Module 3: Go-To-Market

Brand Purpose (Vision 2030)

Growth Strategy Friday
Workshop #10

"There is no favorable wind for the one who does not know where they are going."

As this statement rightly points out, most of our organizations have their Mission, Vision, and Values. But how well are these aligned with creating value for our customers and generating revenue?

Various studies and brand purpose indices indicate that organizations need to be guided by what makes them unique, by their driving force, the pursuit of excellence, which sometimes gets lost or diluted along the way. But how can they reconnect? How can they turn this into the driving force of the business?

In this session, we analyze various Brand Purposes that are relevant and can serve as inspiration:

  • Dulux: From selling paint to adding color to people’s lives.
  • IBM: From manufacturing computers to making the world work better.
  • Starbucks: From selling coffee to creating human connections.
  • Amazon: From an online store to inviting exploration and discovery.

 

The process of aligning senior management on strategic issues such as the vision, soul, and DNA of the business is often unclear to improve performance and relevance. Therefore, we will delve into developing a clear and powerful Brand Purpose for our organizations by extracting the soul of our brands with one of the most interesting methodologies created by the Soul Institute.

On this occasion, we use the Corporate Soul board (Attached in the Deck below) which allows us to extract and amplify what makes the business unique? What is its essence?, its soul… it allows us to discover the driving force of our businesses, not only to make money, but also to contribute to providing more value to our customers, helping the growth of our collaborators and communities.

Once the Brand Purpose was aligned, the next step was for executives to define their Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). By exploring Chat GPT, hundreds emerged, our top 5 were these:

  • GE: Innovating solutions for the world’s biggest problems.
  • Airbnb: Creating a world where everyone feels at home.
  • PayPal: Democratizing financial services to empower everyone to thrive.
  • Patagonia: Building the best product that causes the least environmental damage.
  • Unilever: Doubling the size of the business while halving its environmental impact.
 

We didn’t see any where it said “having the best-paid collaborators on the planet” or “being the ones who pay their suppliers immediately” or “being the largest employer of seniors,” so there is room for our businesses if we want to innovate.

  • Lastly, regarding the event of last Friday, July 19, the Microsoft outage was attributed to a failure in CrowdStrike’s quality control system. How coherent are BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) in this particular case? Microsoft’s BHAG is to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” It highlights that dominant companies can generate staggering economic damage that disrupts and halts global operations. This is only a prelude to what could happen with large-scale cyberattacks anticipated for the 2030s, which is why we must have our Digital Contingency Plans ready. This is another major topic we could potentially address in future trainings.

Download methodology and case studies deck

The following Friday we will continue with Module 4: Go-To-Market, Market Potential & Market Size, where we will explore how these estimations are made, since even in countries or international organizations, measurements do not coincide in such a way that we can have greater visibility when executing growth strategies.

The “Growth Strategy Fridays” are Onlive workshops lasting 2 hours each week from 8:00 to 10:00 AM Chicago/CDMX time. These sessions cover corporate growth strategy topics through a program that reviews methodologies and Harvard case studies of the world’s most iconic brands. In each module, I introduce one of the executives from these brands, with whom I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate, so attendees can directly ask them questions and network with them.