At a conference last week, the CEO of a professional services firm asked me about some advice they’d received from a marketing consultant.

The consultant urged the company to overhaul its messaging to focus on its team’s passion for what it does. According to the advice, even major client pitches should start with that message.

“Ahhh,” I said. “They want you to start your message with ‘your why.’”

“Yes,” the CEO nodded. “That’s exactly it. So, what do you think?”

I smiled and replied, “Well, if we’re starting with ‘why,’ my answer is why you should not take that advice.”

Whose why matters more?

That consultant isn’t the only one out there talking about using “your why” as the anchor of your brand’s story. So many articles tout the advice to “know your why” that the phrase is now a marketing cliché.

And, yes, this one talks about it, too.

But I think the advice to start with “know your why” steers marketers wrong.

The idea of finding the “why” behind what you do caught on almost a dozen years ago due to Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why and the accompanying Ted Talk.

From a marketing and brand lens, Sinek’s idea was simple: He claimed, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” Therefore, he suggested, brands should start their positioning with their why.

Sinek subsequently pulled back from the brand-positioning why in his follow-up work, Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team. That book focuses on how people (not brands) can find their unique purpose to motivate their actions. I believe this is the much more useful purpose for his why framework.

Still, the advice to find the brand’s why before creating content became the rallying cry of many agencies and consultants in brand storytelling.

Here’s the problem: Most people outside your brand don’t care about your why.

And even if they do, that’s not why they purchase from you. And it’s not an effective way to differentiate from your organization’s competitors.

The challenge of why-based brand stories

Let’s be honest. Most businesses don’t start with (or stick with) some fantastic, world-changing why.

Even some of Sinek’s original examples never really took this approach. Brands conveniently reverse-engineered their why to fit a brand narrative.  

For example, that famous Ted Talk opens with Apple’s why as a success story: “In everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.”

As Sinek pointed out, that statement inspired Apple’s successful Think Different campaign, which ran from 1997 to 2002.

But by 2010, when Sinek published his book and gave his Ted Talk, Apple had long moved on from Think Different to Get A Mac.  

That campaign featured John Hodgman (personifying a PC) and Justin Long (as a Mac) talking about how the Mac platform made things like creating photobooks and listening to music easier.

It certainly didn’t support the idea of “challenging the status quo” and “thinking differently.” Instead of focusing on Apple’s why, the ads explain how what the product does connects to why potential customers would want it.

Now, consider the marketing campaign for Apple’s new AI Intelligence writing feature.

This ad does what Sinek says every company’s content does — it focuses on features and benefits (while showing how it helps potential customers).

In fact, one might argue that it’s simply a funnier copycat of Google’s “Dear Sydney” ad fail.

Did Apple forget how to do marketing? Did the company forget its why?

No.

Apple didn’t discover its why and then change its business to match. It came to understand its customers’ whys. Then it clarified what (emphasis intended) business it was really in (making “life stuff” easy) and how to communicate it.

Understanding your brand’s why is important.

But (not to get too meta here) knowing your customers’ why matters more for marketing and content development.

Match your why to your customers’ why to differentiate with content

I see situations like the one the CEO described to me all the time. Teams craft messages to convey their brand’s why without connecting it to their customers’ why.

Frustration sets in when the reactions to their ideas sound like this: “But do customers want any of that?” 

The brilliance of the Think Different campaign wasn’t that Apple proclaimed itself to be among the people who “are crazy enough to believe they can change the world” (and are the ones who do).

It was that it made a creative bet that its customers would see themselves in those iconoclastic figures. The Apple campaign didn’t say, “We think different.” It said, “You think different.”    

Businesses still struggle to create content that truly differentiates. But it’s not because they don’t understand how to discover their why. Many books and workshops exist to help brands do that.

It’s because they believe the brand’s why should dictate what they do.

Your brand’s why only matters if it defines why you do what you do and how that connects to things customers care about. But you can’t stop there.

You must still convince customers to love what you do and how you do it.

How to come up with your customers’ whys

One of the techniques I use to go from “tactical idea” to “larger purpose” is a classic exercise built on the foundation of the 5 Whys exercise from the Six Sigma problem-solving technique.

Here’s how it works. First, come up with content marketing ideas (in a group or by yourself). The ideas may look something like this:

• Launch a social media effort to educate prospects on using the kind of product we sell.
• Position our firm/brand as a thought leader in the space.
• Create a white paper or video series on the business benefits of the kind of service we provide.
• Use a blogging platform to curate industry news to position ourselves as thought leaders.

Then, take one of the ideas and ask why five times. That will help you understand the true purpose behind that idea and how it fits into your larger story. (By the way, this example comes from an actual workshop for a B2B company.)

Let’s try it with the “curate news” idea.

Starting idea: Use a blog platform to curate news from our industry to position us as thought leaders.

1. Why is curating news to position us as thought leaders important to our customers?

Because our customers will see that we have our finger on the pulse of the business and a point of view on the industry.

2. Why is it important that customers see that we have our finger on the pulse and have a point of view on the industry?

Because our customers and prospects will have more trust in what we say.

3. Why is it important to our customers and prospects to have more trust in what we say?

Because developments in our industry are changing quickly and our customers need a trusted partner to keep them up to date.

4. Why do customers need a trusted partner to keep them up to date with what’s going on in the industry?

Because they are busy trying to succeed, a trusted partner can help them be informed.

5. Why is it important for our customers’ success to be informed?

Because if our customers are properly informed about the industry, they will be more competitive — and more successful.

Well, isn’t that interesting?

Within five whys, we’ve gone from a blog focused on “positioning us as thought leaders” to a platform that “helps our customers be more competitive and successful.”

Go back and read the answers in reverse, and you have a why to motivate you and your team.

I did a similar exercise with the CEO of the professional services firm. We worked through an exercise to identify how their point of view matched solving their client’s why. 

The answer to the why is “to have the client’s business be more forward-leaning in technology.” But this doesn’t get to the core value.

When we got to the fifth why, we discovered that the client’s answer is “to provide stable employment for their employees, support their family, and create a legacy that lasts beyond their tenure.” 

This matched the CEO’s point of view about how their services could help future-proof small and medium-sized businesses. But now they had something much more interesting to hang their hat on rather than saying, “I’m passionate about helping businesses become cutting edge technologically.”

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Connecting the whys

You’ve probably heard the advice, “Do what you love. The money will follow.” That advice encapsulates why it’s important to understand your own why.

But for content creators and marketers working for a brand, I suggest this tweak: “When your audience loves what you love to do, the money will follow.”

Matching your brand’s why to your audiences’ and customers’ why sets you on the path to convincing them to love what you love to do. And that’s how your brand will find success in whatever it loves to do.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute