Purpose values, or P-Values, spur behavior that imparts a sense of meaning to a person’s life and brings focus to a person’s output of energy. The absence of a sense of valid purpose enervates and emotionally depresses a person, but so pervasive throughout Nature is the need for purpose to continue having a claim on life that when a perfectly healthy cell in the body no longer has a job to do—in other words, no longer has a purpose—it literally commits suicide in a process called apoptosis. John Calhoun, a researcher at the National Institutes of Mental Health, discovered that when he allowed a rat colony to become overpopulated to the point that there were too few meaningful role opportunities to go around, cannibalism, raticide, premature menopause, and, ultimately, the inability of females to mature into a reproductive stage destroyed the entire colony.
Having purpose is a primal need that is clearly a component of basic life value, in Damasio’s terms. Yet, despite their essential role in people’s lives, P-Values receive the least attention in marketing communications of any of the five primary core value systems.
When I first began working with Del Webb in the early 1990s, the company had a long-standing tradition of marketing recreation (E-Values) exclusively. I believed that this limited the reach of the Sun City brand because messages pushing recreation would less likely survive the information triage processes of potential customers whose retirement doesn’t revolve around golf, tennis, swimming, and nightly neighborhood gatherings around barbecue grills.
It is not uncommon for retirees, especially men, to suffer the enervating effects of a diminished sense of purpose. Contributing to this self-esteem challenge is a problem addressed by a man in a focus group when he said, "We live in a society where you are what you do. So when you retire, you do nothing, therefore you are nothing."
Phoenix ad agency Lavidge Baumayr created several ads to test the idea that a virtually exclusive focus on recreation was leaving money on the table. One ad showed a woman standing in a potting shed, arms on hips, head slightly cocked saying, "Your golf courses are beautiful. But I don’t play." The ad generated more prospects than any recent ad had done. Why? It connected with a whole new group of people. Sun City’s brand reach was extended because the ad survived the information triage processes among a large group of people for whom retirement is viewed as a time for injecting new socially justifiable purpose in life.
Not many brands use taglines that are strongly rooted in P-Values. Many of those that do are nonprofit organizations that strive to connect with people’s altruistic side, such as the United Negro College Fund’s tagline, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," the subtext of which is a call for people to do good by helping young students.
One for-profit company organized largely around P-Values is Tom’s of Maine. Read the following words from Tom’s Web site that demonstrate how the company strongly connects with people’s desires to have purpose beyond their immediate selves:
Tom’s has always been a community of people grounded in respect for another, animals, and nature. At Tom’s of Maine, Natural Care is a way of life that guides what we make and all that we do. We think of Natural Care as many things—caring for nature, for our customers, and for our communities. We do this by creating safe, effective natural products free of dyes, sweeteners, and preservatives; by harvesting, processing, and packaging with respect for our natural resources; and by donating 10 percent of our profits and 5 percent of our employees’ paid time to charitable organizations.
From its founding, moral values—doing the right thing as a life purpose—have been the foundation Tom’s of Maine’s business model. Reflecting on headline scandals over the previous several years involving such names as Enron, Tyco, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and too many Wall Street brokerage houses, one wonders why more companies don’t follow the path taken by Tom and Kate Chappell, who founded Tom’s of Maine in 1970. The company, which posts double-digit growth in good times and bad, marks its products up 20 to 40 percent over competing brands, demonstrating that many customers put price aside for brands that resonate with their P-Values.
In the early days of Federal Express, before it became FedEx, the determined courier coined the memorable P-Value-oriented tagline "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." The original marketing targeted executives and managers who generate much of what goes into the overnight packages. However, Federal Express soon figured out that those who actually dispatch overnight packages were better message targets. The message focus was changed to put less stress on getting a package to another city overnight and more on helping dispatchers fulfill their workplace purpose by meeting their responsibilities in superior fashion.
Pillsbury’s ready-to-bake brands connect with P-Values with the tagline "Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven" because the brands promise homemakers that they will help them better meet their responsibilities to their families.