Your agency’s mission statement can have new business value and measurable results.
Most ad agencies have a mission statement. Most are filled with wordy jargon that is often forgotten, misremembered or flatly ignored by staff and is meaningless to prospective clients. Your mission statement should foster clarity.
Kevin Starr, executive director of the Mulago Foundation, has created a compelling approach to developing a focused and useful mission statement that warrants your attention. Starr insists that companies he funds, express their mission statement in under eight words.
The Starr Method: Clients must follow this format: “Verb, target, outcome.”
This concise method is a fresh approach to developing a useable mission statement that will clarifying thinking and keep the agency focused on a single issue.
How long is your agency’s current mission statement? Do you think you could get it down to under 8 words using the “verb, target, outcome” format?
Try this exercise and share it through the comments’ section below.
My mission statement in 8 words is: “Fueling ad agency new business through social media.”
I agree completely. And I would add that agencies need to stop creating a mission statement based on what they think will get them business and start creating them based on what their mission is. By doing so, there would be a lot less client-agency spats and seperations!
Thanks for your comments Connie.
Mission statements for businesses! Really? Is that still being pedelled? I’ve worked for and with a few businesses over the years most of whom had a statement of somekind, usually posted on the wall of a staff room or on the wall behind the reception desk. Most management if asked could take a wild stab at reciting it if asked and few of the staff too. If you look at some of the best performing young businesses they have a culture statement; the difference is not the poster on the wall but the very nature in which the employees react and perform, it is intrinsic to their very nature. Hiring new staff has a psychometric element that determines their company fit. One of the examples I refer to is Zappos, of which I’ve had personal experience.
“Love God. Love People. Love Branding”
Making things happen.
Insist on making sure at least one of those words defines your “Why” so we know WHY you are doing what you do.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” ‘ Simon Sinek (author of Start With Why”
Your why is your purpose, your reason for being. If your why is new business or profits they I know at least one CMO who would never choose to do business with you. Think about it. What’s your why?
If you don’t know your why, your what and your how don’t matter!