Is your mission statement as inspiring as a tombstone?

During branding, brand planning and value proposition deep-dives into a credit union’s DNA, one often also explores mission statements. You’ve probably seen and read many of them. Some are pretty good. Others? Well, they’re about as inspirational as a tombstone.

In the interest of anonymity, we won’t discuss any of these downers from specific credit unions. However, here are a few doozies from other industries that represent the tombstone effect.

In November 2013, Inc.com ran a great article, “The Nine Worst Mission Statements of All Time.” Do yourself a favor and read the entire article. Below, you’ll find three favorites.

1) Check out the Avon mission statement. Holy cow. Almost 250 words that cover way too many topics. As the article states, it’s great to do a lot of important things but your mission statement is not the place to tell the world about it.

2) Read the Albertsons mission statement. They talk a lot about the customer experience, workplace opportunities and making money, which is fine. You’d think, however, they might want to mention what they actually do as a company, which is sell groceries.

3) “It is our mission to continue to authoritatively provide access to diverse services to stay relevant in tomorrow’s world.” Who do you think came up with that gem? Isn’t it beautiful, all full of long, important sounding fluffy words and grandiosity? That little treasure was concocted by Mission Statement Generator, a website that has a lot of fun randomly configuring nouns, verbs and adjectives into hilariously bland (and unfortunately, often pretty typical) mission statements.

Yes, mission statements can be a pretty boring, desolate and entirely uninspiring graveyard of good intentions gone bad. Let us lay to rest these bad examples. How can your credit union avoid this grave threat?

As stated above, first steps include keeping your mission statement concise and focused on what you actually do as a credit union. We live in a world in which people absorb a great deal of information, but prefer to do so in tiny bites. So when writing your mission statement, think in Twitter terms (140 characters or less).

Other tips that can help exhume your mission statement include:

• Conducting an honest self-evaluation of what you do well and conveying that
• Ensuring your overall brand is authentically represented
• Establishing and highlighting key differentiators between you and your competition
• Using positive and upbeat language
• Including words outside the typical, boring corporate-speak (If words like fabulous, amazing and scrum-diddley-umptious accurately reflect your brand, feel free to use them.)

Developing a meaningful mission statement is a vital part of your overall marketing and branding efforts. Work to ensure that yours actually means something to the right people and doesn’t confuse or bore them into an early grave.