Reading: Mission Statements for Marketing
Roy Larke
Mission Statements in a Marketing Context
A mission statement should define the company’s purpose, but the wording can have a deeper meaning. On the one hand, it could be a fairly vague philosophical statement. Although more of a motto or slogan than a real mission statement, in 2000, not long after the company was first founded, Google used the statement:
“Don’t be evil.” |
See: Wikipedia.
This simple statement was supposed to summarise why Google existed and the way it and its employees were supposed to behave:
Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world, even if we forgo some short-term gains. (see Wikipedia quoting Ovide, 2011).
Nowadays, Google has a much more functional mission statement:
Google’s Mission Statement
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. ” (See Google)
The important thing to note about a good mission statement is that it will specify what value the company will provide – which in turn means what value customers will receive. In Google’s case, the company aims to “make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.” This is different to what it actually does, which involves a lot of programming, running server farms and data centres, and providing an advertising platform to name just three things that the company does.
When comparing mission statements, it is usually easy to spot a company that has a marketing orientation versus one that has a product orientation. Having a marketing orientation in the mission statement provides a basic platform to encourage both employees and external stakeholders to consider what the company aims to do for its customers. And, without customers, a company may not have any existence at all.
Key Takeaways: Mission Statements for Marketing
For marketing purposes, mission statements should:
- Define the company’s core reason for existence in a short, simple sentence or paragraph
- Express the company’s existence in terms of the value it offers to customers