27 Feb 2018

The managing director of Hill+Knowlton Strategies in South Africa says leading global research has shown that organisations are moving towards becoming purpose driven.    

  Speaking in an interview, Ms Roz Thomas said while this was interesting, what was even more interesting was that the justification for doing so was far more than merely achieving philanthropic goals. She said brands with purpose were responsible for higher growth at companies.

“For example, Unilever states that those of its brands aligned to a purpose contribute to 50 per cent of the company’s growth and are growing twice as fast as the other brands at Unilever, and that meaningful brands (defined as socially conscious companies) outperform the stock market by 133 per cent, with the top 25 scorers delivering an annual return of nearly 12 per cent which is 6.7 times that of the STOXX 1800 stock index. (Havas Media’s Meaningful Brands research, July 2015),” she said.

Ms Thomas further said according to MaRS and BMeaningful research paper of 2015, over half of millennials were willing to take a 15 per cent pay cut to work at a company that matched their ideals.

Having come to Botswana at the invitation of Incepta Strategies & Pr Consultancy to work with one of Incepta’s clients on becoming a purpose drive organisation, Ms Thomas said it was important for organisations to interrogate why they existed.

“People do not really understand what purpose means or what it is. So a company’s purpose is the reason why it exists. It is not what a company does, and it is not how it does, it is why it does what it does, that is what purpose means. So if I say to a number of banks what do they do a number of them will say we offer banking solutions etc. If I say to them, why you do it they are going to give me different answers and purpose is all about that. Why do you do the things that you do,” she continued.

Ms Thomas said there were a number of reasons why purpose matters.

She said one of those reasons was an organisations’ growth and how having a purpose driven organisation translated into its existence for many years to come.

“The other thing that we are seeing and it is relevant to Africa and Botswana is skills. We have a skills issue, not as much that we do not have people to employ, but we want people with the right skills and not only that, but also to keep them after we get them. And purpose helps with that,” she said.

She noted that research also showed that people that joined a particular company and bought into that company’s reasons for being with purpose were likely to stay at that particular company for longer and contribute to its bottom line.

“It is because they are driven by that desire to make a difference. Global trends are saying to us that this whole idea of a company existing just so it can make money off people and not do anything else does not really fit in with most people. As human beings we are saying if you think of oil companies for example, it is no longer good enough to just drill a hole in the ground, extract the oil and disappear. We are saying you cannot just do that, what you are doing to ensure that the community around that area is being looked after, and that whole sense of what does a company stand for and it maybe it can be around sustainability and that would become an organisations’ purpose,” said Ms Thomas.

Quizzed on how important it was for organisations to have their corporate social initiatives (CSI) divisions linked to purpose, Ms Thomas said one found that an organisation that had its CSI gain linked to purpose had a much stronger affinity inside the company than those that did not.

“For example, in our organisation, we talk about our purposes being to create curious and creative conversations with clients to build their brands. If you want to create curious and creative conversations, it means that inside our company we need to have the right type of people. Our CSI is very much focused around education and we are saying we support any type of education where one is exposed to different ideas and thinking and can form their own opinion so we can have curious and creative conversations,” she further said.

For her part, Ms Celine de Canha, Practice Lead at Hill+Knowlton Strategies said the advice she would give to small businesses in Botswana when it came to growing and them contributing significantly to the economy was first identify their purpose on why they existed.

“This is where we come into helping organisations identify their purpose. Organisations should not get it wrong and think we tell them what their purpose is, it is a process that we go through with them and for them to engage us they go through Incepta Strategies & Pr Consultancy,” she said, adding that even big corporations and organisations needed to know what their purpose was.

“In this day and age it is not enough for a company to operate within a silo and just make money. A company has to have a purpose of why it exists and usually companies that do not have a purpose are not sustainable, and yes it is important to make money but what else is the company doing within the community it is operating in,” she continued.

She said if one looked at most of the major corporations in the world, they were driven by purpose and in turn become part of the bigger story and it gave them the opportunity to transcend borders, hence more people wanted to be aligned to that particular corporation and also become part of the story.

Ms Canha said companies in Botswana needed to think about their greater purpose within the business sector and look at the entire value chain of where one could identify their purpose.

“Companies that tend to think about what their products/services enable people to do beyond having sold and made money and thinking now that I have made money it is no longer my business tend to be more successful,” she said.

She further said the first step to becoming a purpose-driven organisation was articulating and defining an organisation’s purpose, but that it was important to note that this was not something that could be done by a handful of executives in a dark room.
ENDS