the relationship with the offshore design freelancer or friend’s cousin of the CEO whose studying graphic design and wants to get some practical experience. It reduces brand design to a guessing game based solely on personal preference, which can leave both parties frustrated with the process and results.

It’s not only small companies who fail at branding. Some high-profile companies that tried to rebrand and failed to deliver while spending 100s of millions of dollars are BP, GAP, Sci-fi Channel, Pepsi, Cardiff City Football Club, London Olympics logo. Some were forced to revert back to their original branding – cough GAP – while others held on tightly to their rebranding choice in spite of the negative press.

In order to avoid the pitfalls mentioned above, here is what I recommend you do in order to take back ownership of your brand. Find the right partners who can help you. At Smart Chic Labs, we crafted a seven-step process designed to find your purpose and bring that purpose to life for yourself and your company.

With Smart Chic Labs, you will:

a. Find your unique identity

b. Clarify your dream

c. Articulate your value

d. Co-create in a brandstorm

e. Assemble your brand design package

f. Handcraft your purpose-driven brand with us

g. Enjoy your shiny, new brand assets

so you can reach a level of success your ambition and character allows while fully expressing your purpose.

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Why am I writing so much about the importance of purpose? I’ve seen the transformational value of having discovered it in my own life. Finding my purpose is one of the top 3 experiences of my life. I will never forget it. I am so grateful for the chance to know it so that my remaining time on earth is fueled with focusing on what’s most important, not just on what circumstances deem urgent. Discovering my purpose has inspired me to help others find theirs so that together we can make the world a better place.

If you would like to know more about discovering your own unique purpose and how purpose-driven branding can transform your life and business, please connect with me on LinkedIn and we can set up a time to book a complimentary discovery session to find out if our brand intensive is the right fit for you and your company.

I hope this article provided you with some valuable insights and food for thought. I’d love to hear what resonated with you in this article.

Own your dream.

Shanelle