MOST OWNERS AND MANAGERS ARE WRONG ON THESE MATTERS

Though vision, mission, values and brand are communicated to customers and public in general, their primary purpose is not to attract the public rather to help people within your organization –staff and management to understand what they are supposed to do, why they have to do what they have to do, and what are the expected results of the efforts and activities of your organization.  

Unfortunately, many people have been trapped into creating vision, mission, values and brand without sufficient knowledge; they just look for nice words to please the public. 

The aim of this post is therefore to open your mind, bringing to you effective meaning of those terminologies. 

What to remember is that people as individuals can also have their own vision, mission, values and brand for effective personal development.

Vision:

What is vision? This is a description of what an organization will become after it has successfully implemented its mission and plans. It is a dream destination; it is what inspires the founders of the organization to start what they start.

For example you start an online business, say a website to sell products online. What is that really you want to see your website becomes? May be you want it to be a number one website in your area of business, for a certain geographical location.

 So, you would say; vision is to become a leading online market for computer accessories in South Africa. Behind this vision, you see the outcomes such as your website will receive special awards, be featured in mass media, the founders be socially recognized etc.

For a vision to be meaningful it has to have a time frame, it should be specific (not too broad) and it has to be relevant and rewarding. So, you would for example have a vision that says: to become a leading IT solutions provider for East Africa by year 2018.

Vision should not be static, your organization can change vision from time to time as the need arise. 

Therefore it is a good practice to review your organization’s vision periodically to see if your dream is still the same, can it be achieved within the time frame  or situation have changed that make it the dream irrelevant or impossible to achieve.

Mission:

What is a mission? This is a statement of what your organization is all about. It is what your organization does, and it does what it does for whom, and where. For example, the mission of Johnie blog is to:

To provide articles that inspire and open minds of people around the world who are in pursuit of personal freedom.

Unlike vision, mission doesn’t have a time frame because it is a statement of what the organization does as long as it is alive. 

Like vision, a mission should be specific for instance it should state who exactly is targeted, where, and what is done by the organization.

Again, it should be remembered that you don’t write mission for your customers or the public. It is for you to know what you do; it is to communicate with people within your organization so that everybody there knows what they are supposed to do.

Values:  

What are values of an organization? These are key considerations your organization wants to put emphasize on.

Values represent ways of life that you think will make it possible to achieve vision, mission and objectives of your organization

Just like vision and mission, you are not supposed to just copy values of other organization and paste in your organization’s strategic plan. You don’t write values to just attract customers or the public, rather the values should be well thought, well understood, and be implemented so that your organization can achieve what it wants to achieve.

Common values mentioned by organizations include professionalism, innovation, commitment, transparency, accountability.

It is not enough to just mention values; you should go further into explaining how your organization is prepared to live those values.  Consider the following value of Johnie Blog:

Results driven: We put focus on short and long term consequences of our decisions and actions, and always we are up to adding value to what we do.

Brand

What is a brand? Brand refers to unique mark associated with a product which is being marketed, including name, letters, groups of words or specially designed trade mark. ( This definition is adopted from book –Introduction to Business Management (6^th edn:p311) edited by Cronjé, Du Toit, Marais, Motlatla)

Brand is how you want the public to identify your products; it is how you want your products to be recognized as different from other products.

Therefore branding, should be done very carefully and professionally, because it will carry special message, special image to the public.

Branding is therefore more than just a nice logo or nice name, rather it is what is in that name, it is what those colours and logo represent.

Brand should have effects of positioning your product – giving it a certain image.

It has an effect of directing the staff and management the priorities and culture of the organization; it has an effect of communicating to the public the uniqueness of your organization.

When you want to do branding, consider vision, mission, objectives and values of the organization, consider how the organization wants to create its image, and consider the competition and environment in general.

For you to  understand more about branding, I suggest you read the article Why Vodacom changed from blue to red. Here is the link Why is Vodacom Going Red ?