Why mission is key to great product storytelling
How Meaning Strengthens Strategy
A meaningful company mission is critical in every way. Strategies without a meaningful purpose can lead to marketing that is confusing, inauthentic and ‘me too’ oriented. If you do not understand “the greater reason why,” you are missing a critical ingredient of a high performance culture and impactful product storytelling. Customers will be unlikely to connect to your brand emotionally and your product storytelling will feel forgettable. A meaningful company mission helps to align product storytelling with strategy.
How Meaning Creates Customer Loyalty
According to a recent study by Porter Novelli, nearly 79% percent of Americans say they are more loyal to Purpose-driven brands like Patagonia, TOMS, and Warby Parker than more traditional brands.
How we connected company purpose to product storytelling at RingCentral:
We became inspired by Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling book Sapiens. In Sapiens, Harari explores what makes human's unique to all other species on the planet, why did we thrive? He concludes secret of Sapiens' success is large-scale flexible cooperation. This has made us masters of the world over all other species, there's 100s of pages on this with how we were able to achieve so much due to organising and cooperating with each other. But at the same time it has made us dependent for our very survival on vast networks of cooperation. This process has accelerated over the millennia, so that today nearly all of the things we need for survival are provided by complete strangers. I don’t know how to produce the food I eat, how to sew the clothes I wear, or how to build the house in which I live. I write history books, get paid for it, and buy 99 percent of what I need from strangers. We need each other desperately, in summary.
How this relates to our mission: Where you go choose to work & what you choose to buy, is you voting with your money, time & effort, on what mission you want to accelerate. You can go buy/spend time on software that is addictive and wastes people’s time (sorry TikTok)… or software that is making our fellow humans (our teams, customers) lives more empowered, inspired, and focused. Collaboration is at the heart of all human progress - we are building software that accelerates human progress.
How this was evangelized in our product storytelling: