(This is a continuation of a multi-part post on igniting and leading a market Movement.  To start at Part 1, go here. )

Purpose or Movement Messaging, as I describe in Part 1 of this series, must either transform or inspire a business issue or society.  With the 4 types of message, inspiration or transformation, business or societal, we see how this message reaches above market context, to provide an even bigger purpose to our messaging.  In this post, I will show how my Viewpoint framework can be extended to also define a Purpose or Movement message.

Let’s take a quick look at the KJR Viewpoint framework as described in detail in my book Launching to Leading.  The Viewpoint framework tells a story that starts in the customer’s current reality, taking them in three steps to a Brave New World.  The Viewpoint Story wheel is shown graphically here:

                                      The Viewpoint Story Wheel

Our Viewpoint Story always goes something like this as described on page 68 of Launching to Leading:

• Act 1: One or more things in your world have changed and left you in today’s new reality.
• Act 2: If you depend on the expected solutions X and Y, which were built for the old reality, you will be left with unmet needs and/or missed opportunities.
• Act 3: What if you had an unexpected approach to X that was a re-imagined solution for today’s reality that looked like this.
• Act 4: Then you would end up in a transformed future state where you would solve problems and capture new opportunities in this transformed future state.

We can now build a Purpose or Movement message from extending this framework. Our Movement Message is built by the either cutting out steps 2 and 3, the how of the story, or by focusing strictly on the the transition between steps 3 and 4.  Let’s call these type T and type I Movement messages respectively, for Transformation and Inspiration.   These paths are shown in this modification of our Story Wheel:

The Viewpoint Paths to Inspiration and  Transformation

Now this is all starting to seem a bit theoretical, so let’s take a look at a couple of well know examples, one a which is an Inspirational/Society message and the other a Business Transformation one, Nike and Salesforce.com

Nike – Just Do It,  A Inspiration Movement Message

It may not seem obvious, after all of these decades, to not take the Nike Just Do It message as being a Movement starter.  Nike though, changed not just an entire industry and but our society with their Movement messaging. Let’s construct the Nike Viewpoint Story –

The story goes something like this.  Fitness is more important than ever.  However, before Nike, we were used to using generic “gym shoes” or “sneakers”, as specialized shoes were the purview of competitive athletes.  Nike said, our approach is to sell you the shoes that champions use, we all deserve the innovation and power of the Nike Brand.  With Nike, as our name means, everyone is a Victor!  Then 17 years after the launch of the Nike brand, they summed the movement up with the inspirational and now ubiquitous slogan, “Just Do It”.  Just Do It inspires us to be our own champion, how poetic, beautiful and inspirational.  Note, they did not go for the transformational message, which may have been as dull as “From Fitness to Victory…”

Salesforce.com – The End of Software, a Transformation Movement Message

Salesforce.com is one of the business success stories of the last 20 years. Founded in 1999, Salesforce.com now has a market cap of over $50 Billion.   They were the first of a long series of Software As A Services successes, and nearly every day in Silicon Valley, you hear the echos of entrepreneurs saying, “we will be the Salesforce of X”.  Let’s examine Salesforce.com’s Viewpoint Story –

The Salesforce.com story went like this.  The world has changed, we’ve entered the Internet Era, and must run our business at Internet speed. (Remember, this was 1999!).   However, if we continue to deploy old style Enterprise software, we will be subject to long slow and risky deployments. What if we took an approach where we use the Internet, and “cloud computing” (inserted into the story a few years later) , where your solution provider does the hard work for you?  Then you could operate your business at Internet Speed, and win and compete.  Salesforce.com summarized this transformation as “The End of Software”.  They drove this platform message for more than a decade with their ubiquitous end of software logo. Rather than explain the details, they simply said this!.

We’ve now seen two examples of Purpose or Movement Messaging.  In the next post, we will dive deeper into how to build your own Movement Messaging.  Until then, here’s another inspirational quote:

Don’t underestimate the power of your vision to change the world. Whether that world is your office, your community, an industry or a global movement, you need to have a core belief that what you contribute can fundamentally change the paradigm or way of thinking about problems. – Leroy Hood, Biologist and Inventor of Automated DNA Sequencing machine