Put Purpose to Work for You.
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Have you hit a growth ceiling and believe a purpose-driven brand is the answer?
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Does your company purpose attract like-minded customers and employees?
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Does your messaging convey what truly sets you apart?
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Are you struggling to build a strategic, purpose-led marketing plan?
Our Ovrflo process is how we move your company from simply stating your purpose to truly activating it in every facet of your organization. This proven, purpose activation journey has been developed through years of innovation and refinement, overcoming the obstacles that lead to the purpose paradox. We’re delivering transformation and value for our clients, and we can make it happen for you as well.
Review each section below to learn what happens in each step.
01. Identify Your Purpose
Messaging Matters
Identifying your company purpose begins with uncovering, distilling, and documenting how you make lives better through your company. These important words are the framework required to build consistent meaningful conversations in your culture and marketing.
This step is where many companies shoot their purpose activation journey in the foot without even knowing it. It may seem like a simple task, and you may think what you came up with is fine, but it often falls flat with your employees. When identifying and documenting the company purpose without seasoned experts involved, the purpose statement typically lacks the emotion, uniqueness, creativity, and focus needed to activate it at all levels of your organization.
There are four key messaging components that we develop to ensure that your purpose is compelling to all of your audiences: Core Problem, Core Belief, Core Purpose, and Tagline.
Core Problem
A core problem is an obstacle or challenge that those your company serves or cares about are facing in the world today. It acts as a focal point, bringing individuals together and inspiring them to take action to correct the problem. We often integrate statistics to help reveal how universally impactful the core problem is.
Core Belief
A core belief is a deeply held belief that informs how people see themselves and the world. It has a large influence on people’s perceptions and decision-making. Your core belief conveys your company’s stand to fight against the core problem.
Core Purpose
Your core purpose is your specific promise to make an impact in the lives of others. Because the core problem exists, and because we believe it must be corrected, our purpose is the action we must take to correct the problem. It’s WHY your organization exists, and the wording typically does NOT specifically mention your products and services. It should be at a higher level than that.
Primary Tagline
A good tagline will have dual meanings. It combines the WHAT and WHY to become the conversation starter in every channel, from your marketing to your culture. It’s the short, purpose-powered phrase that becomes the representation of your purpose and impact in and through your company.
CLIENT EXAMPLE
Mazon has provided short-term loans to small businesses for more than 45 years. Review the compelling messaging we created to build their purpose-led brand upon.
CORE PROBLEM
2000 businesses fail every day due to lack of cash.
CORE BELIEF
We believe every business deserves the opportunity to prosper.
CORE PURPOSE
We help businesses keep their dream alive, so that more people thrive.
PRIMARY TAGLINE
Funding you forward™
02. Vision Alignment & Metrics
A clear and inspiring vision brings people together and focuses the entire team to run towards it. Your vision should describe the future state where your purpose is fulfilled in the lives of your employees, customers, and community. It should be something you can see a picture of. That’s a vision!
We recommend a vision document that outlines your purpose, values, financials, ideal customer profile, and how you will impact people through your business. It should line out those outcomes over a short-term and long-term view (typically 90 days, 1 year, 3 years, and 10 years).
Purpose Metrics
We recommend creating metrics in your vision documentation that measure all the goals, including what we call Purpose Metrics. If we write your purpose messaging well in Step 1 above, then we simply need to flesh out how we’re going to measure it to ensure that it gets done.
Since your purpose includes how you impact your customers, employees, and the community, we suggest creating purpose metrics for all three audiences. Often, our clients find a ministry or other nonprofit that aligns with their company purpose that they can donate to and/or volunteer at.
- How could you better integrate your purpose into your vision?
- How could you measure it?
Purpose Metrics Example
Since 1995, Traveling Coaches has been a pioneer in talent development and organizational change within the legal industry. Their company purpose is to empower and educate individuals, creating a learning culture that elevates the entire organization.
CLIENT IMPACT
- # client employees served
- # software subscriber users
TEAM IMPACT
- # of employees elevated (internal promotions)
- # hours served in volunteer activities
GLOBAL IMPACT
- # girls impacted through donations to Strong Women Strong World (nonprofit partner)
- # people impacted through volunteer activities
03. Operations Integration
If your purpose is truly activated, then it will impact how you deliver your products and services.
Your passion for solving your core problem will compel you to deliver your products and services in a specific way. Your belief will drive that behavior. You’ll be willing to invest in doing things differently to make things better for your customers, and you won’t be willing to cut corners just to save a buck. From employees to customers, that type of purpose will attract people who believe what you believe and want to help you achieve it.
Chipotle® is a good example of that type of purpose. They believe in creating “Food with Integrity.” That purpose changes how they operate. They believe food should always be fresh, and that means there are no freezers in their kitchens. That means they only source local, organic produce. Their choices to live that purpose and belief lead to a more expensive way to do things, but it’s worth it to them.
How does your purpose change how you deliver your products & services?
04. Brand Assets & Application
Your messaging and creative assets are the visual representation of your purpose.
Your audience should feel your purpose in every brand touchpoint. From your logo and imagery to your typography and color palette, it all should form a cohesive, beautifully designed, professional brand experience that draws people in and inspires engagement.
To create this kind of brand experience, our creative team explores how to visualize the purpose messaging we established in step 1. Let’s look at an example of a transformational, purpose-powered rebrand.
Client Example
Clements Fluids is a multi-generational, family-owned, faith-based company providing custom fluids to the oil and gas industry. They chose AM to help them connect their WHAT to their WHY, aiming to infuse meaningful purpose and impact in every facet of their growing business.
The leadership at Clements Fluids already had a strong desire to have a purposeful impact on their customers and employees. This website image shows an example of their brand elements before OVRFLO. It mentions purpose, but it lacked clarity and emotion. They needed branding and messaging that reflected their unique vision and purpose to help it come alive in their culture.
BEFORE Ovrflo:
Unearthing & Unleashing Potential
As we took Clements Fluids through our Ovrflo process, we identified their purpose and wrote messaging that captured it perfectly.
Core Purpose: Clements Fluids exists to unearth and unleash the God-given potential in every well and every person we encounter.
Primary Tagline: Unearth your potential
“Unearth” was the perfect dual-meaning word that connected their WHAT (helping oil wells produce resources out of the ground) and their WHY (helping people unleash the God-given potential within them).
From the bold typography and gritty textures to the vibrant color palette, the new brand is more personal, unique, and compelling.
AFTER Ovrflo:
After Step 4 is complete, the foundation is in place to begin implementing your purpose into your culture and marketing.
05. Culture System Implementation
Toxic work cultures destroy the potential of what your organization is capable of. Your culture needs to be healthy to activate your purpose.
Conversations create culture
Culture is created one meaningful conversation at a time. From 1-on-1s with a Supervisor to company-wide communication, every conversation counts in building an authentic, purpose-powered culture. Through our Ovrflo Culture System, we implement intentional, scalable, purpose-led conversations at every level of your company.
- Is your hiring process attracting applicants that align with your purpose and values?
- Is your onboarding process infusing meaningful conversations and content about what matters most to your culture?
- Do you have intentional tools that help your team recognize each other for living out your values?
- Is your company-wide communication a strength or a weakness?
06. Marketing Strategy & Execution
There are two sides to marketing. One side is getting the right people to pay attention to your brand. The other side is having something meaningful to say to them once you have their attention. Choosing the right marketing channels and tactics helps you get the attention of your ideal customers, but purpose-led branding ensures you have something compelling to say that holds their attention, draws them into your story, and creates a connection.
Our marketing approach is to make sure you have both sides working together. Once you commit to starting your sales & marketing conversations with your purpose messaging and brand, your strategy should be about finding the ideal customer whose own purpose aligns with yours.
Purpose-Powered Marketing Funnel
Moving your prospects through your customer journey looks different for every organization. Whether your marketing is B2B or B2C, leading with purpose at every step helps you set yourself apart and ensures you stand out no matter which channels you use.
Choosing the right channels and tactics is critical to speeding up the customer journey. From awareness to purchase and beyond, our marketing strategy process audits your current efforts at all stages to uncover the areas needing the most improvement.
- How much is your purpose leading the conversation in your marketing channels, campaigns, and content?
- Which stage of the marketing funnel are you best at right now?
- Which stage could use the most improvement?
If you’re a B2B company, there’s a growing strategic marketing system to consider called Account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is a quality-over-quantity marketing approach that can help businesses achieve their growth objectives by focusing on their most valuable customers. ABM enables you to stop boiling the ocean and start fishing in a barrel.
