By Jonathan Winch, Partner & Co-founder
The telecom provider Telia has spent a lot of time and money on such statements. But their customers rate them at the bottom of the customer satisfaction scale (Markedsføring magazine, 23.03.10).
I visited a Telia store recently and became highly irritated with their service. They refused to bend a harmless rule to help fix a problem they themselves had created for me. The difficulty was one of having the wrong attitude toward their customers.
Leaving that store, I decided to sneak into another Telia store to see if they might be more flexible and the girl behind the counter helped me immediately. Her attitude made all the difference.
When people ask me to create a vision/mission that consists of a bunch of statements (something they often do), I just can’t see the value. And I typically advise them not to do it. Unless they do it right, that is…
There are essentially two types of vision/mission projects: The first are highly creative efforts that result in something most people like and think was worth it. They are the results of big, expensive processes and get implemented in companies like Carlsberg, LEGO or Nike. I can recommend them if you have the cash and time.
The second is the text-by-the-meter model where you write a lot of stuff from the company’s “We” perspective. That always results in paragraphs that you yourself would never read and which you therefore can’t expect others to want to read, either.
Without the big process, the only thing you can do is to string a lot of clichés together in prose – i.e. the second type. And that’s what we can do for you if you want us to, of course. It would take about 4-5 hours. No input is required – we just pull the clichés out of a rather worn old hat. Of course, I believe that it would be against any good brand to do so.
But there may be other internal or external pressures that require it to be done this way. The reason I’m so tough on this is that times have moved far away from long paragraphs of blowing the company’s own trumpet. People don’t believe it like they (maybe) used to. It’s just another sign that the company is not a leader – because leaders are action-focused, have a simple but powerful attitude, show that they know the customer’s time is short. Employees don’t get behind this stuff, either. They get motivated by the excitement of working with a company, not by management statements and rules.
It’s not about looking like everyone else, but about looking different in an interesting, exciting way. So let’s cut to what is really important. Let’s drop those stiff corporate statements that waste management time and no one can remember anyway. And let’s focus on expressing and living an attitude instead. So the answer is? Create an attitude with edge and express it via text, images and interactions. That works much better!
If you want to see how, just ask us.
