In my last blog I introduced the outline and game plan for your system for marketing in your small business – your Marketing Manual. Now we’re going to look at each of the 5 levels of your plan in more detail starting with your Vision, Mission, and Culture.
Your company vision, mission, and culture define not only WHAT, but WHO you are as a business. Every business decision you make should stem from these values. Your marketing is no different. One of the primary findings in, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, that contradicted the teachings of almost every MBA program on the planet, is that the businesses that survived and excelled over time were often the ones that were centered around a core business concept, not a great product. That’s what your Vision and Mission are all about… That one core business concept that makes your business unique. Something behind which you can rally the troops and lead them.
In the early 1900’s Ford’s vision was to, “Democratize the automobile.” That’s very crisp, tangible, and conclusive. The engineers now had an overlying goal when designing new models; new designs must obviously have mass appeal, be easy to manufacture, and easy to service. It helps the marketing department define their target customer as the average family with approximately the median income looking for reliable, safe transportation. They know they’re not marketing to the ultra-rich or the homeless. It helped every independent dealer and salesman throughout the country understand what their company stood for in 3 simple words. Unfortunately, their vision today is, “To become the world’s leading Consumer Company for automotive products and services.” I say unfortunately because it just isn’t all that exciting and doesn’t really say anything… And who talks like that? For instance, how would you define “world’s leading”? Does that mean most profitable? Highest in sales? Least deaths per mile driven?
The trick, of course, is to have a vision that’s specific enough to have teeth, but broad enough to not limit you… That being said, I’d rather be specific, achieve our Vision and then rewrite it instead of starting with such a broad vision that it’s meaningless.
Boeing did a similar thing with their vision in the 50’s by making it very concrete: “Become the dominant player in commercial aircraft and bring the world into the jet age.” They achieved their vision and created a new one: “People working together as one global enterprise for aerospace leadership.” If you were an employee at Boeing, which one would me more helpful when making tough business decisions?
Your Vision is that underlying principle that dictates why you exist. Writing a company vision is one of the most difficult tasks for a business. After all, if multi-billion dollar organizations rarely do it well, how can you be expected to do any better? It has to be specific to your products and services and yet exciting enough to inspire people… One company that I’ve always admired that I thought would have a tough time with a vision since they do so many different things is 3M. Even though their corporate Vision, Objectives, and Strategies page lists all kinds of different ideas, I think they’re Brand Identity sums it all up very well, “Practical and ingenious solutions that help customers succeed.” Now if I’m an engineer sitting in a lab working on some new inventions, that can certainly help guide my creativity.
One last example of a Vision is the one I created for my Small Business Engineering. It is, “Teaching Entrepreneurs how to Engineer a Business that Works Without Them.” In a single statement my goal is set myself apart but also concretely define how my business is different. I hope that statement does just that. What do you think?
Your Mission statement is an extension of your Vision. It’s generally a bit longer, maybe a few paragraphs, that talks directly about the values of your company.
The final piece is your culture. Your Culture Statements (as Brad Sugar’s calls them) or Operating Principles (as Sam Carpenter) refers to them, define the culture of your organization. It helps define how your team acts, interacts, dresses, eats, hangs out… Your culture can be like that of the blue suits and company songs at IBM or the shower sandals and bean bags at Facebook. Tony Hsheih, co-founder of Zappos.com, had a different approach to culture. In his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, he describes how his culture developed naturally and, like most businesses, was molded roughly after his own personality. After they had grown to a few thousand employees he decided to more actively define and cultivate his culture. So he put out a company survey to ask his team what they felt Zappos culture was all about and came up with the Zappos Family Core Values.
Now this is starting to seem like an awful circuitous way of getting better at generating leads, isn’t it? After all, what does this have to do with my radio ad? Everything! You see, without a defined vision and goal in mind, you can’t accurately determine if any decision in your business is heading you in the right direction. That includes your marketing. Yes, of course, you can shoot from the hip with a vague, fluffy vision that’s floating around in your head… But if you want to create a business that runs without you, it needs to be in writing so that as you recruit the help of Ad Agencies, marketing experts, web designers, radio personalities, and sales people, they all know the big picture on Day 1. Do you think you might get better results from your Ad Agency when they have a more clearly defined picture of your entire business Vision? If so, just imagine how that can help your own team members and even you make better, more-targeted decisions.
To your visionary success, Bryan
