Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Corporate

How to deliver your Purpose: a practical framework

Businesses of all sizes have latched onto the idea of having a Purpose. The concept of working towards something that takes you beyond profits to a wider benefit for society fits nicely with current trends among the chattering classes and, if we’re honest, nicely feeds executives’ egos.

There is no shortage of advice about why you should have a Purpose. However, there is also no shortage of critics waiting in the wings to decry your efforts if you fall short. Conscious of this, I’ve been working on a framework that helps plan chart a path from Purpose to practical day-to-day activities.

POST

This framework is simple. Its success, however, depends on the clarity with which you define each phase of it.

Purpose
Objective
Strategy
Tactics

Based on the OST framework popularised by Alastair Campbell. POST places Purpose at the start. It assumes that Purpose is defined for an organisation by those who run it. This framework falls apart if different departments and teams are working towards different ends.

We then step down to your team’s Objective. This tends to be something agreed with or approved by senior executives. Your Objective should align with your Purpose, but it should not be abstract; it must be practical.

Then we move down to Strategy. Now, here it gets tricky. At this point in planning, particularly in large organisations, it’s not uncommon to find multiple strategies within teams. It’s a recipe for disaster. A team should have a single Strategy. For comms teams, that means a single communications strategy. You don’t need different strategies for media relations, digital, etc. Where this happens, it’s normally a sign of silos or teams not really understanding their Objective. The only caveat to this is internal communications which can make a pretty strong case for having its own strategy, probably one that aligns closely with HR’s.

Now we get to Tactics. This really should be the easy bit. What are you going to do? It needs to deliver your Strategy, which delivers your Objective, all of which needs to be aligned with your Purpose.

The key to successful delivery is getting this framework, or similar thinking, widely adopted within your organisation. If there isn’t a clear, simple way to link what you do everyday to your organisation’s Purpose, you will never deliver it.

Simple or meaningless?

Social media is awash with quotes. Some accurate, some less so. Some deeply cherished by those who post them, others seemingly churned out of some quote sausage machine. Many love them, many loathe them. However, what is not in doubt is that they elicit engagement.

People are drawn to simple, clear messages. If those messages bring simplicity to complex issues, well then everything’s rosy. But there comes a point when something is made too simple. When so much context is removed that the message is meaningless.

Design

There is an excellent documentary series on Netflix called Abstract. In the first episode, Christoph Niemann, who designs covers for the New Yorker, discusses abstract design. He uses the example of communicating love. Everyone uses a heart shape. From a design perspective, the heart shape is the most abstract a drawing of a heart can be before it becomes meaningless. It doesn’t have the complexity of ventricles and arteries, but it is definitely a heart. If you made it more abstract, by turning it into a square or a circle, it would go from simplified to meaningless.

Language

Let’s apply the same thinking to language. A popular refrain in communications at the moment is that there is no longer B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business), there is only business to human. The idea being that in the age of social media and the blurring of work and personal lives, we need to communicate to people as people. It is superficially appealing, but it is meaningless.

B2B is a useful simplification. It tells us, at a very top level, that we’re communicating to people who are making decisions for businesses. Similarly, B2C tells us we’re communicating to an audience who are making decisions as consumers.

Business to human, tells us we’re communicating to people. What’s helpful about that? It is shorn of useful context. It is the equivalent of communicating love using a square.

Twitter ads, disclaimers and highly regulated industries

Twitter is a tricky medium for advertising but its user base is valuable.

On average, Twitter’s UK user base is better educated and higher earning than the population as a whole. That makes it a bit of a prize for some products, including some which are highly regulated like financial services.

Twitter users are also an opinionated bunch who often angrily coalesce around an issue and their regular flare ups become fodder for news outlets. So there’s a notable risk when advertising to them.

A look at financial services

So how to advertise Twitter users? Let’s take a look at some ads by financial services firms to see the approaches different firms are taking.

Hargreaves Lansdown, which provides investment services to retail investors, has been running ads that link to information about the funds that are most popular with its ISA clients. They have a clear disclaimer that there is a, “risk of loss.”

Meanwhile, UBS bank’s digital wealth management offering, called SmartWealth, is running ads with a clear call to action telling investors to, “place your money into UBS SmartWealth.” They too run a disclaimer that informs us, “Capital @ risk.” The disclaimer is certainly less blunt Hargreaves Lansdown’s but is just a clear. Interestingly, UBS SmartWealth only uses Twitter to run ads. It has not tweeted in an effort to build an audience or a conversation.

Standard Life Invest, use no disclaimer in this Twitter ad. The account, which in its description says it’s only for investment professionals, instead takes an approach whereby you click through to a screen which requires you to confirm you are an investment professional before proceeding to take you through to the advertised content. This approach certainly frees up characters in tweets and also allows for longer and more complete disclaimers. A drawback to this approach is that the bounce rate is likely to be quite high.

Brand building

BNY Mellon take the approach of using Twitter as a brand building tool. A simple ad, linking to a nicely designed (if a little too self-reverential) quiz that seeks to place BNY Mellon as an innovator.

What should we take from this array of approaches? Well, firstly, on Twitter there’s no standard way to deploy the disclaimers highly regulated industries need to use. That’s probably a good thing from a creative perspective. Certainly, in the examples cited, when sharing information that might be seen as financial advice, the disclaimers are delivered before you get to the content.

Another point to note is that targeting is poor. One of the ads is for investment professionals (and I’m a long way from being one) and two others promote wealth and investment management brands which provide services that, to put it politely, I’m probably not the target customer. That’s not to say those managing the accounts have chosen the wrong audience targeting. We all know that Twitter’s targeting can be a little off sometimes.

Finally, we should note that Twitter, in its thus far fruitless drive to turn a decent profit, is constantly developing new ad products. Financial services and other highly regulated industries tend to be cautious spenders but also big spenders. It’s likely Twitter will keep launching new ad products and tweaking its services to capture this lucrative market.

Who’s controlling the social media treadmill?

The ideas that attention spans are shorter and audiences operate in discrete silos are received wisdom. As a result, companies produce and repurpose more content than they previously did. All this happens under the presumption that consumer habits are changing and firms need to keep up.

Last week, Instagram rolled out polls. The move, mimicking functionality from Twitter, enables users to run polls in their Instagram Stories. It’s an incremental and unsurprising move. And yet, when you note the vast array of other changes (like trialling swipe up links for some accounts) that are only available for those publishing Stories, it’s obvious that it’s all designed to encourage more, and more frequent, posting.

Meanwhile, posts published on Google’s My Business, which helps firms take control of how they appear in search, only appear in search results for a week after they are published. After that, they expire. Again, this is a move to encourage more frequent publishing.

Over on Facebook, for those seeking to maximise their organic reach the consensus seems to be the consistency with which you post (alongside how well received your posts are) has a dramatic impact on reach.

So, alongside the received wisdom that consumers want targeted, bite-sized content, we have social networks increasingly shrinking the lifespan of content.

Consumers and platforms are turning up the speed of the treadmill. Companies are the ones doing the running, but they’re not in control.

No one cares about your diamond

In 1849 the Treaty of Lahore was signed. A 10 year old boy, who also happened to be the Maharaja of Punjab, lost his kingdom to the British government and a very special diamond to Queen Victoria.

The then Governor General of India, Earl Dalhousie, played a central role in obtaining the diamond. Once the treaty had been signed, he wrote to a friend declaring, “I had now caught my hare.”

Dalhousie believed, having captured one of the East’s most venerated gems, he was going to be a hero of the Empire.

When news spread of the Kohinoor’s arrival in Southampton, Britain was gripped. People clamoured to see what was, at the time, the largest diamond in world.

The first opportunity for people to see it was at the Great Exhibition. There was a great rush, but the crowds left disappointed. Newspapers reported that it didn’t really sparkle. It was overrated.

A lot work went into fixing Dalhousie’s gift.

First, the organisers cut off all natural light to the diamond and shone lamps upon it at specific angles. Reports came back that although its lustre was much improved, visiting the Kohinoor was a hot, close and arduous visit. Some viewers fainted.

It was then decided that the diamond be cut. In the process it lost almost half of its size, but it shone like never before. At last the diamond was fulfilled its promise. It went on to be set into jewellery and has sat in the crowns of three different queens.

What did Dalhousie get wrong? He misunderstood his market. In the East, the fashion with precious gems was to leave them as natural as possible so you could appreciate the beauty of nature’s creation. In the west cutting and polishing gems to bring out their lustre was the thing. It was about getting the most sparkle.

Dalhousie was mesmerised by his product, but he ignored the audience. They weren’t impressed. It’s an instructive lesson: he failed to understand his market so even the world’s largest diamond did not impress.