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Variety is one of the defining characteristics of global business in the current age. Every industry is proliferated with numerous companies offering competing products and services. Similarly, every product category is inundated with numerous product variants offered to cater to multiple customer segments. Still, some brands and products manage to outperform others and do so consistently over long periods of time.

Consider the global airline industry. On the one hand, Singapore Airlines (SIA) has been consistently outperforming the industry average and has exceeded the expectations of both customers and other stakeholders in delivering a high quality brand experience. On the other hand, many other full service airlines such as Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa or British Airways have not been able to match or better SIA in any brand evaluation metric.

More often, consultants and strategy advisers fall back on the easy economic logic to explain such variance. The difference in resource endowment, the extent of government support, access to preferable international flying routes, and many other resource-related reasons can be offered. However, none of those fully capture the underlying mechanism that differentiates the industry leaders from the also-rans.

One of the most important and often overlooked factors that separate industry-leading iconic brands from the pack is their guiding corporate mission and vision. Most companies do not invest enough resources in clearly defining, defending and leveraging these guiding charters to design effective strategies that can lead their firms to leadership positions.

Achieving corporate success and maintaining it over long periods of time in the context of ever-increasing competition is a challenging task for global brands.

Given the importance of tangible and intangible resources along with organizational capabilities in creating corporate success, most CEOs and brand managers are compelled to restrict their focus to such resources in designing their brand strategies.

However, brand leadership is as much a function of resources and capabilities as it is of visionary leadership and an underlying corporate mission that not only challenges the status quo but creates strategic blueprints that can take the brand beyond the predictable product launches and incremental innovations.

Microsoft and Apple exemplify this case. Microsoft has been the eternal leader in the personal computer industry since its founding. Given its mainstream popularity of its operating system along with the Office package, Microsoft grew into a corporate behemoth endowed with massive resources, elaborate corporate networks, entrenched individual and corporate customers and an iconic brand.

On the other hand, Apple started as a niche player that catered to a small segment of technologically savvy customers that preferred the latest technology and high, differentiated quality over low cost. All along Apple chose a strategy of innovation and pathbreaking products over mass market leadership and market share. Yet, in the last five years, Apple has overtaken Microsoft in both brand loyalty and market capitalization.

This demonstrates the power of visionary thinking and rallying around the strategic blueprints offered by corporate mission and vision statements.

Broadly, corporate mission statements signify the company’s purpose as reflected in its priorities and responsibilities to multiple stakeholders. Similarly, corporate vision statements lay out the broad aspirations of the company within the general scope of its mission.

While most companies ceremoniously design these statements, iconic brands that command dominant market leadership positions actively leverage these blueprints to build, defend and nurture their brands.

Such statements help in a number of ways. They offer clear boundaries for stakeholder-brand interactions. They help create strategic priorities, which are key in defining strategic scope. Finally, they align strategy with customer needs. Such benefits show that mission statements are a key to success for global brands.

Martin Roll is a global business and brand strategist. His Web site is at http://www.martinroll.com.