While watching the various political party election kick-offs, I was reminded of a book by Simon Sinek: Start with Why. As David Cameron and Ed Miliband started kicking metaphorical lumps out of each other, it occurred to me just how far political parties in the UK are from the organisational ideal Sinek espouses.
Neatly wrapped up in what he calls the “Golden Circle” (outlined in his TED talk here) Sinek highlights how the greatest brands and businesses talk about “why” they do what they do rather than how they do it or what they actually do.
What is striking about politics today is that the parties barely even touch on what they do or how they do it, preferring to focus on what the other parties don’t do. It’s a wholly negative approach that’s brought about because there is so little difference between what the parties plan to do and how they plan to do it. There are no differentiators. The only way they can build these points of difference in the mind of electorate is to create negative space.
However, doing something different can be scary and isolating. It sometimes requires a certain degree of faith and always requires courage. What it also requires is authenticity; if we do things differently and say that we’re different, we must be able to back that up with authentic proof points.
Authenticity was our starting point for the latest work we created with STIHL, focusing on the why, not the what, and doing something different.
Our competitor research demonstrated just how similar everyone else’s advertising was in the sector. Mostly product-led and feature-rich, it failed to strike an emotional note with people. It told them all about what the products were and how they worked, but never why they had been developed in the first place.
The STIHL team was courageous enough to work with us in starting with the why: why did it matter that it produced the world’s most precise power tools and, more importantly, why would they benefit customers’ lives? Equally important was that STIHL had earned the right to talk to their customers on this level; they could stand authentically behind the fact that all their products are developed with passion, with customer needs always in mind – even if we were not talking about that directly in our campaign.
Our end point was a campaign focused on the customer, not the product – on the enjoyment and lifetime of memories a garden brings, not the actual act of creating one.
There are lessons here for the politicians. Maybe we’ll see a political party courageous enough to focus on their “why” someday. But I don’t think it will be in this election.
Kieron Weedon is director of strategy at BWP Group
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