If your purpose doesn’t change a decision, it’s probably just communication.
Every few years, purpose makes a comeback. A company updates its values.
A new statement appears on the website.
Someone puts a beautifully designed sentence on a wall.
The campaign follows.
And everyone feels like something important has happened.
But purpose isn’t something you communicate first and live later.
It should work the other way around.
A genuine purpose should influence what a company builds, what it prioritises, what it measures, who it works with — and sometimes, what it decides not to do.
That is what makes purpose different from a brand promise.
A brand promise tells people what they can expect from you. Purpose should help determine what you actually do.
The real test is what happens when purpose becomes inconvenient
It’s easy to say that people are your priority.
It’s harder to redesign a process because your people are actually struggling.
It’s easy to say you care about the planet.
It’s harder when that commitment affects your product, supply chain, margins or growth plans.
And it’s easy to say you want to create positive change.
It’s harder when the opportunity in front of you is commercially attractive but doesn’t fit the organisation you claim to be.
That’s where purpose becomes useful.
Not when it’s printed on a wall, but when it becomes part of the decision-making process.
This matters even more in agencies
Agency life is full of decisions that rarely make it into a brand purpose document.
Which clients do we want?
Which briefs do we take?
Which ones do we challenge?
What kind of work do we want our teams spending their time on?
And what happens when the most profitable brief isn’t necessarily the one that best represents what the agency says it stands for?
Nice and Serious created a process where the team could assess incoming briefs against the agency’s purpose before deciding whether to pursue them. The interesting part isn’t the tool itself. It’s the idea behind it: purpose becomes a filter for action.
That changes the role of purpose completely.
It stops being a communications exercise and becomes a business mechanism.
So maybe the better question isn’t:
“What’s our purpose?”
Maybe it’s:
“What would we do differently if we actually believed it?”
Would we change a KPI?
Would we reject a brief?
Would we redesign an experience?
Would we change the way we treat our employees?
Would we stop doing something that is profitable but fundamentally inconsistent with what we claim to stand for?
If the answer is no, perhaps the problem isn’t that the purpose isn’t inspiring enough.
Perhaps it isn’t being used.
Because the strongest purpose statements don’t need to be shouted from every wall.
You can see them in the decisions.
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