Invisible Brand

We’re all familiar with the experience. You've picked up a nail in your tyre, so you drop into your local branch of a national tyre and battery organisation. There’s no-one in reception, and the phone is ringing...

An old man sits on the only chair, huffing with frustration. Cobwebs are beginning to join him to the wall.A pile of five year old motor mags is strewn on the coffee table beside a battered take-one dispenser that offers nothing to take. In the ante-room a kettle boils away unattended. Just outside, the mechanic is enjoying a mid morning cigarette while chatting to his girlfriend on the mobile. Behind the counter resides a proud if slightly grubby and dog-eared poster: Our Mission Statement. It’s signed by the Chairman and Chief Executive, so presumably it’s to be taken seriously.The organisation, we are informed, aims to be ‘World Class’ in the supply and fitting of tyres and batteries.To this end, it aspires: ‘to the pursuit of excellence’…‘always to exceed customer expectations’…‘development through innovation’… ‘inspirational environment for customers, employees and stakeholders’…de blah de blah de blah.

A worrying trend
My example may be extreme, but the corporate Mission Statement seems to be finding its way into too many areas of – as Mission Statement drafters might wish to phrase it – the customer interface. It has no place there, none at all.Yet these days almost every business from your high street bank to the local pet store is at it. It’s like a disease. I have two grumbles with this.The first and most obvious is that a Mission Statement is an internal development tool. It’s there to let your staff know clearly what you stand for, want you want them to deliver and how you want them to deliver it. It’s absolutely not a substitute for the delivery of the customer experience and its presence on the office wall in the absence of such delivery will serve as nothing more than the proverbial red rag to the bull. If the experience is spot on, it’s superfluous.

Mindless Missions
The second and more irritating aspect of all this is the mindless, repetitive garbage that too often passes for a Mission Statement. The lack of meaning, courage or originality in content is often breathtaking; but it does explain why the tyre shop mechanic doesn’t take too much notice; he thinks it’s bullshit too. A quick internet search will bring up around 1.73m earnest contributions on the subject but, encouragingly, punch in the additional word ‘Generator’ and you’ll be offered almost 80,000 satirical inputs. On netinsight’s random Mission Statement Generator I was offered the following at my first attempt:

“We are in the business of ensuring a high level of stakeholder value from service and an ethical approach from the top down.” Not bad, eh? Package it up nicely with some brand development jargon and shiny covers and it might fetch a few thousand in consultancy fees. Do we need it?

The place for sex, they tell us, is in the bedroom and much the same might be said for the Mission Statement. Every time I find myself in a coffee shop, travel agent or financial services retailer and I see those same tired, meaningless clichés displayed I want to scream. No, we don’t need it at the point of sale.

Do we need it in the workplace?
Countless brand consultants will assert that we do. But I would say we don’t – not unless we can think of something, bright, original, meaningful and genuinely motivational to say. Otherwise, at best, it will create confusion. At worst it will bring management into disrepute. I’ll close with an example of what I’m arguing for. Maybe it began as a tagline, but it became the UPS Mission Statement and it’s a model of clarity: “We keep our promises.” Now that’s what I call bold and unequivocal.