Why should your customers be expected to be loyal to you if your employees can’t explain how your company makes a difference?
An old fable illustrates this point perfectly. A man on his afternoon stroll sees three bricklayers at work. He asks the first one what he was doing. The man responds with irritation, “I’m laying bricks, what does it look like?” This gave the man no real insight into what they were building, so he asks the second man, who answers, “I’m building a wall.” The third bricklayer was whistling happily so the man decided to ask one more time. The bricklayer stopped working, wiped the sweat of his face, and smiled proudly, “I’m building the town’s new cathedral.”
Customers have so much consumer choice these days; they want to align their dollars with a brand that stands for something bigger. So that when they’re buying an Apple ibook, they’re actually buying creativity. And when they buy a Harley Davidson, they’re buying freedom.
World-renowned thought leader Nikos Mourkogiannis argues that companies can be divided into four type of purpose – discovery, excellence, altruism and heroism.
What does your company stand for? And does everybody inside the company know it?
