Vision and purpose should stand above commercial considerations
Asking whether purpose will increase market share is the wrong question. But brands all have a deep-seated vision, which marketers should dust off and use to inspire their approach to innovating for, and engaging with, consumers.
In September 2014, CVS Health, the USA’s biggest pharmacy chain, announced it would cease selling cigarettes in its 9,600 outlets, putting a line through $2bn (£1.5bn) of annual revenue.
You might ask what a pharmacy was doing selling fags in the first place – this would be like popping into Boots for your 20 Rothmans – but profiting from sales of tobacco was a norm for the sector. All five of CVS Health’s major competitors engaged in it, and still do.
The change was driven through by a marketer, Norman de Greve, who had a personal reason to fight the inevitable internal battles: his father had died of lung cancer when he was seven. But there was another pivotal factor that made the timing pertinent: the group had recently changed its trading name – from CVS Caremark to CVS Health.
A cynic might justifiably ask whether it really took the inclusion of that new word to suddenly make it realise what business it had been in all along. What else could a pharmacist group be, but a health business? A realist, more in tune with the rhythms of business, would nod and see how these things can happen – how entire industries can drift and be carried along on a tide of incremental shifts until they end up a hemisphere from where they started.
For a combination of reasons, then, the CVS business was inspired to focus in and ask itself a simple yet deeply exposing question: what are we here to do? Once the answer had narrowed down to ‘helping people to better health’, it was clear that some tough decisions would follow.
