Your brand values are your guiding principles. Think of them as your greatest importance and the words that will define your brand. These values are the very centre of your brand core and what you will always be aiming towards and providing your clients. These should be clear and succinct so that your audience can connect with them. Knowing these and showing them off will help you figure out how to create your content, what actions you are going to take, how your brand will behave, and your entire workflow.
Your guiding principles are part of everything that you do. These values are important because they influence how your audience views your brand. For example, do you want them to remember your brand as the highest quality in your industry? Then maybe you should focus on quality as one of your values.
WHY YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE
Your brand is a business on its own and in a lot of cases it should be run like a business, not a brand. As such, there will be times where you will want to make tough decisions to ensure your brand remains true to you and its own core. The values you define will be a constant reminder on what is the correct decision to make.
In addition, these values will help you in revealing your brand’s mission and vision. One of the things to take away from these values is the fact that they will be used by your audience to decide on what they want to do with your brand. In addition, your audience will want to know if your brand fits their own values. Keep in mind that your audience is more likely to become your client and support your brand if your core values align with their own.
One other thing, your core values are about your brand not you, your products, or your services. What this means is that they are full overview of your brand not about the specifics. Revealing your core values will help convert audience into clients and help those clients remain loyal to your brand.
There’s a dance happening on both sides of the table. Individuals are giving their personal and career values a lot more weight when it comes to finding a company that aligns with both. At the same time, companies are becoming a lot more transparent about their core values as an organization and the types of people they want to attract. – Kathryn Minshew
WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR VALUES
Your brand’s core values are at the centre of your brand’s core. They are what your brand is and what it does. What this means is that these core values help you start the storytelling process with your clients. Knowing your values and following through on them will help your audience connect with you past the discovery stage. Revealing these values to both yourself and your audience will help your clients become advocates for your brand.
The main thing you want to know about your values is how they connect with you, on a personal level, and if you can enforce them at the drop of a hat. Since your brand is an extension of you, it comes from you. These values should come from you as well and should be clearly defined. Now, I said earlier these values are not your own and that is still the case, but they should be based around your own so that you can connect with them.
One other thing you want to know about your core values is that they are not something you create. These values already exist as part of your brand and you want to discover what they are so you can define them for your audience and expand on them for your information.
Lastly, make sure that your values are not so generic that any brand can take them. Most people want their brand to be nice or reliable, but those are general terms that can apply to most brands. Go deeper and break it down even further into what values are important to you as an individual and to your brand as its own existence. Define any generic traits that you choose in such a way that they are specifically linked to you.
USING YOUR BRAND VALUES
You use your brand values for everything from email communications, hiring process, admin work, client interactions, marketing materials, social media, and so much more. Every aspect of your brand should answer and aspire to these values at all times. That is why the process of finding them is such a long and vigorous one.
One of the easiest ways to see how your core values can be implemented into every part of your brand is to apply them to your client journey and to your internal workflow. In order to apply your values to both of these, you must first create them both.
Also, discovering your brand values will help you in finding your unique selling points (USP) are also known as unique selling propositions. These are what make you different from your competitors and can also be pretty cool statements to put up on your marketing materials.