First Step Marketing

If a company’s strategy represents its overall approach tomaximizing business success—stated in terms of achieving certain sales, profits, product delivery, and employee turnover goals—then the mission statement represents a more generalized and idealistic vision of the company’s purpose in life. If done right, a mission statement can go a long way toward energizing everyone in an organization to achieve the ideal.

Unfortunately, in the rush to develop mission statements, many companies have established statements that are somehow too general and lofty. I have seen a number of missionstatements that commit companies to being “the producer of the highest-quality (name the product) in the world” or “the top company in the (name the industry).” In my experience, the best mission statements are oriented in either of two directions:

1. They help people improve their lives. Most employees want to believe that their jobs or professions are somehow doing something beyond simply making money. Yes, there is much satisfaction to be achieved by being successful financially, but if that success can be combined with making a contribution to society’s betterment, the company has achieved a powerful motivational tool.

The CML Group, a small conglomerate of leisure products companies that includes the Carroll Reed women’s clothing retail chain and NordicTrack exercise equipment, has as its mission, “To create products that enhance people’s

• Health_;
• Understanding of the natural world_;
• Sense of well-being.”

According to Charles Leighton, the company’s chief executive, “We wanted something that excites our young people beyond just saying, ‘We’ll increase sales X percent a year.’ ”

CML Group has been extremely successful, achieving a compound growth rate for sales in excess of 20% annually since its founding in 1973.

2. They establish achievable goals. Mission statements can become the basis of rallying points that excite employees and in the end excite customers. One of the most successful companies in this regard is Ben & Jerry’s. Its founders decided that in order to avoid the overly general mission statement, they would develop three different sets of missions:

• A product mission that essentially commits the company to making a top-quality innovative product.
• An economic mission that commits the executives to running the company in a prudent and caring way in order to be profitable and provide an ongoing source of jobs.
• A social mission focused on serving the community, which comprises the company’s customer base.

It is the last mission that has most galvanized employees. Based on that mission, the company decided that children are the basis of its social mission. Thus, it organized a campaign in the early 1990s to help abused children, under the motto, “Leave no child behind.” Working jointly with the Washington- based Children’s Defense Fund, Ben & Jerry’s organized entertainment festivals around the country, complete with free ice cream, at which attendees were asked to purchase postcards for 25e apiece to write their congressional representatives to take action toward reducing child abuse.

The festivals generated a torrent of mail to Washington and no doubt sensitized senators and representatives about the importance of protecting children from abuse. Not coincidentally, the festivals enabled consumers to sample the company’s ice cream as well as to associate the company with a worthy cause.

A note of caution. . . For the mission statement to achieve its goal of galvanizing employees, it should be developed with as much input from employees as possible. Developing an effective mission statement isn’t an easy or simple process. It will likely create a good deal of discussion and debate about what is appropriate, achievable, and useful for the company to establish as its mission. Such discussion and debate are usefulbecause they invariably raise worthwhile issues about the company’s purpose. Probably the worst approach is for the chief executive to devise a mission statement and then force it on the rest of the management team and employees.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
The Mission Statement: A Big-Picture View

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Business Management, Jobs, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.