Mission & Vision Statement Templates [Simple Steps, Examples & Templates]

Mission & Vision Statements are a great way to humanize and add emotion to a company, business, or brand. Mission & Vision Statements make businesses attractive to investors, customers, and employees. Your mission statement shapes your company and impacts everything from marketing to internal communications. Your vision statement shows what your company is solving for and where it is headed. If you don’t know how to write a mission & vision statement for your company, we’ve got you covered!

In this article, we’ll explore what a business mission & vision statement is and how to write one.

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Let’s dive in!

TL; DR

• A business mission statement is a concise and clear way to communicate a company’s goals to customers, investors, employees, and stakeholders. 
• A business vision statement is a written document that describes where the business is headed and what state it will be in when it reaches its goal. 
• Mission and vision statements help employees stay focused and customers develop an emotional bond with the company. 
• To generate a company mission and vision statement, you need to follow a five-step process and finally integrate your statement with your workflow. 
• If you need an AI assistant to help you with your mission and vision statement creation process and support you with tasks such as rewording or idea writing, ZenoChat is designed for you.

What is a Business Mission Statement?

A business mission statement is a concise and clear way to communicate your company’s goals to customers, investors, employees, and stakeholders. A mission statement should usually be one sentence or one paragraph long. Your business mission statement explains what your company does for customers, employees, and owners.

What is a Business Vision Statement?

A business vision statement is a written document that describes where a company is going and what it will be when it reaches its goal. Vision statements are used to describe the idealistic emotional future of a business and to humanize organizations so that customers, employees, and investors can emotionally connect with a company or understand its purpose from an emotional perspective. A business vision statement can be as short as a sentence or as long as several paragraphs.

Benefits of Mission & Vision Statements

Mission and vision statements have different benefits for your business or organization. The first of these benefits is that a mission statement gives your organization a target to focus on and a strong sense of direction that influences decisions, strategies, and future plans. This way, your employees can focus on the bigger picture of your business, work more efficiently, and make more accurate decisions. Some of the benefits of mission and vision statements include:

• Provides Direction
• Measures Success
• Aids Recruitment
• Unite Teams
• Provides Accountability
• Improves Internal Branding

How to Write a Company Mission & Vision Statement?

Now that we’ve covered what company mission and vision statements are and their benefits, it’s time to explore how to write one! To write a company mission and vision statement, there are some preparations you need to make and onboarding plans that you need to prepare for your statement. Let’s look at the steps you need to complete to write a company mission & vision statement.

1-) Ask Questions and Identify Themes

The first thing you need to do to determine and write your company mission and vision statement is to answer a few questions. Instead of answering these questions on your own, you need to gather founders, stakeholders, and top executives and develop common answers with them. The first questions you need to answer are:

• What do we do?
• Why does it matter?
• Who is our target audience?
• What are our SWOTs?
• How does our product or service have influence?
• What is our goal?
• What impact do we have on our community?

After you answer these questions and note everyone’s answers, you need to answer additional questions that are related to the answers.

• What is our key differentiator?
• Which mission statement resonates with us?
• Which description feels right?
• What common themes were written?

After answering these questions, you can start writing a mission & vision statement by combining repetitive phrases and ideas. Remember, your mission & vision statements should be clear enough for everyone to understand and convey core values ​​to managers and employees.

2-) Create a Draft

After meeting with stakeholders and team leaders to address key questions, the next crucial step is drafting your mission and vision statements. For this process, consider involving employees from public relations, marketing, and content departments. These teams typically have direct interactions with customers and a deep understanding of the brand's positioning, making their input invaluable. During this stage, facilitate a collaborative session where you can gather and synthesize everyone's ideas. This approach allows you to capture diverse perspectives and refine the wording to create compelling and representative statements.

3-) Ask for Feedback

Your business mission & vision statement drafts may convey the core message perfectly for you, but it may not always be the same for customers. For this reason, you can get feedback from customers and other employees about your mission & vision statements. Questions you want answered when you request feedback include:

• How does a mission or vision statement make you feel?
• What part of the mission statement did you not like?
• What would you change?
• Is it missing something?

4-) Finalize and Share

Once you have prepared your mission & vision statement draft and collected feedback, you can move on to the finalization phase. Once you arrive at the final form, update all company materials to reflect the new statement.

5-) Documentation

After crafting your mission and vision statement, you need to integrate it into employee-focused documents. Since your mission and vision statement outline your business’s future goals and how it will position itself, you need to tailor your new workflow to that end. If you need an assistant who can help you integrate your mission and vision statement into your documents and easily handle knowledge management tasks, ZenoChat by TextCortex is designed for you.

ZenoChat: Implement AI to your Mission & Vision Writing Process

ZenoChat is an AI assistant developed by TextCortex that offers AI content generation, knowledge management, web search and seamless integrations. With ZenoChat, you can generate any text-based content including mission & vision statement ideas. Moreover, if you want to visualize your idea, ZenoChat offers DALL-E 3 powered AI image generation. Moreover, ZenoChat is available as a web application and browser extension that is integrated with 30,000+ websites and apps.

Knowledge Bases

Although it is possible to have ZenoChat generate basic mission & vision statements without giving it any context, the most efficient way to use it is to use the knowledge bases feature. 

ZenoChat's knowledge base is a knowledge management tool that lets you upload your internal data and documents and use them to produce AI-generated output.

You can upload documents or projects containing the data you want to include in your mission & vision statements to ZenoChat and generate mission & vision statement ideas. Moreover, using our knowledge bases, you can streamline your workflow and increase your company's productivity. See the results from one of our case studies:

• TextCortex was implemented for Kemény Boehme Consultants as a solution to tackle these challenges and today employees report increased efficiency and productivity (saving 3 work days per month per employee on average).
• AICX, an ecosystem partner of TextCortex, was integral to the onboarding and helped achieve a 70% activation rate of the team within the first weeks.
• Employee confidence in using and working with AI increased by 60%.‍
• The implementation results in a 28x return on investment (ROI).

Mission & Vision Statement Examples

[Insert YOUR Mission Statement Here]

A mission statement delineates a company's core purpose and objectives. It provides clear direction and intent, guiding the organization's trajectory and stakeholder engagement, including employees, customers, and partners.

An exceptional mission statement is precise, engaging, and memorable—akin to an advertising slogan that resonates with its audience. It conveys the organization’s immediate focus and the value it seeks to provide, inspiring stakeholders to connect and collaborate with the company. Essentially, a mission statement is a present-focused declaration that encapsulates the organization's purpose and actions.

Examples:

• Tesla: To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
• Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• TED: Spread ideas.
• Facebook: To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
• Disney: To entertain, inform, and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling.
• Southwest Airlines: To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.

[Insert YOUR Vision Statement Here]

A vision statement articulates where the organization aspires to be in the future. It serves as a strategic guide for decision-making and goal setting across the company, aligning efforts with its core philosophy and long-term objectives.

A vision statement is forward-thinking, ambitious, and inspirational—outlining a future ideal state that the organization strives to achieve. It’s a beacon that illuminates the path towards significant, overarching goals, offering a strategic framework to shape the company’s journey.

Examples:

• Amazon: To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
• LinkedIn: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
• Microsoft: To help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.‍
• Toyota: To lead the way to the future of mobility, enriching lives around the world with the safest and most responsible ways of moving people.
• ‍Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.‍
• Samsung: Inspire the world, create the future.

Both the mission and vision statements are critical components of an organization’s strategic planning. While the mission defines the company's present activities and purpose, the vision outlines its aspirations and desired future impact. Together, they shape the organization's culture, guide operations, and communicate its core values and ambitions to all stakeholders.