Three questions for business success. Part 2 Purpose Statement
What makes my product or service attractive – my Purpose Statement?
What makes your product or service attractive and how do you communicate that to your customers?
A great purpose statement should:
- Be easy to understand for your target audience, something that resonates with them.
- Communicate specific results that the target customer will get.
- Explain how you’re different from an alternative they might be considering.
A good purpose statement has to be both relevant and compelling. Click bait is sometimes quite compelling but often not very relevant. Making you click, only to reveal that the compelling nature of the message is completely missing. Don’t be that person.
Good purpose statements that find their way into the wider world can stem from:
The product: Nike: Just do it.
Service: Avis: We’re no 2, so we try harder.
Location: Disneyland, The happiest place on earth
Price: Walmart: Save money, live better.
Ours at Tax and Trust is – Growing Great Businesses
So, how do you go about writing one for yourself?
Answering these questions is a good foundation:
- What difficulty do you solve for your audience?
- What do you do to solve it?
- How does your product or service do it differently from other options out there?
Try to think about the big picture — your business as a whole. To write your purpose statement, start by aiming to answer all of these questions in a single sentence. It may be a long sentence, but that’s OK. Then start to reduce the longer sentence down to something short and punchy, we recommend no more than 7 words and the fewer the better. A good test is to think of it as if it was the only piece of signage you could have that told people passing in the street what was good about your shop or office. What would it say?
So, it goes to show that if you are struggling to answer the three questions or want to step back from the day to day for a minute to consider these questions – then it’s a good exercise. If a publicly listed company like The Warehouse is struggling to answer them – see the latest news here – then you are not alone and shouldn’t see it as a problem but an opportunity to ensure your business has some of the fundamentals of success covered.