Plenty of organizations, from small local businesses to international corporations, have a vision statement—that blurb outlining the company’s social/cultural goals and guiding principles. Too often, though, they’re full of clichés and empty, overly generalized language, and they just sit there, written mostly because someone thought it was supposed to be done.
But these statements can—and should—present a clear, specific, compelling, engaging vision that everyone in the organization believes in and understands how they help achieve. When this is the case, the company culture, creativity, ambition, productivity, employee satisfaction, customer service, and the business thrive.
A great brand vision statement:
- Captures the future of your organization in words
- Pushes the people and the organization to grow to satisfy it
- Fosters excitement about work (the best motivation)
- Inspires employees to do their best work
- Encourages responsibility in employees
- Encourages corporate responsibility
- Helps keep everyone striving toward unified goals
- Helps identify key places to allocate resources
- Guides strategy decisions
- Is easy to remember (not necessarily verbatim)
- Is familiar to all employees
- Is invoked often by leadership (internally and externally)
Not many brand vision statements hit all these points; it’s a fairly hefty list with some lofty goals. But the more of these qualities your vision statement checks off, the more powerful a tool it is. How does yours stack up?