What is your Why?

If you only watch one marketing video year, please make it Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’.

Sinek is one of the world’s leading brand strategists, helping businesses of all types around the world understand and grow their brand.

The idea behind, ‘Start with why’ is that the best brands are those which bring their purpose into their identity. And furthermore, not just in the personality of their marketing, but in the integrity of the design of the products and services they provide.

After all, what illustrates true credibility and knowledge like a commitment to the core values you’re selling?

If you’re selling health food, you could create the facade of a health theme on social media, and try to sell products with no substantive evidence of nutritional benefit, but, it won’t last. For long-term business success, the root of every strategic choice in the business, right from the top, has got to be a commitment to supplying evidence-backed healthy products that work for people.

Hootsuite say, ‘The perils (and promise) of purpose: Bold brands start in the boardroom, not the front lines of social…

“Instead of using social as a mouthpiece for empty promises, strong CMOs will use the intelligence gathered by social media teams to help the organization adapt to new buyer beliefs, new ways of doing commerce, and the new path to growth.’

What’s my ‘Why’?

Here at Brightbird, we are built on the idea that every business owner should be able to grow their business if they want to – and should have affordable access to the globally-recognised marketing expertise they need, to make that dream come true.

We are educated, ethical and genuinely excited to bring that wonderful future here now, with you.

We stand out in this market flooded with online short-term quick ‘marketing’ fixes, from ‘miraculous’ lead-generation hacks to apparently fool-proof online courses, and a revolution of overnight influencers.

At Brightbird, our professional process is the mark of our credibility. We meet you for a consultation, we come back with our recommendations for your growth plan, and we only proceed if you and we mutually agree that the changes would bring you real ROI.

But we also stand for some ethics we feel passionately about bringing more of into the world, like celebrating neurodiversity; non-binary gender identity; creating equality of opportunity for career and education; and prioritising sustainably-sourced materials. This shapes the personality of our brand, for example, in the designs and writing we produce, the people who represent us, and the printed materials we create.

We are transparently us, and the clients who work with us very soon get to enjoy for themselves the breadth of creativity that comes with seeing a healthy world without barriers.

So what is your why?

So what is your real passion as a business? What gets you up in the morning? What was it that made you get into this particular service? If you’re a property conveyancer, is your purpose to ‘supply the legal documents required for house sales’, or is it actually that you love helping people to buy their home?

I know some pretty passionate mechanics, and they will tell you their ‘Why’ is not getting 60 people per week through an MOT so they can pay their mortgage; no, it’s lovingly maintaining some of the world’s most incredible examples of engineering, and going home knowing that they helped one more person drive a car home tonight that’s going to get them and their two kids totally safely where they need to go.

So why not consider the real ‘why’ behind your business, and bring it our in your marketing materials? What do you really stand for? What are your values?

Ask everyone involved in your business, then, install it starting at the top. Get those values into all your decisions, and cascade them down. If you can live by what you believe in, then others will flock to you.

Good luck and keep thinking bigger.