Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies

Stengel served as global marketing officer at Procter and Gamble and wrote this arguing that companies organised around a higher ideal outperform financially.

His central claim rests on a study he commissioned with Millward Brown, which examined a large set of brands and identified fifty, which he calls the Stengel 50, that he argues are built on ideals connected to improving people's lives. He reports that an investment in these brands over the study period would have returned substantially more than the S and P 500, and he presents this as evidence that ideals cause growth.

The framework classifies ideals into five categories: eliciting joy, enabling connection, inspiring exploration, evoking pride, and impacting society. He argues that a brand ideal must be an authentic statement of why the business exists that connects to a fundamental human value, that it must be operationalised across the business rather than expressed in marketing, and that it should guide hiring, product decisions and partnerships.

The practical content covers how to discover a business's ideal, how to build the organisation around it, and how to sustain it, drawn from Stengel's own experience running marketing at a very large consumer goods company.

The methodology has been heavily criticised and the criticism is substantial. The brands were selected after their performance was known, the ideals were identified by the researchers rather than measured independently, no control group of companies with comparable ideals and worse performance was constructed, and the return calculation has been challenged on its construction. The claim that ideals cause growth is not supported by a study designed this way. The practical advice about organising a business around a coherent purpose has value independent of the evidence offered for it.