Culture klatch

Toward a Higher Purpose: The Value of Mission Statements

Often pigeonholed as a business plan deliverable, mission statements are critical for guiding and grounding our life’s work.

A mission statement helps a shepherd keep him self and his flock on task.

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Whether you’re starting out on a project, planning an event, or going after a goal. Whether it’s for work (like, say, at an advertising agency?), for your friends and family, or for yourself. Whatever it is you’re doing, you can do it better with a Mission Statement.

Mission statements aren’t just for high-falutin company About Us pages. They are powerful mental constructs that help us understand our true goals. Mission statements keep our actions connected to a project’s grander purpose so that as we work we stay on the path toward that purpose. More practically, they help mitigate swirl, alleviate confusion, and create achievable expectations.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to refer to any undertaking as a “project,” whether it’s an advertising campaign or a New Year’s resolution to lose 10 lbs.

And, there is no shortage of recommended tactics or frameworks to help us be more successful in our projects: write your goals down! Use with a SMART framework! Add more and regular agile check-ins! I have the audacity to suggest one more tactic:

Start the project with a mission statement.

Already sold? Feel free to skip ahead to:

Want more of the pedantic long-form? Welcome to the Klatch, friend.

What is a Mission Statement?

A mission statement is a concise, written summary of a project’s purpose, designed to guide efforts toward achieving its goals. Put more excitingly, a mission statement is the written expression of your path to success.

Missions statements can be used for projects that are professional or personal, big or small, tangible or spiritual. If you’re doing something you care about, you can write a mission statement for it.

Missions statements are

  • statements! They are one sentence, written down.
  • concise, clear, and motivating.
  • containing the Thing to be Done, Why, and Grander Purpose of a project.
  • conveying the grander purpose for a project.
  • intended to guide the creation of project briefs.
  • anchored in core principles and values.
  • inherently emotional.

Mission statements are not

  • the place for nitty-gritty details, lofty ambitions, or broad statements of purpose.
  • the only input needed for good work.
  • one-size-fits-all across projects.

You might be saying, “Well, I have a business and it has a mission statement that is the north star for all of my work.” And I’m saying, that’s great, but you need a mission statement for every project you undertake. If your business mission statement is your North Star, then think of project mission statements as the compass you use for each trip you set off on. Want to launch a new product? It needs a mission statement. Want to start a blog? It needs a mission statement. Want to post on TikTok? Please PLEASE write a mission statement first. A North Star points you in the right direction on a clear night, but a compass is insurance against getting lost.

Takeaways:

  • Mission statements are important for both business and personal projects.
  • Mission statements do the job of articulating the grander, more meaningful purpose of a project.
  • If it has its own deliverable, it needs its own mission statement.

Why do I Need a Mission Statement?

Because they are they best tool for articulating a clear and meaningful path forward.

We’ve all experienced frustrating, and even bewildering, moments where we’ve come to the end of a project and…it’s just not what we thought it would be. Sometimes they’re big head-in-your-hands, WTF moments with unexpected feedback or somebody somewhere saying that everyone has missed the mark entirely. Sometimes they’re just moments of feeling disappointment.

We made the creative assets for the campaign but they just didn’t resonate the way we wanted them to. We lost the 10lbs but we don’t feel much better about ourselves. We planned the perfect family vacation, but everyone seems miserable.

And we have a lot of ideas of what went wrong. Maybe we just didn’t communicate well enough, or maybe we set the wrong goal, or perhaps our expectations are too high. What is more likely is that we started out with what we thought was a clear idea of success but was in fact a bit hazy. We imagined the creative assets would just hit better. We hoped the family vacation would have more joyful moments. In fact, we likely set appropriate goals which in turn helped guide our decisions, but we didn’t have a grander purpose to the project so we (and our team) still lost our way.

And now we’re left with project confusion, disjointed deliverables, and the prospect of rework. So we’ll set yet another round of achievable goals. We’re probably reassessing our approaches, and ourselves.

So, what is going wrong?

We need to start at the very beginning. We need to ground ourselves in the project’s grander purpose at the outset.

We need a mission statement.

How do Mission Statements Help?

People desperately want to have a purpose for working. Purpose creates meaning, meaning creates the desire to do something effective, and doing something effective makes for great work. Mission statements are the tool to define and instill purpose at every step of a project. They make clear the path to great work.

How exactly?

1. Missions Statements Prevent Ambiguity

“At the 11th hour the client came in with a complete reframing of the work. Everything we had already done seemed so completely irrelevant. I have no clue what got lost in translation.” – Beth, Account Director

In this business scenario, we’d immediately look back at the project brief to identify where the project went wrong. But what went wrong was there from the beginning–not everyone was aligned to a common purpose. The mission statement can articulate that purpose so that when each individual is off on their own workflow, they have the same guiding direction as everyone else to help clear uncertainty and make good decisions. This is why mission statements must be written down. If the mission lives only in the minds of you and your coworkers, it’s bound to get morphed by each individual’s point of view. Enter miscommunication, incompatible approaches, and divergent expectations. Writing a mission statement down makes it concrete. Having a physical copy to reference sets it as a firm source of truth.

I recommend including a mission statement in the marquis of every brief related the project to help anchor the work, feedback, and perception of success to the project mission.

2. Mission Statements Instill Meaning

“Everyone suddenly needs to be on TikTok. You sell batteries, maybe you don’t need to be on TikTok!” – Russell, Community Manager

The point of the mission statement is to ground the project in a meaningful, higher purpose. Having a higher, and hopefully noble, purpose provides the motivation to do good work. It helps contributors look beyond the scope of just another marketing campaign and focus on an meaningful outcome of the campaign that will improve the well-being of the client and their business. Meaningful purpose is what got us into our careers and is what keeps us motivated. Meaningful purpose should be an easily accessible concept as we do our daily work.

3. Mission Statements Create Shared Expectations

“We all got the same brief. Everyone seemed to understand the assignment. But the creative team just seemed to go off and do their own thing. We basically had to start over.” – Sarah, Senior Strategist

If your stated project expectation is “10 creative assets that generate awareness” without a mission statement you’ll get 10 creative assets that check all the boxes yet somehow still miss the mark. The mission statement purpose provides motivation but it also provides direction. Say it turns out the client is not just trying to build awareness, they’re really are trying to create brand salience within a new audience. The higher purpose of salience will yield dramatically different, and better, results than just the purpose of awareness.

4. Mission Statements Improve Project Briefs

“I spend too much time on briefs as it is.” – Me

Mission statements and project briefs go hand in hand, and the former should inform the latter. Mission statements presented with a brief at a project kick off do the work of aligning all participants minds to the purpose of the project. And, through the very nature of being communicated early, the mission statement will be the lens through which everyone understands the brief, views the purpose of work, and ultimately conceives of what success look will like.

I’ve found that even with a detailed brief in everyone’s hands the spirit of the project can get lost, causing the work to dramatically miss the mark. In our analogy of North Stars and Compasses, the brief is like a topographical map telling us which mountain to climb and which river to cross to get to our destination–critical details for getting from point A to point B. But while a brief details what we’re suppose to do, how we should do it, and what our final product should be, it doesn’t help us make effective decisions in times of uncertainty. In times of uncertainty the brief’s details often just create more swirl. We end up looking in too many places to find our next step forward.

Maps can’t reorient you, and North Stars don’t help you navigate in a forest. But a compass–a mission statement–is the thing that will always keep everyone moving in the right direction.

Takeaways:

  • Mission Statements are included in a project brief.
  • They help everyone better understand the assignment.
  • They guide us though uncertain situations.
  • Something written down is less susceptible to ambiguity and misinterpretation.

How to Write a Mission Statement

To avoid starting out on the wrong foot, it’s best to employ a simple sentence framework.

Missions statements should easily convey the Thing we’re trying to do, Why we’re doing that thing, and the Grander Purpose of it all. So my preferred template uses a 3- or 4-part system that ladders up rationale to arrive at a Grander Purpose.

Don’t start with the Grander Purpose. You might think you know what your grander purpose is, but it’s those kinds of assumptions that get us into trouble in our projects, and which the mission statement seeks to evade in the first place.

Start with the Thing to be Done: What is the actual thing you’re trying to do? Are you building a content strategy? Making creative assets? Planning an event?

For our business example, I’ll choose something almost every marketer has touched in some way: Instagram posts. Let’s assume we are working for a Boba Tea company named Bee Boba Tea.

Thing to be done: Create Instagram posts

So, why are we making Instagram posts? The client’s directive is to probably to “build brand awareness.” This First Why should be an easy, logical step. It’s also usually where we seek to measure success.

Thing to be done: Create Instagram posts First Why: Build awareness on social media

“Build awareness in social media” is a helpful for our work, but it’s not our mission because it doesn’t convey purpose. Awareness is rarely motivating to our team members.. Awareness is a measurable goal, and awareness is a tactic in support of other objectives, but awareness itself just isn’t a Grand Purpose for our project.

So ask Why again. This should get us thinking deeper and more abstractly about our mission objectives. Well, why DO we want more awareness? We want more people to know about us, so that we have more potential sales. We’re really trying to build a bigger addressable audience.

Thing to be done: Create Instagram posts First Why: Build awareness on social media Bigger Why: Increase the site of our addressable audience

This is much better context for building Instagram post for awareness, because it gets the creative and strategy teams thinking about how to create assets that work for the overall marketing funnel and won’t just exist to capture transient attention.

But, increasing the addressable audience is just not very motivating for our work. It doesn’t feel exciting. More customers is always better, but what is the purpose for building a bigger customer base…just increasing sales? Well, everything we do in marketing is for sales! And we would never be in it for vanity growth metrics. So, we need to look at the Bigger Why and then ask, what is it all for? What is the Grander Purpose for creating a bigger audience?

And this answer is…well it depends on the situation, the client, and the business 🙂

Let’s imagine that what the client is really hoping for by growing their audience via an awareness campaign is to create salience. Boba tea happens to be a fairly niche category still, so net-new customers to the category is possible. Our client wants a broad-reaching awareness campaign that works to leverages Bee Boba Tea branding to introduce the concept of boba tea to new customers. Bee Boba Tea will be the first brand they think of whenever they think of boba tea at all. This is big. HUGE.

Thing to be done: Create Instagram posts First Why: Build awareness on social media Bigger Why: Increase the site of our addressable audience Grander Purpose: Create new customers who think of Bee Boba Tea when they think of boba tea at all.

So put it all together and our mission statement reads:

“Create Awareness-focused Instagram ads that target out-of-category consumers in an effort to increase the size of our addressable audience, thereby creating new customers and salience in the category.”

Oh Lordt. It’s accurate, but it’s not good.

Let’s rewrite a bit it so that it conveys our meaning, and some emotion.

“For out-of-category consumers, create Instagram ads that work to establish the name of Bee Boba Tea as the preeminent boba tea brand in their lives.”

Ta-da! Simple, motivating, and effective. With this statement you’ll get good creative that meets the expectations of you and your client. Notice we intimated the First Why and dropped the Bigger Why from our statement–We don’t really need the short- and long-term goals in this example. They are a critical step for finding the Grander Purpose, but are not necessary to explain the connection to the Thing To Be Done and the Grander Purpose, or to motivate ourselves and our team.

To that end: how many Whys does it take to get to a Grander Purpose? Use restraint. Two Whys should get us to our Grander Purpose. Please beware the Path of Whys.

The Path of Whys

“I think I need a mission statement for my mission statement.”

What is the Path of Whys? It’s an exercise in over-reasoning, a never-ending laddering up of rationale. In our personal lives, the Path of Whys typically ends at some sort of spiritual truth. In a business, the Path of Whys will likely take us up to a purpose of business solvency or “growth.” Occasionally, for larger business projects or life decisions, these ultimate purposes are appropriate for the Grander Purpose in the mission statement. But for smaller or downstream projects, those ultimate purposes just aren’t well-connected enough to the Thing To Be Done to be motivating and helpful in times of ambiguity.

Going down the Path of Whys is a fine logic experiment that will help us understand our core motivations, but for the purpose of a project Mission Statement it ends in too abstract of a place to be effective for success.

Takeaways:

  • Use a template to build your Mission Statement.
  • Try not to use more than two Whys to get to your Grander Purpose.
  • The ultimate purpose of your business (or existence) is not usually the Grander Purpose of your mission.

Mission statements are worth it

By this point, 2800 words in, you may be thinking missions statements are a little too much to be done for every project. But let’s imagine what happens in our boba tea scenario if we don’t go through the entire process.

Stopping at the First Why: “Create Instagram posts that drive awareness.”

Stopping here is what leads to overly broad targeting, counting raw impressions as a KPI, and a campaign that has nothing but reach to show for it. This is when you start to ultimately miss the mark.

Stopping at the Bigger Why: “Creating Instagram posts the drive awareness to increase the size of the addressable market.”

It might feel like the Bigger Why is the purpose of the project, but it’s actually just another intermediary objective. It’s a nice objective to have, but it’s not particularly motivating or inspiring, and it could still lead to ambiguity and errant measurement. This is when you invite confusion in.

Getting to the Grander Purpose: When we provide this level of motivation, we can see how it directly impacts the work of our team members at key moments of the project.

  • When the copywriter starts to wonder if they should include competitive PODs in the post or ad copy, they can refer back to the mission statement and realize this won’t resonate with people who aren’t even aware of the boba tea product category.
  • When the designer is combing through the asset library, they will avoid up close product shots and instead find images that show lifestyle scenarios.
  • When the analyst writes the measurement plan, they will add contextual KPIs like brand lift, branded and category search volume, and, of course, the size of targetable audience, not just raw reach and impression numbers (bleh!).
  • And, if the client still comes back at the end and states “it’s just not what I was expecting,” you can point to the mission statement as say “We are confident this is the creative that will sell Bee Boba Tea to people who have never even heard of Boba tea.”

Why a mission statement and not just a list of mandatories?

I get it. Putting something into sentence form requires a lot more mental effort than just listing a bunch of mandatory guidelines:

  • Create 10 Instagram posts
  • Creative must target awareness-level audience
  • Ensure posts target net new consumers to category
  • Achieve an 15% increase in impressions
  • Build addressable audience by 20%
  • Grow salience!

But a list of mandatories does not create purpose, it creates rules. Rules are great and very important, but they don’t motivate us to do good work. Rules motivate us to check boxes. Mission statements convey the emotion to motive us and keep us on the path to good work.

Takeaways:

  • There is an art to writing mission statements that will resonate with your team members.
  • Ensure the purpose of the project is motivating but easily achievable from the Thing to Be Done.
  • Avoid the Path of Whys.
  • The value of the mission statement can’t be achieved with a list of mandatories or short statements of intent.

I use mission statements for almost all my work, personal and professional. The act of writing the statement itself–articulating and fleshing out a project’s purpose–can alone help radically change my approach to a project. I keep these statements written on my phone or in a journal where, after a period of time, I can look back at them to glean a better of truth to my aspirations, my core principles, and which tools are the best motivators to my success.

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