Smart Services: Competitive Information Strategies, Solutions, and Success Stories for Service Businesses by Deborah C. Sawyer

Author:Deborah C. Sawyer [Sawyer, Deborah C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2002-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

Mission and Vision Statements Can Be Revealing

A further tactic to learn about traditional competitors’ strategies is to look for mission statements or slogans in any advertising they place or in the literature they produce.

Many in the intelligence field find mission statements useful for forecasting their competitors’ behaviors, not to mention predicting how other competitive factors, such as customers or influencers, may respond. Mission statements reveal how a company thinks and answer the question: What does it believe? Another useful indicator from a mission statement is: What values will the company apply to decision-making?1 Although law firms for many years had very staid images, in recent years many have turned to a mission statement or slogan to convey their positioning and by association what they offer to their clients. Take, for example, the statement on the letterhead of the law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain operating in Canada, which is, simply, “Business. Advice. Success.” The intent of the vision statement is to indicate that this firm, and they alone, have the capabilities to act on the concepts expressed in the statement. Similar objectives are expressed on the letterhead of financial consultants Markowitz & McNaughton: “Helping executives know the next move.” The vision offered by the Futures Group on its marketing materials is “Building Robust Strategies.” Similarly, California-based communications consulting firm MedComm Solutions explains it is “Raising the Standards of Performance in Medical Communications,” while contract research organization (CRO) APEX International, in Taiwan, states: “Our vision is to establish the most professional and competitive CRO team in the Asia-Pacific region.” And in Australia, the MindShifts Group lets us know it offers “A Smarter Way to Compete.”

This is why, when the vice president of corporate development of North American Life Insurance Company was tasked with formulating a new mission statement for his employer, he set out to gather the mission statements of several other insurers to find out how they were positioning themselves and what these statements might suggest about their overall strategy. The process took about three weeks—this was in the pre-Internet era—but the results were worth the wait. Some insurers had unwieldy statements while others had concise 5- to 10-word missions. The vice president was then able to spread these out to gain a “bird’s eye view” of his competitors, then re-group them by key themes. Some companies were positioning around their comprehensiveness of product or their pricing while others were repositioning themselves around the “solutions” they offered. The real benefit to North American Life was in spotting the gaps and locating the “unstaked turf” so it could use its own mission statement to distance the company from the competition.

Shifts in strategy can sometimes be signaled in subtle changes to a service firm’s mission statement. Such was true for Trammell Crow, a real estate developer. Prior to 1989, the company’s mission statement or vision read, “To be the premier customer-driven real estate company in the U.S.” After this time, the statement read, “To be the premier customer-driven real estate services company in the U.

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