Branding from the heart: purpose, mission & vision
A step-by-step process to define a brand strategy - a useful tool for individuals, businesses and organisations
Knowing your brand at a foundational level like we worked through in Worksheet 1 is invaluable, so that you can articulate the market challenge, target audience and your brand’s proposed solution. Think of it as marketing 101 for the brand challenge ahead.
Now comes brand strategy – getting to the core of what gives your brand its heart. It’s a chance to articulate your brand’s own spin on the market problem, and the unique way that you offer a solution.
We can do that through finding your brand’s:
Purpose: this describes why you do this work. Done well, it motivates and inspires action.
Mission: this defines how you will deliver on your purpose; the specific levers or approach you will use.
Vision: describes the ultimate desired endpoint when the problem has been solved - where purpose and mission collide.
Brand Purpose
Start with some questions:
What situation or challenge is present, and what group of people are impacted?
How does your brand help to solve this challenge?
Let’s use a flying doctor service as an example.* They may answer something like this:
“In Australia, it can be difficult for rural and remote people to access medical care due to their location. The flying doctor service provides essential medical services to people in these areas.”
* N.B. Not affiliated with any flying doctor service! It simply makes a useful brand challenge that nearly everyone can understand.
Let’s think back to the first three questions in our pre-game warmup:
“What pressing challenge or problem exists in the world?”
“For whom is it a challenge or problem?”; and
“How can the brand solve this challenge?”
Having the answers to these questions will be useful in creating your brand purpose.
The challenge is to keep your answer short and sharp; not one word too long. Omit any information at this stage about how you’ll solve the problem, or what niche you are going to pursue; there will be a better time to get to that down the track.
What we’re really looking for is a quick picture of what the challenge is, who it impacts, and how you can help.
Brand Mission
Start with this:
What specific actions or paths has your brand chosen as a method for solving the challenge?
Ideally, your answer should specify around 2-3 specific pathways that your brand is focusing on to deliver a solution to the challenge.
Again, the flying doctor service answer may read something like this:
“The flying doctor service provides acute medical care via aircraft and telehealth to people who live in remote areas, who otherwise do not have access to this care when they need it most.”
This may seem really obvious; how else would a flying doctor service choose to provide medical care to people in remote areas?
But remember, they have multiple levers available to them: they could choose to double down on telehealth, or education by way of teaching people how to administer their own medical care. They could invest in a fleet of high-speed ambulances, or jetpacks (technology is pending on that one). Absurd, yes! But you get the drift. A business or brand has many levers available to solve any one problem and your brand mission tells your audience the specific actions that you have chosen to focus on.
Brand Vision
The final piece in this trilogy! Answer:
What does the world look like when this challenge has been addressed, and what are people free to do?
What’s the ‘perfect world’ you’re trying to create? The flying doctor service could answer this question like this:
“People in rural and remote areas of Australia can be worry-free, knowing they and their families can access healthcare when they need it most.”
For some brands, they may be out of a job if their vision is realised, and that’s ok! Imagine if the Cancer Council finally cured cancer and they no longer needed to raise funds for research, or to educate people on how to avoid or manage cancer? Happy days. I’m sure their board and CEO would feel good about moving on to other challenges.
For others, such as the flying doctor service, their vision will probably never be realised. Australia is geographically such a large place, that the reality is people will always likely require such a service to manage acute medical conditions. And jetpacks probably won’t come to fruition anytime soon. That’s ok too.
Let’s pull it all together
Now, what do we do with the answers to these questions? Here’s where some wordsmithing is required. See if you can get a few people in on the challenge and workshop the answers together. And remember — economy of words over descriptive explanations will always be more powerful.
To work out your brand purpose, finesse the answers to the questions from earlier into an elegant phrase.
What situation or challenge is present, and what group of people are impacted?
How does your brand help to solve this challenge?
The template below offers a good starting point.
Likewise for your Brand Mission:
What specific actions or paths has your brand chosen as a method for solving the challenge?
And finally, to work out your brand vision, finesse the answer to:
What does the world look like when this challenge has been addressed, and what are people free to do?
What comes next?
Voila! Hopefully you’ve emerged on the other side of this with some meaningful explanation of what makes up the heartbeat of your brand.
The process of thinking deeply about and discussing these answers will create an opportunity for alignment throughout your team (even if team = only you!). You’ll have answers ready when you need to explain what you do, how you do it, and why, leading to greater clarity and understanding within your audience.
You will also have a unique profile of your brand’s strategy – the exact blueprint for how you are going to solve a problem. This has the potential to differentiate the business from others who do work in the same space, and positions you perfectly to start building your brand identity. More for that in another post!
Did you enjoy this post? Download the free worksheet to work out your brand purpose, mission and vision.
Free worksheet
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