Brand Vision: The Horizon of Development in a Brand Platform

Vision and Mission: Why They Are Often Confused More Than Distinguished

The confusion does not arise by chance. Both elements are formulated with similar words, both sound inspiring, and both live on the first page of a brand platform. However, they have different functions, and if this is not distinguished, the platform becomes a set of slogans without managerial value.

Wildberries formulates exactly this way — the second example in the table is taken from their real brand platform. This is a vision, not a mission: it describes the result over years, not current benefit. A mission answers «what we are doing right now», while vision answers «where we will be if everything works out».

Horizon of Development: For How Long to Formulate Vision

There is no single correct answer — there are three approaches, and the choice depends on the market dynamics, not on the trend toward «long-term thinking».

The error I see regularly: a company operating in a rapidly changing market sets a vision for 10–15 years and does not review it. As a result, the vision lives its own life in presentations to investors, while the team works according to a completely different logic. For markets with high turbulence, a review once every 5 years is not a sign of strategic weakness, but a necessity. This is how a development horizon is built: not as one distant point, but as several intermediate stages — 1 year, 3 years, 5 years — that lead to a long-term goal and allow for its adjustment without losing direction.

How to formulate a vision: BHAG versus 'become a market leader'

The most frequent client request is to 'make the vision inspiring'. The most frequent mistake is to end up with the phrase 'become a market leader in category X', which says nothing to either the team or the client.

Jim Collins in his book 'Built to Last' (1994) proposed the concept of BHAG — Big Hairy Audacious Goal. The logic is simple: at the moment of formulation, the vision should seem slightly overestimated, almost unrealistic. A classic example is Microsoft in 1980 with the formulation 'a computer on every desk in every home'. At that time, this sounded like science fiction. It is precisely the overestimation that creates a horizon, not a current task.

The difference between a working and a dead vision is in the specificity of the future image, not in the scale of ambition. Compare two approaches:

• Abstract path: 'Become a leading company in its category' — beautiful, but does not generate a single managerial decision.
• Concrete path: Tesla — 'Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy' — sets a specific trajectory: products, emission metrics, investments in battery production.

In practice, three methods work, which replace abstraction with a concrete image:

1. A newspaper headline from the future. The team writes a headline article about the company dated 2036–2037 year — as if the vision is already realized. This method immediately reveals whether there is a real image behind the words or just clichés.
2. 'The customer's day in 10 years'. A detailed description of one day in the life of a customer, where the brand fully solved the stated problem. The format forces discussion of specific scenarios, not market positioning.
3. One number. Instead of general words about success — a single metric that proves the achievement of the vision: the share of users, revenue volume, number of countries of presence.

A structurally functional vision consists of three components: a foreseeable future of the company and the market over the 5-10 year horizon, the brand's purpose — how people's lives will change for the better, and values that will not let the company veer off course for short-term gain.

From vision to OKR: how not to lose the horizon in operations

A vision without connection to operational metrics is a beautiful slide for investors' presentations that does not affect the work of product teams at all. The linkage is built top-down, but verified bottom-up.

1. A vision for 10 years is decomposed into strategic goals for 3 years — major directions, not tasks.
2. Goals for 3 years are broken down into annual company priorities.
3. Annual priorities are transformed into quarterly OKRs of teams — specific measurable results.
4. Each quarter is reviewed: do the achieved Key Results bring us closer to the annual goal, and does the annual goal bring us closer to the vision horizon.

If the link breaks at any of these steps — for example, the marketing department's OKRs do not correspond to any of the three-year priorities — the vision ceases to be a management tool and remains a declaration. T-Bank in this sense demonstrates a working model: the vision is directly linked to the values of 'freedom, responsibility, innovation', and these same values are used as a filter when making product decisions at the level of individual teams.

Examples: where vision drove business, and where it hindered it

Yandex formulates its vision as 'to make technology accessible to all, improving people's lives' — a broad formulation that nevertheless justifies diversification into taxi, delivery, cloud services, and media: all directions fit into one vector. Ozon builds a tighter vision — 'to be the leading online platform in Russia and the CIS' — and this directly explains the company's geographical strategy, not just its product strategy.

A reverse example is the collapse of a vision formulated without taking into account the speed of market change. Companies that, at the peak of the desktop era, fixed their vision around a specific technological platform without a horizon for review, encountered the same effect as Kodak with digital photography: the vision described the past rather than the future, and the strategy continued to serve the outdated image of the market for several more years after reality had changed. The lesson here is simple: vision is not carved in stone — it must be checked against the market on the same horizons it is designed for, rather than waiting for a complete strategy failure to review it.

A working vision can always be verified with one question: if you remove the company name from the formulation, does it remain recognizable and impossible for competitors to replicate? Tesla, Yandex, and Wildberries all answer yes. Most formulations such as 'to become a market leader' answer no, and this is the main indicator that the vision will have to be rewritten from scratch.