“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
In 2009, Simon Sinek unleashed one of the most powerful ideas in marketing. This idea would become the defining theme in marketing for the next decade, and Sinek managed to capture it not just in many pithy one-liners but also in the simple, three-word title of his book: Start With Why.
In Sinek’s TED talk — at 50 million views the third-most viewed of all time — he explains that the greatest, most inspiring companies and individuals communicate from the inside out. Rather than telling us what they do and how they do it, they first tell us why they do what they do.
And just like that, the cat was out of the bag.
Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers — by the time Sinek is done with his examples, you’re not just ready to buy a cable for wireless headphones from him, you also begin to see what was there all along.
“The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe,” Sinek says.
Nike, Disney, Amazon — inner greatness, entertain and inspire, everything for the customer. Of course! They believe what we believe. How didn’t we see it before?
Soon after Sinek’s talk, purpose-driven marketing was everywhere, evident not least in the fact that we coined the term “purpose-driven marketing” — and created 180 million search results for it.
We wrote articles about mission statements, vision statements, and about finding your Why in eight steps. We created case studies, held workshops, and tweeted our Why until we forgot our name. And then, somewhere along the line, like always, we lost track of what mattered.
You know who also had a mission? Theranos. “We believe the future of health care lies in greater access for the individual,” their website read — right until they collapsed in one of the biggest fraud scandals of our time.
So did Wirecard. “More than anything else, we’re fervent about shaping the future of digital payment solutions,” their about page still reads. The company went bankrupt over $2 billion in missing funds, shares dropped 99%. Were they just not fervent enough?
Today, every VC pitch deck includes a “Why” slide, and yet 75% of funded startups fail. These companies don’t go bust because they “lack drive.” They don’t close their doors over misaligned beliefs with customers. These well-funded, well-connected startups are full of highly motivated, capable people, who are strongly incentivized to make the business work. So why can’t they?
The truth is companies fail for a million reasons — and their Why is rarely one of them.
Companies fail because they make sub-par, irrelevant products. They fail because of large-scale, unforeseen events, a pandemic perhaps or a government ban. They fail because a competitor delivers a 10x better experience, because the people gluing the place together leave, or because they no longer do well what they used to do brilliantly.
Companies fail because people do. One bad actor can bring down a $100 billion empire. One bad Why can negate a whole corporation’s vision statement. And yet, it is the vision statement we keep obsessing about.
We spend our days whiteboarding, brainstorming, redesigning the “Why” slide. But in a world where more people watch Sinek’s video each year than graduate college in the US, your Why is just not that special. It’s just not good enough.
As the world goes entirely digital, clarifying your Why becomes a pay-to-play condition: You get scrutinized if you don’t have it, but as long as it’s there, we don’t really care what it says. We’ve heard it all before anyway.
Sure, go ahead, “revolutionize my finances,” oh yet another commission-free trading app. Power to the people, and so on. Webull, Trading212, Robinhood, Wealthfront, Freetrade. I can name five apps with the same mission for a single, narrow use case off the top of my head. How’s that for a Why?
Every fine dining restaurant wants to “provide unique experiences.” So does every travel company. They all believe in curiosity, adventure, and new perspectives. Every social platform believes in human connection. They want us to love each other, to exchange ideas, to feel less alone.
Jargon or not, if purpose statements start to sound all the same to you, it’s because they are.
It’s a bit like everyone saying they love fitness, food, and travel on their Tinder profile — it’s what humans have desired for thousands of years: Eat, move, explore.
The list of true Whys is short, and it looks no different than it did 2,000 years ago, when philosophers in ancient Greece etched it into beeswax tablets: We believe in equality, justice, morality, and freedom. We believe in happiness, collaboration, empathy, and love. We believe in feeling useful, being valued, and enjoying the fruits of our labor through play and relaxation. That’s it.
Sure, there are synonyms of how you can achieve one or the other, but at the end of the day, humans want safety and health, connection and respect, and a sense of growth. Today, millions of players compete to provide us with any given one of these things. No wonder the words start blending together.
The fact that there are few things humans truly believe in should be liberating, not limiting, both to individuals and businesses.
It’s okay. We can stop expecting more. We can stop hiding behind big claims and start doing the real work of delivering our goods and services.
Rather than turning the important work of clarifying — and living — our Why into the humdrum drudge of telling our audience why they should change theirs, we can just focus on doing good work.
Let me repeat: It’s okay to “just” do great work. It’s okay to be of service and to achieve a simple outcome for your customers. Not everyone needs to put people on Mars. Even Elon says so:
I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing. It doesn’t have to change the world. If you make something that has high value to people, even if it’s a little game or some improvement in photo-sharing, if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, I think that’s fine. Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.
At Four Minute Books, we’ve saved five million people a few minutes since 2016. If it’s just one minute per person, that’s still 9.5 years of human life. Even small numbers become large if you keep adding them up.
Simon Sinek was right. We don’t buy what you do. We could care less how you make the train appear on time, what you do to make your perfume smell great, or which code made your onboarding feel seamless.
But Simon Sinek was also wrong — because we damn sure buy the outcome you promise. If the train is late, the perfume smells bad, or the onboarding takes too long, we’ll let you know loud and clear — and until you fix it, we don’t want to hear about what you believe.
Make sure your fries taste great. Respond quickly to complaints. Build a tool that’s useful. Those are the things that keep us coming back.
People don’t buy what you do, they buy what you promised them. Why you made that promise is one part of it all — but it won’t matter if you don’t do great work.