Brand messaging is the ship you sail through the choppy seas of modern marketing, so you can better communicate what your brand’s all about—be that to prospective or current customers, internal team members, or other businesses.
But without a map to guide you, you’re likely to end up lost at sea or crashing into the rocks.
When it comes to brand messaging, your business’s mission, vision, and values comprise that all-critical map to the next safe harbor.
Building your brand messaging around a strong sense of mission, vision, and values helps you clearly define your brand identity and build consistency across departments and company assets.
But how do you define and approach each of these? These may be vague buzzwords to some, but successful business leaders know that each forms a critical pillar in the structure of your business and your brand identity.
Here’s what you should know about how connecting mission, vision, and values can boost your brand messaging and take your brand identity to the next level.
How Your Mission Drives You Forward
A brand mission is how you define the core of your business model, including your primary objectives and your approach to achieving those objectives. It helps people understand what you’re all about. As a brand, who are you? What do you do? Why? Whom do you aim to serve with your business? What’s unique about you that no one else in your industry does?
Your mission aims to answer these questions in succinct, straightforward, and easy-to-digest language. When writing a mission statement, the goal is to help both internal and external stakeholders understand your brand’s purpose.
A mission statement gives you a baseline for business decisions, all of which should align with your mission. Whether you’re launching a new product, shaping your internal team culture, or connecting with new prospective customers, the mission statement provides a critical framework for how to proceed.
When crafting a mission statement, you want it to have certain qualities, such as:
Clarity – An effective mission statement is clear and concise, free of complex jargon, and can be expressed in one or two sentences. Think of a mission statement as a type of official slogan for your brand.
Purpose – A mission statement should define your core purpose to your audience. Think about what you’re looking for when you click on a business’s about page. A mission statement should fit naturally on your About page and tell people what your purpose is (or could be) in their lives.
Relatability – A mission statement should connect directly with your audience in a way they can relate to. Include references to your mission in marketing content and your brand messaging strategy more broadly to help bridge new connections.
A simple mission statement format might be:
[Your brand] exists to [purpose of your brand] by [how you’ll achieve your mission] for [your target audience, or personas].
An example of a mission statement for a healthcare organization might be: “[Organization name] is dedicated to improving community health by providing accessible and affordable medical services for low-income families.”
How Values Guide the Way
While your mission defines your brand’s purpose, goals, and target audience, the core of what guides your mission forward are your values.
Values guide your brand’s actions and shape the way you communicate with your audience. They help you align with those who share your brand’s values. Here are a few ways to incorporate values into your brand experience and connect with your audience in genuine ways they care about.
Build a values-driven brand message. Brand messaging is a way to prove your values to those you’re trying to connect and communicate with. Brand messaging in your external marketing and sales assets, as well as internal communications with your team, should prove why your audience should trust you and the principles you espouse.
Let your leaders tell the story of your brand. Leading by example is a great way to prove dedication to a set of guiding principles. Brand leaders should embody values in their actions and decisions and take the lead in sharing personal stories that reflect those values. Use anecdotes and examples in your leadership’s personal brand as well as the brand messaging more broadly to provide proof of concept and foster trust and brand loyalty.
Don’t neglect internal culture. Your biggest brand ambassadors should be the team under you, and your internal culture should be strong enough to get enthusiastic buy-in from employees. When your team feels like you genuinely embody your values and that is reflected in how they’re incorporated into the brand’s priorities and principles, they’ll be able to communicate those values more authentically to others.
How Your Vision Gets You There
What is your brand’s ultimate long-term goal? When it comes to strategic planning and decision-making, what are you trying to achieve? The goal of a strong brand vision is to take abstract, lofty aspirations and boil them down into a concrete, clear, concise, and compelling statement.
When building a vision, you want to ensure it encapsulates the following qualities:
Your vision inspires. You use aspirational language to excite and inspire others about the future you envision. This applies both externally and internally. What positive impact do you want to have over the coming months and years? Use your vision to align everyone invested in your brand with a common goal.
Your vision is big—but within your capabilities. Your vision is future-focused and encapsulates a big aspiration of your brand, but your vision statement should be aligned with your real, measurable goals as well. For instance, a nonprofit food market isn’t going to end world hunger, but it might have a vision to make a meaningful impact on reducing food insecurity in the local communities that it serves.
Your vision gives you an opportunity to celebrate success. When you make progress toward your vision, you can share examples of your success and illustrate that you’re making progress toward your biggest goals.
Your vision is an important metric for measuring performance. If your vision represents the ultimate goal, it gives you a metric to define and measure how successful you are at making progress toward your vision. While a vision isn’t something you’re going to achieve overnight, it’s something you can continuously embody and strive toward in quantifiable ways.
Aligning Mission, Vision, and Values with Your Brand Messaging
Once you’ve established each of these elements, it will become clear how each influences the next. Your mission is driven by your values. This in turn allows you to strive toward your vision in a way that is authentic to your brand and your audience. Aligning mission, vision, and values helps you tell a unique brand story and a more unified brand messaging strategy.
The primary purpose of your brand messaging strategy is to tell your brand’s story. Every good story contains, at its core, some essential truth people can relate to. Messaging that incorporates your mission, vision, and values ensures you can incorporate a true story about your brand in every asset or communication and build real connections.