Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
My name is Thomas Kolster.
I am the CEO and founder of
the Goodvertising Agency,
and I have been in the purpose
space for more than two decades.
Today what I will share with
you is really what I see
as two quite different ways
of finding your purpose.
I'll share those two
methodologies with you,
and then it's up to you to decide
which one makes the best fit for you.
0:36
Let me put purpose into
a historic perspective
before we go into the two
different approaches.
The purpose discussion
became much more dominant
on the back of the
financial crisis in 2007.
This was when more companies
started to look for purpose,
to engage people around something bigger
than just profit, profit, profit.
I think people, at the time,
saw how brands had failed,
failed them,
and obviously, brands were trying
to engage people and regain trust.
This was also around the time that my
first book, Goodvertising, came out.
In that book, I had
a thesis around how,
if you were doing good for
people and the planet,
it was also good for the
brand and bottom line.
At that time,
there was a shift in how
you started portraying
and differentiating products.
In the beginning,
it was very much around
what I would call USP,
so unique selling proposition.
This was at a time when it
made sense, for example,
to talk about a toothpaste that
might make your teeth more white,
or which might be a
more cheap option.
That would be your unique
selling proposition.
Then what we started seeing was
emotional selling propositions,
when we started to make brands give
the more human characteristics,
such as, for example, a BMW,
which was more of a
masculine driving machine,
so you'd feel more like
a real man at that time.
When purpose suddenly started
entering the discussion,
it was certainly a different way
of positioning your company.
One of the people who really
popularized the concept
around purpose was Simon Sinek,
in his book Start With Why.
In that book,
he really began to talk about
the soul of the business,
and why you weren't buying
the product or the service,
but why the company
was doing it.
It was much more around
the soul of the company,
the values that were, in
fact, differentiating.
