Author, Simon Sinek, many years ago successfully brought the idea of finding your “why” when guiding brand identity and positioning. The suggestion to “know your why” has become so common in marketing writings that it has become a marketing cliché. Its impact has guided several businesses in directing their brand positioning.
The trouble with why-based origin stories
A relevant example of this is Apple. Apple’s success story/brand identity was centred around the notion of “In everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo”. Which birthed their “Think differently” campaign which ran from 1997 to 2002.
Apple saw the changing of the times as well as the need to adapt to them, as seen in the current mission statement: “To bringing the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.”
The solution to brand positioning
Recognising your consumers’ why is more important for marketing than understanding your brand’s why. Content creators and marketers struggle because they are attempting to grasp the why of their brands without linking it to the why of their customers.
Given your brand’s why is meaningless without people understanding why they desire what you provide, your brand’s “why” should clarify why you do what you do and how it links to aspects customers care about.
Matching the brand’s why to the customers’ why
The ‘5 Whys exercise’ from the Six Sigma problem-solving approach is one of the strategies used. The 5 why’s approach is an iterative interrogative technique used to investigate the cause-and-effect linkages behind a particular problem. The technique’s primary purpose is to discover the fundamental cause of an issue by asking “Why?” five times. The fifth why should indicate the core source of the problem.
