Today I want to talk about brand values and why they are a really important part of creating your brand strategy.
Whether you’re a marketing manager or business owner looking to set new standards within your business, these simple brand value strategies will help ensure you attract the right partners, customers and staff into your business.
How brand values form part of the vision
One of the reasons why it’s really important because your brand values not only form part of the vision of the business, in terms of where it’s going but also the foundation of how the business is going to be built from the ground up.
In fact, your values can have an impact on things like the kind of standards that you set in your business, so things like what kind of level that you want to play at, and also, your values then can have an impact on formulating your client avatar.
When you know your brand values and you’re clear on those brand values they will also help you work out what kind of clients, customers that you want to either, not just market to, but obviously attract to the business.
Brand values can impact the colours used in your branding
The other reason why they’re really important is actually that your brand values can also have an impact on the colours that you use for your branding. For example, if you go on the internet and you look at colour psychology there are lots of different colours that relate to different types of values and energy.
For example, the word trust is synonymous with things like the colour blue, and then there are other colours that are more creative in energy, like orange.
When you really think about your brand values you can actually use them to choose the right colours for your business and your brand, and it can make a difference in terms of, attracting the right or wrong customers to your business.
Brand values categories
You can break brand values into two categories. First, you’ve got your core brand values, which, form the core foundation of the business in terms of standards and who you are and what you stand for. And then, for example, you are developing a brand campaign that’s for a specific product and service, you would then have a number of extra keywords or values that you think that are important to a specific project.
For example here’s an example we created for an engineering company … They had built their business to a certain level, but in order to go to the next level up they needed to invest in a brand campaign that would stand out from their competitors, and this meant getting clear about their values and the kind of customers they wanted to attract.
So before we did any kind of creative work
We took time to look at the brand values of the business, and as you can see, there’s a real mix of different words. Some of them are about the business, words like strength, prestige. The main thing was that the words were important to the business from a core perspective, but also product specific keywords as well.
Another area that we’re seeing an increase in…
are companies looking to make their business more purpose driven, and a lot of businesses at the moment are, reviewing their standards, In fact I was watching a video featuring the CEO of a venture capital company who was doing a talk at the New York Stock Exchange who said he had seen a 700% increase in companies wanting to be more purpose driven. That’s pretty interesting.
So, what if you are looking to add some kind of social responsibility to your business? A good resource for this is the UN Global Goals. I believe they were brought out in 2015, and I think there are about 12 goals* which look at different areas in the world that they see as being really important to focus on and improving. I know myself, I’ve had a look at them, picked out a couple of things that I know that are really integral and important to me, not just personally but also as a business owner.
Another great resource I use is a platform called GeniusU. It’s an entrepreneur network, which is free to join. On there you can find a series of individual micro degrees that can help you review and find both the values and purpose of your business.
And of course, I’ve integrated the links into this article of any of the above resources that I’ve mentioned.
So… When was the last time you reviewed your brand values? Are they aligned to your business and own internal brand standards?
I really hope you enjoyed the tips that I’ve shared today, and obviously, please either give me the thumbs up or leave a comment below, if you have story or experience about how changing your brand values improved business performance and reputation? I’d love you to share.
Correction: *actually 17 UN Global Goals