Purpose is everything. Purpose is dead. Purpose is poison.

The purpose debate has been running for a decade and most of it lands on one side or the other.

Here’s an attempt at a more useful answer.

Every organisation has a purpose

Before getting to that, one thing needs to be said. Every organisation has a purpose. A ‘purposeless’ organisation isn’t a thing – it’s just an organisation that hasn’t looked hard enough at why it does what it does.

The standard definition – why you exist beyond profit – carries an assumption that purpose needs to be elevated, even noble. Which is partly why it became so easy to conflate with social mission and brand activism. And it’s why some organisations view the whole conversation with suspicion. The language feels alien to people running engineering firms, logistics businesses, or B2B tech companies. It sounds like something that happens in other kinds of organisations.

Purpose doesn’t have to be highfalutin to be real.

‘We exist to make financial reporting less painful for mid-sized businesses’ is a legitimate purpose. Functional statements of why an organisation exists are often more useful than elevated ones – specific enough to shape decisions, honest enough to earn belief.

The work of purpose isn’t invention. It’s excavation. The seed of your purpose is already there. The question is whether it’s been found, named, and put to work.

The confusion starts (with why)

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle made ‘why’ feel like the answer to every strategic question – internal and external simultaneously. Jim Stengel’s Grow study appeared to prove the commercial case. Consultants built practices around it. Purpose stopped being an organisational anchor and became a market-facing proposition by default.

As a result some brands were trying to win customers with answers to questions customers weren’t asking.

Unilever’s CEO named it precisely in 2023. The topics had been conflated and the business case had got confused. Five years of force-fitting purpose onto brands that didn’t need it had produced more heat than light.

Three-ish kinds of purpose – and what each one does

Not all purposes sit in the same relationship to positioning. Three types are worth naming – and a fourth condition that many organisations are stuck in.

Functional purpose – grounded in a specific problem the organisation exists to solve. ‘We exist because financial complexity holds growing businesses back.’ It’s operational, testable, and specific enough to shape decisions. The line between functional purpose and positioning is often short – in many cases the purpose is the foundation the positioning is built directly on top of.

Mission-driven purpose – where an organisational conviction is so deeply embedded in the product, the operation, and the way the business is run that customers encounter it through direct experience. This can earn genuine competitive weight. But it requires embedding, not just declaration. The purpose has to be verifiable. Customers need to be able to find the evidence themselves, without being told where to look.

Aspirational/inspirational purpose – broader, elevated, the top of the ladder. This is where purpose statements typically end up after a workshop. Done well – when the ambition is genuine and the business is genuinely building toward it – an aspirational purpose can hold a portfolio of products and brands beneath it, each with their own pointed positioning. Done poorly, it floats free of anything real – and can leave the lingering smell of unfulfilled potential.

I said three ‘-ish’...

Unmined purpose – Present but never formally named or activated. It shapes behaviour and decisions below the surface, often inconsistently. The work here is excavation first: surface it, examine it, decide which of the three types it is – and whether it’s the purpose you’d choose if you were choosing deliberately. Whether it moves you forward to where you want to be.

The no

For most organisations, most of the time, purpose and positioning are doing different jobs for different audiences.

Purpose is for your people. It shapes how decisions get made, what the organisation will and won’t do, what it stands for when no one is watching. Positioning is for your market. It answers the competitive question customers are actually asking when they’re choosing between you and someone else.

Blur the two and you weaken both. It can produce strategies that sound meaningful but say nothing distinctive – and creative work that inspires without converting. ‘We exist to make the world better’ is really not a reason to choose you. Maybe it’s a reason to feel good about the company you’ve already chosen.

For most brands, most of the time: purpose is not a positioning tool.

The yes. Sometimes

But when purpose is functional, or when it’s mission-driven and deeply embedded, it can do competitive work. And when it can, communicating it externally isn’t just legitimate – it’s powerful.

An example everyone in this field reaches for – myself included, it lived in my slide decks for years – is Patagonia. Remember, ‘Don’t buy this jacket.’ Transferring ownership of the company to the planet. It’s a strategy built entirely around it. It works because every product decision, supply chain choice, and repair programme already demonstrates what the brand declares. Customers don’t just hear it; they can verify it.

Look to Airbnb for a different illustration. ‘We imagine a world where anyone can belong anywhere’ sounds aspirational in register – and it is. But it’s mission-driven in practice. The platform aspires to make a stranger’s home and district feel like yours. Every host standard, every review system, every design decision points toward the same experience. Customers don’t just hear the conviction; they feel it.

What makes it particularly instructive is what happens when you trace the line to positioning. Simplified to ‘belong anywhere,’ the purpose becomes a competitive claim. Why choose Airbnb over a hotel? A hotel gives you a room in a place. Airbnb gives you a sense of belonging to a place. The purpose and the positioning are different statements – but you can see exactly where one becomes the other. That traceability is what gives it credibility. Strip it and you’re left with a tagline that belongs to no one.

A clear illustration is any charity I’ve ever worked with. A charity’s purpose is rarely abstract – ‘We’re here to help people and their families facing cancer.’ Stated in plain terms, felt by everyone in the organisation, immediately clear and compelling to everyone outside. There’s no gap between what the organisation is and what it claims. In many cases the purpose isn’t just connected to the positioning – it is the positioning. The internal and external are one because the purpose is specific enough, and demonstrated clearly enough, that no translation is needed.

It’s here in this form that purpose earns the right to do competitive work. Not the strength of the conviction or the quality of the copywriting. The fact that it’s embedded deeply enough in what the organisation does that customers encounter it before they’re told about it – and competitors can’t easily replicate it.

Distinct. Not divorced.

Purpose and positioning being distinct doesn't mean keeping them separate. In a strategy that’s working, they’re in active conversation with each other.

Purpose sets the limits of what the organisation wants to do – which shapes what genuine competitive advantages are available to it. Positioning, in turn, should be a direct expression of capability that only exists because of how the organisation operates. One informs the other. You should be able to trace the line between them.

Purpose and positioning are not the only elements at work. Principles and personality each have their own role – shaping how the organisation behaves and how it comes across. But it’s the conflation between these two specifically – why you exist and why a customer should choose you – that creates more downstream confusion.

Failure can be confusing the two, but that’s not all. It’s also divorce – treating purpose and positioning as separate workstreams that never meet. It can produce a beautifully articulated purpose with no bearing on the competitive claim, and a positioning statement that could belong to any well-run company in the sector.

The goal is distinction without disconnection.

Purpose and positioning doing different jobs, for different audiences – but each able to point to the other and say: that’s why I exist.

One more thing worth saying.

Purpose isn’t the starting point – that’s Mr Sinek’s argument, not this one. It emerges from analysis: of the market, the competition, the customers, and the organisation’s own culture.

Done properly, that work surfaces purpose, positioning, principles, and personality together – distinct elements that then need a unifying idea to hold them and express them. The sequence doesn’t start with why. It’s first, look hard at the totality, at reality – then distil what you find.

So. Where does yours sit?

Every organisation has a purpose. The question is whether it’s been found, named, and put to work – and what kind it is.

Has it been found and named – or is it ill-defined, unexamined, shaping decisions below the surface without being made explicit?

Is it functional, mission-driven, or aspirational? That determines how directly it connects to competitive positioning.

Can customers verify it through direct experience – through what you make, how you price it, how you stand behind it, how you behave when it’s inconvenient? If yes, it has earned the right to do external work. If no, it belongs internally for now.

And finally: can you trace a clear line from the purpose to what you’re claiming in the market, and back again? If the purpose can’t explain why the positioning is credible, and the positioning can’t show what the purpose means in practice – neither is doing its job.

I don’t believe Unilever’s correction was an argument against purpose. It was an argument against a specific mistake – using purpose as a substitute for competitive clarity rather than a foundation for it.

Every organisation has a purpose. The question is whether it’s been found, named, and connected to what the organisation is claiming in the market. When that line is clear – whether the purpose is functional, mission-driven, or genuinely aspirational – it can do competitive work, and say so. When it isn’t, no amount of declaration will make it so.

Purpose and positioning are different tools. But in any strategy worth having, they illuminate and support each other.

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