It is clearly important for an organization's mission to be consumer focused. As highlighted by the Marketing Myopia article, if you focus on the product the company can fail to see changes in the needs and wants of consumers. For instance, the US Postal Service's mission is "The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities." The Postal Service is focused on the act of carrying mail instead of providing communication. This might be part of the reason (along with legal restrictions) why the Postal Service finds themselves in the situation they are in now.
The mission of the Colorado Springs CVB was revised just a couple of months ago. It now reads "We bring more visitors to Colorado Springs at Pikes Peak." Personally, I don't think it is customer focused at all. There is nothing that is inspirational and motivates the employees to aspire to fulfill the mission and to drive toward excellence. Because we market a product but aren't responsible for fulfillment of our marketing promises, it is hard to really measure how well we as an organization do against the mission.
In general, the employees of the CVB do try to do their best for the customer, but only to the extent that doing our best is within our company norms. We definitely don't take risks to push the envelope of what is possible and we definitely don't invent on behalf of the customer. With a recent leadership change, I am hopeful this will change in the future.
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