UPS Purpose
Role Senior Strategy Consultant
Agency Teneo
Brand UPS
Project Purpose Development
Date Summer 2020
UPS’s new CEO, Carol Tomé strongly believed in the power of purpose and wanted to help unite and energize UPS employees across the globe during the height of COVID and social unrest. Teneo was brought in as a close partner and outside lens to help unearth and articulate UPS’s purpose, a statement and narrative that needed to resonate with UPS employees across the globe and be distinct to UPS. I joined Teneo in June 2020 as a consultant and was immediately thrown into the project, partnering with the agency leads in global stakeholder workshops and leading the creation of an in depth discovery presentation that looked at the project through through the lens of both purpose and positioning. After landing on territories and presenting these to a committee of senior leadership one step below the CEO, my manager and I wrote out purpose statements against the chosen territories. The winning purpose statement leaned into UPS’s role as essential to our society as a whole, delivering both needed medical supplies and non-essential goods while being a vehicle for positive, responsible momentum in the opportunities to customers and employees that they provide.
Three years later, the purpose statement, “Moving the world forward by delivering what matters,” is still proudly displayed on UPS’s corporate website, is frequently referenced by the CEO and other UPS executives and has become a platform to guide operational and ESG decisions.