Honestly, I don’t even like coffee. Hate it actually. Only find it tolerable with sufficient amounts of cream and sugar to effectively make it a milkshake. So instead of talking about coffee, I will take this opportunity to take umbrage with the Ted Talk that the speaker showed in order to explain his business’s goal.
Said Ted Talk is by Simon Sinek, in which he claims that all truly successful companies start with a belief (“why”) rather than a product (“what”). He claims that the “common” advertisement goes somewhat like the following: “We make great computers. They’re sleek and easy to use. Want to buy one?” Then, an effective advertisement says: “We believe in challenging the status quo. We do that by selling sleek and easy to use computers. Want to buy one?”
I don’t know how to view this claim as anything other than inaccurate. Nobody tries to sell things by just claiming “They’re great, do you want one?” That’s ridiculous. Just about every single advertisement, be it a commercial, an audio clip, or a magazine page, depicts some sort of image along with their product. The woman using the detergent is a mom in a spotless suburban house with two perfectly groomed children. The Spotify ad plays the sound of a lively party in the background and uses “cool” slang. That’s what marketing IS in many contexts: selling a product by way of selling the consumer an image of themselves.
The explicit identification of a company “belief” might be an effective way of creating and communicating that image, but in the end I don’t see how it’s much different from choosing particular models, particular imagery, and particular language to sell a product. I don’t think people are really buying the idea of saving the rainforest when they buy coffee, because they have no idea whether that label is a reality and I don’t think most people are going to do extensive research to figure it out. You’re buying the idea that you buy rainforest-friendly coffee. Just like you might buy the idea that certain shoes will make you a serious athlete, or that a certain brand of peanut butter makes you a good parent.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” I would say that people buy the image they like, and sometimes a company’s “why” may factor into that image. I can come up with plenty of companies that are wildly popular for which I personally can’t identify a “why”. So Apple’s is (or was) to “challenge the status quo”. Perhaps Samsung’s is “to challenge Apple”. Lego’s is “to inspire creativity in children”. But what about Starbucks? Or Target? Or Coke? Or Microsoft? They have images, sure, but do those images include some sort of overarching ideological tenets? If they do, I can’t come up with them.
To describe this mysterious “why”, Sinek uses terms like “the reason you get up in the morning”, and even goes so far as to claim that profit should be an incidental result for a truly influential company. I am extremely skeptical of the idea that a company’s “why” is a sincere and intrinsic part of the company, as opposed to a deliberate strategy for selling the “what”. The whole concept seems like an unnecessary and entirely too optimistic abstraction of what is essentially the central idea behind all of brand creation.
I didn’t attend this Rose Cafe, but I agree with you about the nature of advertising. Partly because I don’t think any company can really have a “philosophy”. The “why” is “so we can make money”. Considering that essentially any other philosophy-social justice, environmental protection, “empowerment” is to a greater or a lesser degree contradictory to a profit seeking motive, I don’t see how any company could fully espouse these sorts of convictions. And, as you said, advertising is really about selling us a version of ourselves. Beliefs are only important in how they contribute to this idea of ourselves. But it’s the product-the “what” that we can show off to other people to prove that we are who we’d like to be. You don’t buy an iPhone because of what Apple ostensibly stands for, you buy it because it is a tangible status symbol.