On purpose
One of our clients – Unilever – describe themselves as a purpose-driven business. Their purpose, which is to make sustainable living commonplace, influences every decision they make, every brand they own and every person who works for them.
They have had their fair share of criticism for this claim – and from all sides:
‘If you really were purpose-driven, profit wouldn’t matter…’
‘Putting purpose before profit is irresponsible to shareholders.’
‘How can you claim you have a purpose when so much of the planet is used up in creating your products?’
And you can see where some of these points of view might come from – but everything changes when you consider Unilever’s size. Unilever is seriously huge – this means that their brands have the power to create products at a scale few other organisations can match. Which, in turn, means that they also have almost unequalled power to apply sustainable practices and innovations to the manufacture of the products we buy.
Uncle Pablo have worked with many parts of Unilever - across the world - and it’s true: they really are purpose-driven - as people, as brands and as a business. Every individual at Unilever is encouraged to have their own personal purpose.
Unilever are not the only ones. Nike, Google, UPS, General Electric… all lauded for their purpose-driven approach to their businesses.
Several members of Uncle Pablo have worked with Toyota, a top 20 purpose-driven business, and they tell the same story – serving purpose is a core element of every brief they worked on.
And this got us thinking… 16 of the top 20 purpose-driven brands are billion-dollar brands and the rest turnover significantly more than the likes of Uncle Pablo.
So, how can purpose drive small companies and what's ours?
Cross purposes
Many small companies have a purpose, a reason to exist beyond turning a profit. Many exist solely to fulfil that purpose and operate on a not-for-profit basis: be they small performance spaces dedicated to enabling the arts and entertaining their community or artisan food manufacturers who donate all excess produce to the homeless. Those companies are wonderful – and thank goodness they exist.
Small businesses are often the result of an idea - be that serving the community or doing things differently. Ours is the latter. We don’t make product, we provide a service. A service like the one provided by large digital marketing agencies – but we wanted to do it differently: we wanted to do it happily and fairly.
We’re not suggesting for a moment that large digital agencies are unhappy or unfair places (they’re not, many of us have worked for many of them), but we did have the idea that there’s an even happier and fairer way to do things.
Our idea is two sides of the same coin
Heads: Usually, the better you get at something, the less of it you do. You end up getting promoted and managing a team of people who do what you used to do. What you loved doing. You miss it – and that can make you unhappy..
Tails: When you engage an agency, you engage way more than you need. You get experience, expertise and creativity, sure. You also get offices, ping-pong tables, trainees, board members and all sorts of stuff you don’t really want to pay for, and that’s not always fair.
The people who are part of Uncle Pablo work when and how they want – they are all very experienced, all love what they do, love doing it with people like them and have no desire at all to run teams and go to management meetings for a living.
Our clients pay for our people and nothing else. They pay for the team that is created to answer their brief. That’s all. That’s fair.
How does that go beyond business and make an impact on people’s lives and the world they live in? Well, that’s up to the people who are part of our team – we just make sure that the opportunity for happiness is available, what they do with it us up to them, but we’re fairly sure it brightens their worlds.
Doing work they love, when and how they love doing it makes them really happy – and it’s not unfair to expect that from your working life is it?
So is that our purpose: happy and fair? Maybe it is. Probably needs a snappier line, though.
