A company’s mission statement needs to accomplish two goals: It should clearly state what the company does. And it should offer an inspirational, but not overly highfalutin, message to its customers and employees.
The best retail company mission statements manage to find the sweet spot between aiming too low and saying nothing of real value and aiming too high and declaring the business’s products and superior customer service will change the world as we know it. They don’t sound like religious statements or make promises no company could ever hope to deliver on. And they’re at least reasonably truthful and easily understood.
Here are a few mission statements from retailers—in alphabetical order by company name—that could use some improvement.
Best Buy
Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy doesn’t offer a single mission statement on its website but has a lot to say about its corporate culture and values in the Jobs section of its website.
The Culture section contains a couple of sentences that could serve as the basis for a mission statement: “bringing technology into people’s lives in meaningful ways” and “make people’s lives better, easier and more enjoyable through the great products we sell.”
The things listed under Values mostly aren’t values: Unleashing the power of our people? Having fun? It’s also odd for a huge corporation to speak of humility. How would a company demonstrate humility? And who would benefit from a company being humble? And in what way?
The company also has a very large pdf of its Code of Ethics as well as statements about diversity and inclusion, conflict minerals, and human rights, among other issues. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having those things, but a company of this size could use a succinct and powerful mission statement as well.
Walmart
On its website, Walmart has a statement that speaks to what it does best—sell things at rock-bottom prices—while overselling its ability to improve people’s lives:
Customers don’t go to Walmart because they think it will help them live better; they go there to get the cheapest price on laundry detergent. And what does Walmart even mean by living better? This is probably a case where more words, not fewer, would be better.
The statement could also use some rewording because it reads like people are actually living in Walmart stores, and online, and through their mobile devices.
Zappos.com
Online shoe store Zappos.com has the most ridiculous mission statement:
Zappos.com is living and delivering WOW. Are you living WOW? Have you gotten WOW delivered to you lately? Isn’t it about time you started living and receiving WOW?
There’s more:
Consumers value companies that offer terrific customer service, but it’s silly to talk about your company’s future direction with a fill-in-the-blank.
Zappos.com also has a webpage with an awful lot of text about its 10 core values. One of them is the terribly uninspiring “Do more with less.” The others may be well-intentioned and worthy of pursuing, but they’re far from a “simple” statement of concepts the company holds close to its collective heart.
