HOW PURPOSE DRIVES COMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATION AND EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT
Purpose should impact every aspect of an organization and must be baked into the heart of the core strategy of the business. Purpose-driven organizations are meant to grow faster compared to companies whose purpose is to make money. The companies who focus on purpose in every aspect of business-related decisions outperform their competitors and lead to a greater and long-term profit due to customer loyalty and employee engagement. Moreover, as the spending power of millennials grows every day and they like to spend on social issues and purpose leading ventures, therefore, the companies generate greater revenues.
For lasting success, competitive differentiation and emotional engagement are of the utmost importance. Organizations that usually focus on their financial gains are unable to create a difference in terms of these two factors of competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. An inward approach due to overemphasis on profit eventually leads employees to focus on short-term gains, which in turn leads to little or no innovation, silos build, and mediocrity eventually prevails. The organizations with an outward focus approach involving the betterment of people who actually drive your business, customers eventually yield meaningful competitive differentiation.
The two important factors that spring from the purpose: competitive differentiation and emotional engagement are the linchpins for success. Employees at work, usually try to find meaning in their tasks, and when they find out that the North Star of your business is a customer-driven purpose, it becomes a galvanizing force for the entire organization. Organizations stand out if they successfully frame the purpose around the impact they make on customers. This helps them to actively engage customers and employees alike; they not only become coveted brands and destination employers but also successfully transcend their market to become more than a mere transaction.
The success of greater purpose-driven organizations is measured in terms of their qualitative actionable strategies which enhances the given quantitative results. The purpose being a buzzword is often mishandled and misunderstood, purpose is not just a word to be expressed as a slogan it is meant to be translated into actions to yield required results.
Using Purpose to Drive Competitive Differentiation
Each business organization strategizes to have a competitive edge. The absence of competitive differentiation results in persistent value concessions and diminishing client loyalty, over the long-run revenue and market share also disintegrate. Organizations that get themselves commoditized should take a gander at their sales narrative. By and large, the absence of differentiation is the aftereffect of an internal product pitching focus. Sales and marketing teams pitching features are having the wrong discussion. Differentiation is determined from the customer’s point of view, not the seller’s. On the other side of the coin, the difference can be seen if you infuse purpose in each aspect of business strategy including sales, marketing, and product development stages:
● Sales
A purpose-driven sales team will work towards winning you long-lasting customers for life while helping the clients in providing the best possible solution, not just getting them to buy your product or services, which ultimately buys your business customer’s loyalty. The inverse is additionally evident, spray and pray sellers, who pitch features and benefits get themselves rapidly commoditized. That is the reason sales representatives who accept their actual purpose is to add value to the customer, surpass and outsell salespeople who are focused on targets and quotas alone.
● Marketing
Infusing purpose in the marketing tactics develops a heart-to-heart connection with the customer on the grounds that it is about the customer’s wellbeing. Using the lens of purpose allows the marketers to go deeper, additionally, the messages themselves add value. Marketers, with the financial-earning purpose for simply trying to drive clicks and leads, keep searching for the next luring tagline and the next vehicle. Therefore, the messages begin to sound either benign or desperate.
● Product development
The clarity of purpose also imparts a huge impact on product development, as it prompts product developers to focus on customer impact. The absence of purpose-driven strategies in the product development phase leaves the product teams floundering, and often leads to no differentiation from the competitor’s products as teams simply follow the market trends. If you are a business that is trying to hatch a scheme to simply make money, then it’s worth nothing. Your business must involve the purpose and passion to drive improvement to someone’s life or business produces the best innovation.
Using Purpose to Drive Emotional Engagement
The absence of purpose ultimately leads to the downfall of morale, productivity, and increases turnover. The formula for developing strong engagement at work is “a clear purpose”. According to research, employees who derive meaning and significance from their work were 3 times more likely to stay with their organizations as compared to the workplaces aiming to get financial gains only. These employees were also reported to be 1.7 times satisfied with their purpose-driven jobs and were 1.4 times more engaged at work as compared to the jobs with a lack of purpose.It turns out that employees are vastly more satisfied and productive when four of their core needs are met:
● Physical
Employees need continuous opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work.
● Emotional
Employees feel the need to be valued and appreciated for their contributions to actively work.
● Mental
Employees want the opportunities to focus in a fully-submerged way on their most important tasks and define their timeline and location to get their work done properly.
● Spiritual
Employees need spiritual content by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.
Purpose not only drives engagement but also satisfies the above-mentioned factors that help in increasing retention. Companies nowadays must acknowledge the increasing emphasis on purpose in today’s professional landscape in order to improve their ability to attract such employees and also their ability to retain them for longer periods of time. There are many tools available in the professional field for the improvement of performance and retention, yet purpose provides the highest gain with the lowest costs. Purpose-led business ventures also focus on emotional branding for customer engagement by forming a relationship between a consumer and a product or brand by provoking their emotions. Marketers create content that appeals to the consumer’s emotional state, ego, needs, and aspirations.
On a concluding note, the purpose being a new narrative in business enables you to deliver better results and become a leader of thought who is worth following. People want to make money mainly while making a difference. Your purpose-driven strategies enable you to do both at the same time. Once you derive your purpose, you need to focus on three areas to drive competitive differentiation and emotional engagement:
1. Activate the Purpose
The purpose being an end game must be a Northstar of every team in every department. Each employee at the job should have clarity about how they can strive in order to contribute to the purpose.
2. Enable the Purpose
On a practical level in each department, your policies, procedures and processes must align with your purpose.
3. Embed the Purpose
The purpose must be deep-rooted in your business that it derives emotional connection by winning the hearts and minds of your team which leads to winning the hearts and minds of your customers. Leaders keep their purpose alive in an emotionally engaging way by telling stories about making a difference to customers.