Company, Address Ethical Code and Mission Statement

¶ … Company, Address Ethical Code and Mission

Mission Statement and Core Values: Coca-Cola

For this paper, Coca-Cola was chosen. Finding the company's mission or values statement was actually easy. There was an "our company" link at the top of the main page, which connected to a page that listed information on the company. In the left-hand margin, there were several options, one being a link to the mission, vision, and values. It only took a couple of clicks to find what was needed, and that made locating Coca-Cola's mission statement very easy to do. Anyone wanting to know what matters to the company and what the company stands for would have no trouble finding that information.

The problem I had with the mission statement was that it seemed rather generic. Since Coca-Cola is a soft drink company, it would make sense that part of its mission statement would be "to refresh people," but somehow that came off as trite. What does Coca-Cola really think about the deeper issues of society? What it is doing, as a company, to help with anything that may be going wrong in the world today? While the company may be going a lot of good, those kinds of things do not come out in its mission of vision statement, or in its values. Most of what the company lists is generic, and could apply to any business, so it feels as though no thought was really put into identifying the company as a specific entity.

Another problem I have with the information located on the site was that it was designated to be "2020 vision" as a long-term plan. Long-range planning is a good thing, but 2020 is too far away to plan how things are going to go, and with a generic, plain kind of plan, there is really nothing inspiring about the company's information. I also detest the phrase "be the brand," but that may be just a personal choice. I cannot imagine how someone could "be" a soft drink, or why they would wish to do that, for any reason. Regardless of that, it was very exciting to be able to find Coca-Cola's mission, vision, and values so easily, and then disappointing to realize that the information did not actually tell me anything and seemed as though it could belong to just about any company on the planet.

The presentation of the information was fine, however. It was neatly arranged in the middle of the page, it offered short paragraphs, bolding, and bullet points, and that made all of it easy to follow. The webpage, overall, was easy to follow and well-designed, and that made reading the statement easy to do. Additionally, the fact that the company spelled things out and used formatting and paragraph breaks for ease of readability shows, to me, that Coca-Cola is proud of its mission, vision, and values, and that it wants to make sure that everyone can read what it has to say. It is also clear that Coca-Cola has a well-designed website, and that the company did not just throw something together and put it out on the web. Coca-Cola is not "resting on its laurels" and assuming that a bad webpage will not matter because the company is so large, and that is a good thing.