PurposeMission statements are fairly ubiquitous, particularly among large organizations. However, if they are to have a chance of achieving the desired positive outcomes, they must first be readable and comprehensible to the targeted stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this issue, to answer the question of whether the mission statements of large companies are readable or not.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis and appropriate scores were employed to investigate the readability of the mission statements collected from a random sample of 100 firms in the Fortune 500 annual rankings.FindingsThe results indicate that on average, the mission statements of the studied companies are not that readable, and that in the case of many of them, the mission statements assume the readings skills of a university graduate.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of this paper suggest that if the target audience of a mission statement is broad, and includes stakeholders such as customers and lower level employees, then firms would do well to test the readability of their mission statements, and revise them where necessary. Mission statements are not the only tools that organizations use to communicate with stakeholder. This encourages future research on readability analysis of other communication tools in firms. A larger sample of companies and other approaches to measure readability can be included in future research.Originality/valueThis paper adds to the related literature, as the level of readability of mission statements has received limited attention in the past.

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This article analyzes 12 years of recent scholarly research on consumer behavior published in the five leading international journals in this field. Analyzing academic contributions to a specific area of research provides valuable insights into how it has evolved over a defined period. The approach was to briefly discuss content analysis and its application in scholarly literature review studies. The methodology used here involves the classification of topics to evaluate key trends in consumer behavior literature. It includes a ranking of topics published, typology of the published articles, the research classification in terms of methodologies, and analysis techniques. The most cited articles in the field and within each journal are also examined. The comprehensive literature review of consumer behavior research undertaken in this article could advance the discipline of consumer behavior research by elucidating the evolution of consumer behavior literature in the studied period.Keywords consumer behavior, content analysis, literature review, consumer behavior research, trends 2 SAGE Open behavior research as a diverse discipline with an overwhelming scope in peer-reviewed journals is necessary if the field is to progress in a systematic fashion. Moreover, although content analysis of journals can be time-consuming and data intensive, such studies provide direction into future areas of needed inquiry in the field by offering insight about the topical, methodological, and theoretical trends into research communities (Williams & Plouffe, 2007).According to Buboltz, Miller, and Williams (1999), an examination of articles published in a journal reveals the trends and issues that impact the discipline. A content analysis of journal articles within a specific discipline allows for an examination of the kinds of topics that are deemed important to the particular field the journal represents (Cokley et al., 2001). In consumer studies, marketing research, and other business disciplines, literature investigations can also provide insights into the specific journals' contributions to the field as well as the specific published works (Sattari, 2012). This, in turn, can be used to describe a discipline's intellectual history (Pasadeos et al., 1998). A comprehensive content analysis of peerreviewed journal publications in a field encourages the scholars to assess the entire "forest" of knowledge by taking a step back from their individual "trees" (Williams & Plouffe, 2007).Such studies have been conducted within a variety of disciplines based on publications in the most respected journals. Two examples are the Pasadeos et al. (1998) andWest (2007) studies reporting on the impact of advertising on researchers during different periods of time. Buboltz et al. (1999) and Cokley et al. (2001) have contributed similar studies in psychology. Others have targeted the consumer behavior field such as the studies done by Kassarjian (1977) and Helgeson, Kluge, Mager, and Taylor (1984), but there is no current review of the field....