The Search for Value: Best Ways to Define Clear Brand Values for your Business
If you want to establish a strong culture within your business, your core brand values are critical. By defining clear values behind which you can stand as a brand, you will attract both customers and employees that share your beliefs.
It is important to give your customers and clients something they can relate to. We live in a world where consumers are looking to connect with their favorite brands. And, to create a deep bond between you and your customer base, you need to have so much more than an impressive website or beautiful logo.
While it’s true that your business’s name and voice will help you establish affinity and awareness among your target audience, your brand values are the element that delivers real engagement.
What Are Brand Values?
You need to look at your brand as a whole in order to define clear brand values for your business. Every brand has a variety of external attributes. For instance, your brand’s verbal identity is one of its external attributes.
It can outline your business’s personality and tone of voice. There is also your organization’s visual identity, which includes your logo, fonts, and colors.
But, what really brings meaning to your relationship with your customer base is the “internal” element of your brand. This internal part of your brand includes your brand values. These values should guide your proposition, personality, as well as your purpose.
Elements of Brand Values
You can’t hope to set yourself apart from the competition without clearly defined brand values. If you want to connect to your target audience in a meaningful way and create a community and culture around your brand, your core brand values must be:
Memorable: If your brand values don’t permeate everything you say and do, they won’t mean much. Your actions must represent your brand values.
If you want your brand values to have an impact on your clients, customers, and employees, they need to be able to remember them. And, the best way to ensure your core brand values will be memorable is through consistency.
Unique: Your brand values should reflect your organization’s identity and culture in a unique way. If something works for another business, it doesn’t mean it will work for yours, nor should you try to copy someone else’s brand values.
It is okay to look for inspiration in businesses you aspire to become like, but make sure to define your brand values according to your company’s unique DNA.
Meaningful: You can define your brand values by using words that sound powerful, but if they don’t have real meaning for your brand, and your company doesn’t stand behind them, it will be the same as if you picked our random phrases from the dictionary.
They will be empty. Your brand values need to include concepts you are willing to fight for if you want them to resonate with your target audience.
Actionable: Just like your brand manifesto, your core brand values need to guide how your organization operates. You need to use actionable language when defining what matters to your business.
It is also key to be specific. For example, instead of just saying you “value integrity,” you can tell your prospects that you always strive to do the right thing and you can explain and describe exactly how you do that.
Discover What Matters
You will have to move beyond terms like “friendly,” “trustworthy,” and “reliable” if you want to differentiate yourself from the rest of the crowd. While such terms are positive, they won’t portray you as a unique and powerful company.
Meditate on what you are truly passionate about and leave the idealized terms behind. We can take the iGaming portal AskGamblers as an example. The company is dedicated to helping players find secure platforms where they can sing up and play their favorite games of chance.
Because of that, the portal has instilled transparency and independence into their core brand values. They know that that’s what their target audience values the most. In the iGaming industry, trust can be an issue as there are many platforms that are big on promises, but fail to deliver on them.
The portal has identified what players look for in platforms, and what they want to avoid. To accommodate players, the iGaming portal is clear about how they operate and why they do things a certain way.
Most importantly, all of this is represented in their core brand values. When defining your brand values, choose ideals that appeal to both your customers and your employees.
Stand For Something
When telling others about your brand, how would your customers describe you? Would they say you sell the most inexpensive products? Would they tell their friends you have the best customer service?
You can grow your brand values from what your clients or customers associate with your business. For example, if you know your clients like your personalized approach to email marketing and customer service, you can make willingness to go the extra mile a part of your core brand values.
Once you discover what values your customers appreciate the most, fight for them with everything you do. Try to come up with new ways to customize your customer experience.
Stay Consistent
Your brand value proposition is something that should stay the same over time. Your colors, your voice, your logo, and even your name can change. But, if you want to inspire real brand loyalty, the principles that embody your organization need to be strong, consistent, and timeless.
But, being consistent isn’t easy if your core brand values are too complex. Think about how you can simplify what you stand for when defining your brand values. All you need is a few key words and phrases, nothing more.
The simpler your values are, the easier it will be for your employees and your customers to understand them. Your team can use them as guidance points for everything they do. To ensure consistency, your brand values should be visible in everything from your offline events to your social media posts.
Takeaway
When it comes to defining core brand values, there is no one-size-fits-all process. However, all meaningful brand values have the same elements in common. By focusing on those elements, you will be able to define clear brand values that resonate with your customer base.
