Your mission? Writing a mission statement.

If you’ve been tasked with either assigning someone to write a mission statement, or actually writing one yourself, you may be wondering: What is a mission statement, anyway?

You’re not alone. A large contingent of the population, especially outside the corporate world, doesn’t really know what a mission statement is. And probably a good portion of that group actually includes marketing professionals.

But writing a mission statement isn’t as Marketing 101-ey as you’d think.

So this might be a good place to attempt to define a mission statement: A mission statement, sometimes referred to as a corporate statement, is a short, written statement that identifies a company’s official goals and principles.

Ideally, it should guide a company’s every action and decision by defining its overreaching objective. It should also be the most accurate, yet succinct answer to the questions:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• For what reasons are we selling our product/solution/service?
• Why do we even exist? (existential musings aside, try to think beyond the clichéd here; it’s not just about making a profit)

Here are some tips, and it’s not an all-inclusive list by any means, to help guide you along in writing a mission statement:

• Think big, but focus narrowly. Try to whittle down your grandiose, sweeping vision to its most essential elements: you may indeed want to be the world’s largest and most successful consumer electronics superstore, but what is it about your unique qualifications that will help you get there? What will you specifically be giving your customers that your competitors can’t or won’t? What can you offer or do that’s better, cheaper, or faster?
• Be short, sweet, and direct. Okay, maybe not “sweet,” unless you’re a confectioner or chocolatier. Lengths of mission statements range anywhere from a few words to several paragraphs. Although your organization’s goals should dictate the length, you should strive to be as brief as possible without sacrificing inspiration.
  • The Humane Society’s mission statement gets directly to the heart of the matter, and reads a lot like a well-focused tagline: “Celebrating Animals, Confronting Cruelty.”
  • So does Google’s: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

• Write for the long haul. Your mission statement should be just as applicable three years or a decade from now as it is today. This doesn’t mean it should remain timeless simply for the sake of being timeless; during certain periods of upheaval (including events like mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring) you may in fact need to review it for relevance.
• Display it publicly. You don’t need to take out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle or secure a billboard on the Times Square Jumbotron. But your mission statement should easily be available for your customers, partners, and even competitors to view. Many organizations post theirs on the website’s “About us” page.
• Include others. You may be the only one responsible for assigning it or writing your company’s mission statement, but that doesn’t mean you should go it alone. Plan on involving internal employees as well as externally based partners and associates, if applicable, in the brainstorming and/or researching phase. Differing perspectives may bring a fresh focus and help you gain valuable insight into your company’s goals.
• Take the necessary time to complete. Don’t speed through the process. You should plan on spending time doing research, reading company literature, conducting interviews with the right people, and then drafting several versions if necessary.

There are, of course, other things to consider. What works for one company or industry, for instance, may not work for another. Every organization’s culture is unique. And that’s fine. In fact, a mission statement should encapsulate, and celebrate, that uniqueness.

This is why you probably shouldn’t write your statement using something like The Flag Patented Mission Statement Generator. Although you might want to check out that link for its humorous take on the gobbledygook of corporate-speak.

Speaking of corporate-speak, stay tuned for next week’s edition of MarComments, where we’ll show you how to translate corporate-speak into American English. Well, we’ll provide a few entertaining examples at least.

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