Building value from corporate history

Nick Ranger at Brandpie describes how to use your company’s brand legacy to your advantage 

 

If you’re reading this, you already know that having a purpose has gone from aspiration to strategic priority. Initially uncovered as an unexpected driver of sustained profitable growth (alongside expected strategies, such as entering new markets and meeting wider stakeholder needs), purpose is today widely accepted as changing the nature of business. 

 

The challenge, then, is to define a purpose that’s both distinct and actionable to drive step change. Just knowing where to start can feel daunting, but the tools that help are closer than you might think.

 

Whether you’re a relatively new business or well established, consider revisiting your founding story and ideals. Make it meaningful for all your stakeholders, and your company’s history could be the untapped resource that steers future action and growth.

 

1. Connect the dots

Whether you’re living with children or still a kid at heart, you probably have some Lego knocking around. With record profits in 2022, two blockbuster movies to its name, and the creation of an Innovation Campus set for 2024, Lego’s current success belies the difficulties the company was experiencing in the early 2000s, when declining sales led to a threat of bankruptcy. 

 

The company’s turnaround—it more than doubled revenue and net profits from 2010-2019 and successfully outpaces competitors today—saw the CEO at the time dive deep into the company archives.

 

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp guided the Lego Group onto a new path by asking why it exists. Getting back to its purpose to help children learn systematic, creative problem solving, the business decided to compete not by being the biggest, but the best at what it has always done. In practice, this meant implementing a new structure to strategically coordinate innovation around its iconic bricks. 

 

What’s the learning? Find concrete ways to connect your origin story to how you operate. Struggling businesses may need to be prepared to reconfigure the business. Lego halved its inventory and shed its parks business (selling Legoland to Merlin Entertainments) to double down on its core product and legacy at the time of its turnaround. 

 

2. Reinterpret the idea

Generally, companies are founded on a simple offer and go to market with a crystal-clear proposition. Years of growth into new markets, M&A activity, and changes in leadership and management, however, can muddy the waters. How do you reconnect with your company’s essence?

 

First, find the simplest, most resonant philosophy in the founding vision. Set that in a context that connects it to what the company does today and makes sense with its future ambitions.

 

Take energy services company Schlumberger (now SLB). It was founded on a culture of pushing the limits of what technology can do. Back then, this meant innovating to give oil prospectors a new technology so they could map oil field reserves for the first time. Fast forward almost 100 years, and SLB is a global technology company investing in a broad mix of energy services including renewables.  

 

You can reflect your heritage as well as the business you’re becoming. Creating a new positioning, visual identity, or both in tandem, helps businesses connect their history to the present and future. For SLB, a commitment to ‘driving energy innovation for a balanced planet’ updates the company’s historic focus on R&D to better fit its new role in the energy transition. 

 

3. Convey the benefits

Having sifted through the past to figure out what to take forward, you need to translate that to something that adds tangible value for employees and clients. 

 

No matter how connected you may feel to your organisation’s legacy, you’ll need to frame its relevance and benefits to clients and customers. Set it in a context that connects the founding vision to what you do now, and more importantly, why you do it.

 

For example, TCS started out in 1860s India with Jamsetji Tata’s singular vision of India as a successful industrial society. In the early days of The Tata Group, the business and founding family invested heavily in building the foundations of what India has become today. 

 

TCS was carrying this on practically by channelling a proportion of its revenue into social causes. And is previous tagline ‘Experience Certainty’ conveyed that TCS was a trusted partner that would always deliver. While a true reflection of the experience of working with TCS, it didn’t reflect the role TCS wanted to play with its clients – supporting them to achieve their transformation goals.

 

A new positioning, ‘Building on Belief’, conveys the organisation’s commitment to remain purpose-led and visionary by putting clients’ ambitions first. Aligning TCS’s future direction with its heritage and the founding purpose of Tata resonates with the business and employees.

 

4. Use emotion to galvanise employees 

Now more than ever, people crave a sense of shared purpose in their working lives. While salary and benefits will always be important to people, new research by Gartner confirms people actively seek out roles where they can make a meaningful contribution. 

 

Purpose empowers people (that’s all stakeholders and particularly employees) to connect to the meaning behind what they do. So, when translating your company history into a fresh identity, it should resonate with people. You need to make them feel something. 

 

Emotion is a powerful way to galvanise people to connect with a founding vision. Take TOMS. The business was founded in 2006 with a distinct “why”, namely, to improve people’s lives in different ways. This purpose has clearly informed TOMS’s business model to help a person in need with every purchase.

 

This ‘One for One’ model in turn inspired the company’s original name ‘Tomorrow’s Shoes’, whereby a pair is bought today and donated “tomorrow’, later shortened to TOMS. It is actionable, adaptable to different causes, and as the business diversifies from shoes into eyewear, coffee, and apparel. 

 

TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie long since shared with TechCrunch his belief that “people have this pent-up desire to be part of something much bigger than themselves.” And TOMS employees connect with that aspiration as their chosen employer gives away one-third of its profits to grassroots good causes through strategic partnerships.

 

TOMS’s critical and financial success is a valuable lesson to entrepreneurs on leading with purpose – motivating people to form emotional connections to your brand. 

 

Is there a strategic tool lying dormant in your company archives? Make your legacy meaningful through purpose, and it could be the untapped resource that steers your next phase of growth.

 

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Nick Ranger is Managing Partner, Consulting at Brandpie 

 

Main image courtesy of iSrockPhoto.com