How do you transform your sales conversation? By defining your company's purpose. Brand purpose has been big in consumer companies for years. It transformed the fortunes of Dove, Old Spice and Always. But it can do the same for business to business brands as well. B2B companies like IBM and DS Smith have defined their brand purpose. This has helped them to escaped the commodity trap and established their positions as thought leaders and strategic partners, increase their margins and open up new business opportunities. Want to define your business' purpose? Here, top strategy company Sense Worldwide shows you how it's done.

1. Purpose driven
business-to-business brands
Creating them, and aligning an organisation around them
by Sense Worldwide

2. Purpose-driven branding: why it matters
When your brand has a purpose, great things happen.
What is your company’s place in the world? How does it resolve a universal human
dilemma? Great brands have an answer to that question.
Old Spice helps young men navigate the seas of masculinity.
Dove helps women to escape the oppression of the beauty industry by finding their
own beauty.
Nike believes that if you have a body, you’re an athlete.
Their teams work on more than products and services. They get out of the shower
every morning to make a dent in the universe.
When your brand has a purpose, your consumer-facing promise will express that in
communications. So will your internal communications. And it will inform every
experience design help customers and staff to live the purpose every day. A purpose
isn’t a marketing platitude. It’s a reason for showing up. It’s a cause. It’s a rallying cry.
It’s also a turbo-charged way to transform sales. Dove consistently grows 18% YoY.
Old Spice’s This is the man campaign contributed to a 107% boost in sales.

3. Purpose-driven business-to-business brands
From commodity supplier to partner. Purpose changes sales conversations, and client relationships.
Great purpose-driven brands are built on an insight into
the tensions and contradictions in its consumers’ lives,
and an understanding of how that brand resolves the
tension. Women want to look attractive, but are
oppressed by unattainable images pedalled by the
beauty industry. Dove reconciles this by finding the inner
beauty in everybody.
Business to business marketing can benefit from this
thinking too. Our work lives are as contradictory as our
home ones. I want to reduce my company’s carbon
footprint, but I don’t want to travel economy.
Manufacturers want to source raw materials from non-conflict
zones. But they don’t want to pay a premium for
that.
IBM was a pioneer of purpose-driven B2B marketing with
its ‘Smarter Planet’ repositioning. It transformed
perceptions of the company from a trusted IT vendor to a
consultant selling joined-up thinking, on a mission to
ensure that our world becomes more intelligent, and
serves us better.
Our own work with business to business clients like DS
Smith has convinced us of the power of purpose. It
transforms sales conversations from price-based ‘beat up
the vendor’ sessions to high-level strategy partner
discussions. It turns senior managers into industry
thought leaders.
Deliotte recently published a survey of fast-tracked
millenials in business. These leaders of the future said that
the most important role of business was to improve
society. To attract that kind of talent, and to escape
commodification, more and more B2B clients will be
looking for their purpose.

4. We help brands find their purpose: this is how
Brands find their purpose in successfully resolving a real tension or conflict in their customers’ lives.
Consumer
tension
Our brand
at its best
Brand
Purpose

5. Case study: DS Smith
Purpose-driven messaging and experience design for Europe’s largest secondary packaging company.
DS Smith had never marketed its thinking before,
only its products. Sense Worldwide was briefed to
help it redefine itself as a strategic partner as
opposed to a commodity vendor.
We conducted interviews with customers ranging
from junior buyers to the CEO of a major packaged
goods company. We also did an in-depth audit of
their capabilities. We identified a universal
tension among clients. They felt pressure from
above to do more: innovate faster, run global
operations, raise margins. But they were having to
do it with less: less resource, less expertise, less
time.
Once this was understood, their literally thousands
of products and hundreds of brands were sorted
into a single experience map in one workshop by
a group of 25 stakeholders. That’s the power of
purpose.
Identifying DS Smith’s
brand purpose was the
springboard for a
wholesale redesign of
the customer
experience, from
product and feature
hierarchy to service
design and messaging.
DS Smith
are the
masters of
minimalism
The power
of less
Consumer
I need to do
more with less

6. Managing multiple stakeholders
We’re going to take a big leap. Let’s make sure we’re all facing the same way.
A purpose can’t be imposed on a company. From the coalface to the boardroom, it will be
rejected if employees don’t recognise themselves in it, or the world view it represents.
A purpose can’t be invented. It has to be co-created.
The best brand purposes come out of extensive, in-depth discussions with key people
across a company, and equally rigorous sessions with its customers. Salespeople often
have a one-dimensional view of their clients. Every ad agency account person believes
their client CMO spends all day worrying about the quality of their advertising. If only they
knew the truth.

7. 7
Regence BCBS from price-driven sales to demand-driven consumer champion.
Regence was challenged with a market that was
changing from B2B to direct-to-consumer. It had a
sales-driven culture with little incentive to change
ahead of legislation.
Its senior management team decided to become a
consumer-focused company. Sense Worldwide
conducted co-creation sessions, bringing together
senior stakeholders with a wide variety of Americans.
It quickly became apparent that Americans didn’t see
health or wellness as a challenge, so much as their
whole quality of life. We worked with the
management team to produce a new proposition as
a Quality of Life Services company - one facet of
which would be health and wellbeing.
This led to a name change, an M&A plan, technology
platform development and a completely new
consumer proposition well ahead of its rivals.
Mark Ganz, CEO of Regence BCBS, presents its new purpose:
Quality of Life initiatives. These included buying a chain of gyms and
building a successful online wellness programme.
Case Study: Regence BCBS
Quality of Life Services
Company Services
Regence has the
power to
enhance every
day of every
American’s life.
I live in the
wealthiest nation
on Earth, but my
quality of
life is very poor.

8. Purpose workshops: how to run one
When worlds collide, transformation happens.
This is where we collide our understanding of the business environment with our
understanding of the customer. Here’s our top tips for running a successful purpose
workshop:
•Bring together internal stakeholders from across the organisation
•Build empathy. Construct personas for your key customers.
•Describe their lives and jobs fully, not simply in the moment where we try to
sell them something.
•Next think about their next personal goal, the barriers that stop them from
getting there.
•Now think about their ultimate goal. What’s Nirvana?
•What stops them from getting there?
Now you have some tensions. Time for lunch.
Next, bring out your findings about what your company does at its best
How does it resolve the tensions?
Don’t refine. Don’t stop at one.
Generate as many tensions, and resolutions as you can.
Step back. Breathe. Discuss. Vote.
Got one? Well done.