Purpose Driven Startup Coherence

Purpose Driven Startup Coherence: purpose driven startups are sometimes exposed to criticism from skeptics, doubting their integrity. If you have a strong commitment of purpose to your stakeholders, then you’ll be scrutinized more closely than a business whose main fixation is on maximizing shareholder value. All your business behaviors have to show the same face or you are likely to lose credibility and support—this is the importance of purpose driven startup coherence in any business. Management must ensure there is an effective process that will deliver an outcome to meet the purpose—The ‘how’ that will ensure that leads to the ‘what’ that the ‘why’ intends.

The lesson for purpose driven startup coherence is easy to learn from Big Pharma. Most pharmaceutical companies have lofty aspirations. Like, “patients come first”. The top five US drug companies are J&J (“We blend heart, science and ingenuity to profoundly impact health for humanity.”), Pfizer (“Pfizer’s purpose is breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.”), Merck (“We are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to improve the lives of millions of customers, patients and communities worldwide.”), AbbVie (“We embrace the responsibility of making a remarkable impact on people’s lives through the innovative medicines and solutions we create together. This is driven by our compassion for people, commitment to innovation and inclusion, service to the community, and uncompromising integrity at the heart of everything we do.”), and Bristol Myers Squibb “Discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases”).

Purpose driven startup coherence tends to happen naturally. All the pharma giants mentioned here also espouse very high-minded societal aims and principles. Visit their websites, take a look and then reflect on your own personal experience or what you read/see on the screen. The difference between purpose and outcome may be very different, depending upon where you are standing, or which kind of stakeholder you are. You may react with delight or disgust with the company’s performance by comparison with their declared intent. 

“With 82 per cent of Americans saying prescription drug costs are “unreasonable” and 73 per cent reporting that the federal government isn’t doing enough to lower prescription drug costs, the popular debate over prescription drugs is not whether drug costs should be reduced but how they should be reduced.”

Six and a half billion dollars of influence

Pharmaceuticals are the biggest TV advertising sector in the US. Why is it though, that the United States, is one of the only two countries in the world where drug makers are allowed to market prescription drugs directly to consumers. The other, maybe surprisingly, is New Zealand. The US healthcare advertising market size reached US$ 23.5 billion in 2023. The market is projected to reach US$ 33.8 billion by 2032.

Also, spending more than $6.36 billion from 1998 to mid-2025, the pharmaceutical and health products industry has far outpaced all others in lobbying spending. To be fair, they also spend huge sums on R&D (In 2023, overall pharmaceutical expenditures in the US grew 13.6 per cent compared to 2022, for a total of $722.5 billion), and they may argue that this is only possible from maximizing sales to consumers, hence corporate profits.

Importance of purpose driven startup coherence

The principled entrepreneur who creates a purpose driven startup might ask herself why these things are so, especially with the knowledge that the American pharmaceutical industry used to abide by the term ‘ethical marketing,’ meaning that drug companies could only market to physicians, not directly to consumers.

There are many reasons why coherence of a company’s explicit or implicit messages and conscious or unconscious behaviors are so important—and hence the vital role played by purpose driven startup coherence:

• insufficient thought given to the implications of the purpose or the potential behaviors that might conflict with it;

• a customer may live in the local community, or a supplier might be an investor, a customer may be an influencer, such as a journalist or blogger or an employee might be an elected official and thus there’s a risk of incoherence or words or actions;

• an employee, manager or outside contractor may be new to the venture’s purpose and inadvertently say or do something that is not aligned with it;

• implicit ambiguities will face the company as time and circumstances change, so revisiting the corporate purpose and its consequences is something to be undertaken regularly;

• pressure to produce performance or financial results may adversely impact ethical behaviors.

As the new venture grows and matures, risks will increase as well. The problem of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, will grow as the company becomes more complex. Organizational bodybuilding may not keep up with the complexities or the implications of delegation of responsibilities. During the planning of a new venture, purpose driven startup coherence is considered very critically, but the day-to-day pressures of keeping the business afloat tend to make operational priorities dominate a reconsideration of plans made at the outset.

One look at the Big Pharma advertising story shows that purpose and profit can come into conflict, especially in those situations where government has not sought to legislate frameworks for corporate behavior either by default or the effect of lobbying. Entrepreneurs need to be very sensitive to any incoherence between purpose and profit, both intentional and unintended.

Entrepreneurs working to ensure purpose driven startup coherence, can use this mindmap of stakeholders as a basis for building the map of their own venture’s future stakeholders. Thinking about them formally can avoid strategic error. Of course, you will need to define your own stakeholders—they’ll not be exactly like this schematic version.

So, when you have defined your purpose, you can consider your business plans for each stakeholder to see whether you risk clashes between stakeholder interests and your own. You can also consider both formal communications with each stakeholder as well as the unplanned communication that takes place simply as a consequence of doing business.

Click here for the free Venture Founders Stakeholder Strategy Evaluation Tool