BRANDING 101
BRAND MISSION: Start with your brand story
Your brand mission conveys why your brand exists. Try free writing about your business, what problem you wanted to solve, why you wanted to solve it, your inspiration for starting your business, your product or service, etc. Sum up your brand story. During this step, you’re gathering thoughts, so don’t worry about the volume of material you have.
Determine the core elements
What are your core values? Your brand mission should reflect your values and ethics, as well as your product or service. These are the ingrained principles that hold meaning for you on a personal and professional level.
Write your WHY statement
Now that you have the highlights of your brand story and your core values in front of you, it’s time to clear out the unnecessary content. You need to put the ideas together in a brief statement of what you offer, your core values, and how your offering and values are aligned. This may be one sentence or a few more, but it shouldn’t include any fluff. It should be very clear and concise.
Ask the right questions
When you’re thinking through your mission statement, ask yourself the right questions to stay focused on your purpose.
Here are a few you might find helpful:
What is your purpose?
Who is your audience?
How do you intend to use your brand to change the world?
What makes you different from your competitors?
How do you want to be perceived by the public?
Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google’s mission statement clearly states its purpose in a single sentence. It’s concise, leaving you with no question about its mission.
Earth is now our only shareholder.
This is a new mission statement for Patagonia. They recently evolved into a purpose-driven company. Their voting stock is now owned by the Patagonia Purpose Trust to protect the company values. The Holdfast Collective (a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis) now owns all of the nonvoting stock. Each year, Patagonia will take the money they make after reinvesting in the business and distribute it to help defend nature.
Their core values remain the same: build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to protect nature, and not bound by convention.
