In one of my first jobs out of college, I was part of a team of about a dozen: a VP of marketing, a creative director, a video team of four, a design team of three, an events team of two, a couple strategists and project managers, and one writer (me). Most of the designers and I were hired right around the same time because the company realized they needed an official centralized marketing team and they wanted to do a rebrand.

We were all relatively young and mostly pretending to know what we were doing, and we had a fantastic time.

As the only writer on staff, I was responsible for all the verbal and tonal aspects of the rebrand which included revisiting the corporate mission statement. Of course, there are mission statements, vision statements, purpose statements, value statements, positioning statements, brand statements, and all sorts of other internal-type language that companies create as part of their identities. Each of these types of statements can be a little bit different and can serve a unique purpose, so I'm not dismissing the exercise altogether. But to quote Mark Ritson, "You have right now a deck or a book, or a deck and book, with your brand positioning and inside that book there's a brand personality, a brand essence, a brand purpose, brand features, brand benefits — and it's a total fucking waste of time."

Anyway, as I went to find the current version of whatever statements the company was using, I couldn't find anything. I looked and looked, and I asked around, and there simply wasn't anything like that. And so I got to work creating one.

Until I realized what a waste of time it would be.

It wouldn't just be a matter of creating a new statement for everyone to then mold their corporate behavior around. We would also have to convince and train everyone to mold their behavior around this new corporate statement — something none of them had ever had to do at this company, and potentially never had to do at all. If it wasn't already part of the corporate culture, no amount of rebranding would fix that.

So when the day came to present options to the company president, I explained all of that to him. We could establish these corporate statements, but since people aren't going to be used to doing anything with them, they're just going to get shoved in a drawer and forgotten. So I recommended we keep the company statement-less.

He agreed.

We still had overall brand guidelines, including verbal and tonal guidelines in the brand documents, because the current and future marketing teams would know to adhere to them. We still had aspirational language to give direction to the kind of company we wanted to be. And we still had to do the work to convince our current and potential customers we were right. We just didn't have a corporate mission statement.

And you wouldn't believe it, but the company has survived just fine.

Documents don’t create culture. Behavior does. And if marketing wants to be taken seriously and seen as a valuable contributor, it has to do more than just pump out inspiring prose; it also has to educate those who are actually charge of the company’s mission, vision, purpose, values, positioning, and brand on how to use what we’re creating.

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