“Purpose in Communications” is the buzzing phrase that is making a lot of rounds in the media as well as the corporate world lately. From conferences to boardrooms, everyone is trying to crack the truth behind their ‘purpose’ and the ways they can communicate it effectively. David Gallagher and John O’Brien have discussed how authentic marketing and communications wins in The Purposeful Age in their book ‘Truth be Told”, the takeaways of which they unveiled at the 25^th anniversary of the AMEC Global Measurement and Evaluation Summit on 26^th May 2021.

Evolution of Purpose

The session began with a discussion on the Evolution of Purpose by John O’Brien. From the 1980s, Corporations started the initiative of ‘Corporate Social Responsibilities’ as a step to work collaboratively with local communities with the sentiment of taking businesses beyond philanthropies. In the 2000s the movement rose towards Sustainability. But after around 2007, a lot of scandals and issues within corporations triggered people to think about the way business is conducted today. A lot of thinking went into the real purpose of business. People started disagreeing with the notion of putting shareholders first as a way to do business. People around the world agreed that our purpose as businesspeople should be to create a positive social impact and not just for the minority that happens to be shareholders.

Purposeful Truth

John remarked that we live in ‘interesting times.’ Issues like Black live Matters, Gender Gap, #MeToo Movement, an increase in fake news and the VUCA world has made people question who to really trust. Thus, the demands from businesses are to communicate more than ever. On top of that, this (COVID19) pandemic has illustrated both, the best and the worst of corporate behaviour. John introduced the concept of ‘Purposeful truth’. Purpose sits at the core of businesses. The purpose is not just a marketing and communications mechanism. It manifests everywhere, right from innovation, human resources to manufacturing and financial reporting. John defines ‘Purposeful Business’ as a business that has a human-based truth at the core of its purpose, shaping how it meets a human need through its products, services and ways of operating.

Truth Effect

John further discussed a framework called the ‘Truth effect’. The base truth of this network is the ‘Human truth’. ‘Purpose Truth’ is the statement that really should reflect all aspects of operations and is very clear. This then translates to ‘Practice truth’, which is how do they operate within the business. That finally leads to ‘Products truth’ which deals with the kind of products being sold. Then the session proceeded to talk about examples of failures in Purpose-led conversations. No session of this kind can go without the mention of the infamous Pepsi advertisement where Kendall Jenner gives Pepsi to the cop amongst an obscure protest and the situation is diffused. There was no truth or essence in the story. People no longer accept marketing and communication campaigns easily, they rather seek the truth beyond the campaign. Thus, by putting the ‘truth effect’ to use, one can grow awareness, enhance societal reputation, engage employees and advocates, improve opinions of stakeholder, increase customer loyalty and rise share value of the business through enhanced performance.

Purposeful Listening

In the next part of the session, David Gallagher elaborated how a purposeful approach starts with purposeful listening. Apart from the transactional audience, that is the traditional stakeholders which communicators identify, the second type of audience called the ‘purposeful audience’ must also be identified.  This audience may not be interested in your service, or product, but might be deeply passionate about the cause that you have chosen to associate yourself with. The third type of audience is the peripheral audience which has an interest of their own and has the potential to disrupt the news cycle or supply chain.

Stakeholder Capitalism

David asserts how the most powerful purposeful stories start from within the organization.  Every organization must understand their purpose, the stories about the achievement of the purpose, the commitment and the aspirations of the organization. He emphasises how we need to move beyond shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. The times have changed. Earlier invested parties like investors, customers and employees were considered most important for the brand. But now even the general public can destroy a brand, given their unbridled social media access, along with an appetite to protest.

David ends the conversation with a hope to widen the conversation around the measurement of such purpose-led communications. The session was thought provoking to say the least. I cannot wait to get my hands on the copy of ‘Truth be told’ and dig deeper into this ‘age of purpose’. I am grateful to have gotten this opportunity to attend all the sessions of AMEC Global Measurement and Evaluation Summit. I was in fact able to attend it because of Mr. Abhishek Mahapatra (Director of Consumer communications at Amazon) who graciously passed on his free pass. I am thankful to Reputation Today and School of Communications and Reputation to give me this opportunity to explore the highest standards of measurements and metrics in the Communications Practice. 

Sanika Newaskar

Sanika is a part of the Class of 2021, of the Post Graduate Programme in PR & Corporate Communications at the School of Communications  Reputation, Mumbai. She’s graduated in Communication, English and Psychology from Christ University where she was Head Girl. She led a Model UN delegation to the US and was rewarded in many National level MUNs. She is also a freelancing Digital Marketer. Reading, debating, singing, and writing absorb her. She is a vehement feminist and runs a campaign on Instagram called the_pink_revolution.

Sanika interned with Edelman, India for her winter internship.

She can be reached at @SanikaNew on Twitter, and as Sanika Newaskar on LinkedIn.