3.4 Company Analysis
Roy Larke
Learning Objectives
- Apply the use of Company (and the SWOT framework)
Once your Context Analysis is complete, we then turn to the next step in the 5Cs framework: Company Analysis. Again there are many different ways, tools and sub-frameworks that can be used to analyse a company’s condition and situation. Companies can be considered in terms of their mission and goals, their financial health and performance, their resource capabilities, their personnel, their senior management, their products and services, their brands and so on.
For our purposes in developing a basic marketing plan, we will use two sub-frameworks to analyse a company’s position within a market:
- Company Mission
- SWOT Analysis
Company Mission Statements
A company mission is a statement that explains in simple and concise terms the company’s purpose for being.[1] It is short and simple because it has two main purposes:
- The statement should define the company’s purpose, providing the basic indication of the company’s reason for existence and operation. This can then be easily communicated to people outside the company.
- The statement can also be used to define the company in the eyes of its employees, providing direction and motivation for their decisions and actions.
The company mission statement is simply the starting point for company strategy. The complete strategy will be much more detailed and often consist of a large volume of documents, but the mission statement provides the basis for the strategy.
As noted by Gorton et al., (2023):
- A mission statement is used by a company to explain, in simple and concise terms, its purpose(s) for being.
- It is usually one sentence or a short paragraph explaining a company’s culture, values, and ethics.
- Mission statements serve several purposes, including motivating employees and reassuring investors of the company’s future.
- To craft a mission statement, consider how your company impacts customers, donors, investors, or your community and why you strive to help these parties.
- A mission statement might slightly overlap other marketing content, but it is different from a vision statement, value statement, brand, or slogan.
