Mission statements: cut the jargon, tell the truth
Mission, vision, and values are for your team, not your customers. Chris Erickson on how marketing jargon hides the truth about how a company actually operates.
Summary
Chris Erickson calls out mission statements stuffed with marketing jargon. Mission, vision, and values are internal tools meant for the team, but they often drift into hype, especially when people with a marketing background drive the work. The cost is a missed chance to tell the team the truth about how the company actually operates.
Highlights
- Mission, vision, and values are internal tools, written for your team.
- They easily slide into marketing hype when marketers lead the work.
- Jargon costs you the chance to tell your team the truth.
Key insights
Know the audience
These statements are written for employees, not customers. Language built to sell reads as spin to the people who live the company every day.
Truth over polish
A mission’s job is to describe how the company really operates. Hype gets in the way of that.
Detailed analysis
Marketing skills are useful, but they pull toward persuasion, and persuasion is the wrong goal here. Teams can tell when a statement is selling to them instead of leveling with them. Writing for the team first keeps the words honest and makes them usable for real decisions.
Conclusion
Save the hype for campaigns. Inside the company, plain truth does more work.
There are mission statements stuffed full of marketing jargon. Remember: mission, vision, values—these are internal tools. They are meant for your team. It’s really easy for them to end up sounding like marketing hype, especially when they’re driven forward by people with a marketing background.
And here’s the problem: you’re missing out on a chance to tell your team the truth about how your company actually operates.