The first jigsaw piece in IVC’s Strategy Blueprint© is the Mission (see below). We view it as a meta-strategy which sets the overall direction for the organisation. The mission drives the key choices surrounding the target customer, value proposition and capabilities system, which are the heart of strategy and the middle three pieces in our blueprint.
As a result, the Mission acts as the company’s DNA, North Star or the main plot in its story. Your tactics will change frequently; your strategy will adjust more slowly. However, your Mission will only need to change if the industry shifts in a way where you can no longer construct a capabilities system that produces a value proposition which solves the target customers’ problems and delivers a competitive advantage.
Hence, the Mission is often timeless and dates back to the founder’s original Mission, Vision and Values.
The Problem
Mission statements are not scientific or rules-based, but they should follow a logical and memorable structure. Unfortunately, there is confusion as to whether a mission statement is strategy, if it should be goal and financial orientated, motivational, specific, values-based, inward or outward focused, aspirational, visionary etc.
Consequently, mission statements often contain jargon and legal language which can involve a committee of wordsmiths to try and make them sound clever. Such mission statements are typically verbose, vague, uninspiring, uninteresting, not memorable, and impossible to translate into everyday activities.
Unsurprisingly, if you ask employees what their company’s mission is, you typically get multiple jumbled answers or a vacant look! Such a lack of clarity leads to off-course decisions that point in random directions and result in misalignment of the organisation, there by damaging profitability.
A mission statement lets the world know what you stand for, drives culture, employer brand, employee engagement, and affects all decision making up and down the organisation. Hence, a poor mission statement is a serious problem.
A Deloitte survey found that approximately 3 out of 4 employees who say they work at a “purpose-driven” company are engaged, versus 1 out of 4 who don’t. That is the tip of the iceberg; like a game of Chinese whispers, a lack of precision and purpose magnifies as it permeates internally and externally.
IVC’s Solution
The value of the mission statement is not the words on the page but the images that live in our minds and guide our decisions.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel – Borrow from Storytelling
We would suggest that you write your mission statement following the tried and tested story structure. Stories create a visual image and typically engage the audience through a protagonist with a problem who overcomes challenges, often assisted by a guide; and it is about both who they become and the outcome.
A good mission statement should focus on the organisation’s purpose, which in turn must be focused on how it helps solve its target customers’ problems and the benefits they gain (who they become and the outcome) after using the product/service. Note: the protagonist with the problems is your target customer, the organisation with the solutions is the guide.
Moreover, this structure overlaps naturally with the internal narrative already going on in customers’ brains – customers have problems, they buy products and services to overcome these challenges and to get the benefits. Robert Collier, a copywriting legend, noted that you have to “join the conversation that is already taking place in the reader’s mind”.
Below are examples of some excellent mission statements
Note: the target customer, their problems, the products/services and the benefits are sometimes inferred, but nevertheless drive the story:
Proctor & Gamble – Our Purpose
“We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers, now and for generations to come. As a result, consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.”
Ikea – Vison & Business Idea
“To create a better everyday life for the many people’, this is the IKEA vision. Our business idea is ‘to offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them’. Our vision also goes beyond home furnishing. We want to create a better everyday for all people impacted by our business.”
Inditex – Model
- “Give customers what they want, and get it to them faster than anyone else.”
- “We want to create value through beautiful, ethical, quality products with a complete cycle of life. We act precisely and responsibly in every stage of the fashion process from design and sourcing, to manufacturing and quality control, logistics and sales through stores and online.
Amazon – Our Mission
“We aim to be Earth’s most customer centric company. Our mission is to continually raise the bar of the customer experience by using the internet and technology to help consumers find, discover and buy anything, and empower businesses and content creators to maximise their success.”
Key Takeaways
The mission statements above follow a logical structure and have the following core traits:
- Short, punchy, clear and do not require any explanation
- The customer, their problems and the products/services drive the story
- Memorable, easy to understand and use simple visual language with no jargon or legalise
- Purposeful and show what the company stands for
- Customer-centric and focused on benefits, not products/services features
- Specific and make explicit strategic choices about the chosen direction
- Focused on what the firm does and the journey it is on
- Internal and external facing and speaking to all key stakeholders
The Mission Statements reflect reality
After reading each of the above mission statements, we could reverse engineer and sketch out the middle three pieces of IVC’s Strategy Blueprint©:
- Target customer: who these companies choose to serve, and equally important, who they don’t serve. Marketing is about attracting the customers you want and repelling those that you can’t deliver superior value to.
- Value proposition: what type of products and services would be required to overlap onto the target customers’ preference profile – see pieces 3 and 4 in the visual of our Strategy Blueprint© below.
- Capabilities system: what core capabilities would be required and how the value chain would differ from the industry standard one. Note: if the value proposition is unique, then by definition the capabilities system must be unique. Strategy is about striving to be unique to deliver superior value to your customers.
We could even create a mental picture of what the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements would look like!
Blogs 3, 4 and 5 will use a selection of the above mission statements to show how they explicitly connect to the target customer, value proposition and capabilities system – the heart of strategy.
By Hugh Page
MD Integrated Value Consulting (IVC)
- IVC is a Business Advisory Firm enabling SMEs and investor-backed Startups to Build, Scale and Sell a Valuable Business at a premium
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Index of this 6 Part Blog Series
- Blog 1: Overview
- Blog 2: Mission Statement
- Blog 3: Target Customer
- Blog 4: Unique Value Proposition
- Blog 5: Core Capabilities System
- Blog 6: Measurement System
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