Company culture is a critical selling point, not just in convincing people to buy your products or services but also in recruiting the top talent to ensure that your company thrives.
No one wants to work for a company with no vision and no clear value system.
Companies all around the globe are realizing the importance of a stellar company culture, but many of them are going about creating one all wrong.
The creation of a culture starts with clear, realistic mission and vision statements, but how do you make that happen?
Your marketing team can’t simply piece together clever mission and vision statements and hope that they magically come to life in the culture the company exudes.
Company culture needs to start at the top and involve everyone from the top of the ladder, all the way to the bottom rung. While it’s best that your marketing team puts the finishing touches on these statements and helps to promote them, the actual concepts need to embody what the company truly stands for.
Just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.
“I’m a magical, flying superhero!”
Hmmm, that’s odd. Looking in the mirror it appears as though I’m still an ordinary marketing guy. No cape, no super-strength and no ability to fly. Disappointing, but true.
Just like my self-vision, a company’s vision and mission statements can’t be all smoke and mirrors. They need to be real.
Where to start
Gather together a group of team members from a diverse cross-section of your company. This will help to ensure that you don’t get a one-sided opinion about what the company stands for as a whole and where it plans to head in the future.
The CEO or owner should lead these conversations, but they should listen carefully to what their team has to say.
Take your time and jot down all ideas that pop up during a brainstorming session, or better yet, a bunch of brainstorming sessions. Find out what out of all that you discussed most closely embodies who the company is and where it plans to go.
Keep in mind that the vision statement should talk about where you plan to go in the future, and the mission statement should talk about where you are now.
Once you have this info, consider sending around a survey to see what team members who weren’t in on the brainstorming sessions think. Now that you’ve got a nice, happy consensus, you are ready to start penning your statements.
Since you’ve reached that consensus, this is where the marketing team comes in.
Once you’ve got the concept fleshed out, the marketing team can be extremely helpful in crafting both statements into short, easily digestible content that can then be promoted to the company at large, as well as its target audience and other stakeholders, to ensure that everyone is on board.
Getting approval
In order to get buy-in, you’ll need to share the statements widely to anyone your company touches.
You can create the best, most spot-on statements ever, but if they live hidden away in a box, they will never be effective. You need to take initiatives to promote them to the company and beyond.
Here are a few things you can do from a marketing standpoint to make sure your mission and vision are adopted by the masses.
- Put both in easily accessible places on your website
- Add the mission to the top of the newsletters you send out to team members and customers each month
- Highlight team members and customers who truly embody the statements
- Promote your mission and vision by adding them to all of the company’s social media sites
- Make sure all your business decisions and marketing materials live up to the standards these statements set forth
These are just a few things you can do to make sure your statements and direction are adopted.
And don’t leave it up to just the marketing department. While the marketing team’s promotion of the mission and vision is critical, all team members in management roles from the CEO down need to be visibly consistent in living up to these standards.
There’s nothing worse than a CEO running around saying that they believe in this and that and then not living up to it.
Sadly, it happens all the time. Here’s your warning, so heed it or don’t waste your time crafting these statements because a company without a true mission and vision is destined to fail.
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Hello, i just wanted to say, love your blog.
Thanks so much, Gideon! I really appreciate you dropping by and for your continued support!
I really enjoyed reading this article. It was very helpful to me in answering a question from one of my classmates. I just had a quick question, when did you write this article?
Hi, Phyllis. I glad the article was useful. I actually wrote this piece back in 2015, but I think the concepts definitely apply today. Marketing should certainly inform the enhancement of the message and drive the process, but the mission really needs to come from the top down and be integrating into the culture. Thanks for the comment!
Thanks. Your praise is appreciated! It’s important to not only have a mission, but to live up to it as well.
The site is amazing! I would say you have lived up to the mission statement! You certainly have influenced me with reading your site.