What are brand values, and why does your brand need them?
Brand values are beliefs that your company stands for. They’re a set of statements that define your direction and the way you do things in your business; whether it’s sustainability attitudes, teamwork, or simply the joy that your team retains whilst working.
Did you know that 77% of consumers buy from brands that share their values? Meaning that now more than ever, it’s important to actively set your values and communicate them clearly to your customers.
In this post, we’ll talk a little about why setting brand values is worthwhile, how to find your brand values and what to do with them. Buckle up, we’ve got an exciting ride ahead!
Why Brand Values?
They help reach the right customers
When you set your brand values, a part of that process will involve thinking about your perfect customer, what they expect from the brand and how they interact with you. So it’s not surprising that setting values based on customer experience will indeed lead you to more of those ideal customers.
But asides from that, brand values help all areas of the business, particularly branding, creative, and marketing. They’ll help build stories in content, and the way that you speak and attract your audience. In fact, story-based content can be up to 22 times more memorable than just laying out the facts.
Long story short? Set values > build stories > new ideal customers.
Improves brand experience
This feeds into our last point, but essentially your potential customers have a seamless brand experience. From the first touch point (say an email) to the last touch point (checkout) and beyond.
Having brand values will help your teams work towards this together, from your UX designers to the customer support team.
Brand loyalty
First things first, customers appreciate transparency, quite a lot actually. In fact, 94% of all consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand that commits to full transparency.
Brand values are a brilliant step toward transparency in your business, it gives your audience a chance to feel a part of your mission, what your brand stands for and how you go about business.
Displaying them in full on your website creates a considerable amount of trust, something which is truly key.
How to Find Your Brand Values
So now you know why brand values are important, but how exactly do you discover exactly what your values are?
Work with your entire team
It is so important to speak to your entire team when starting to discover your brand values, whilst the founder may have some ideas on what they should be, this is definitely a team exercise.
Maybe break off into groups, or get volunteers from each team. Either way, ensure you get varied voices with varied experiences making these decisions together.
If you want the team to uphold these values, it’s important to make everyone feel like they have had a say.
Speak to your customers
Good communication with retaining customers is essential to business growth, but also for finding out who you are, from their perspective.
Whether you speak to them one on one or hold an open meeting with volunteers, make sure you ask non-leading questions by telling them how they feel the brand is, what they admire, and what they don’t.
It’ll be great to see how this aligns with how your team feels.
Review how you do things differently from your competitors
A small exercise, but a good one. Take a look at your key competitors, and think about how you do things differently from them. Perhaps it’s that your product/service is more tailored, or you feel you are more transparent with your process. Take think about why your audience might choose you over them, this might hold a few answers in terms of your values!
What to do with these brand values?
So now you have a set of brand values, what exactly are you going to use them for…
Set your goals around them
Having defined brand values will help you set your yearly, quarterly, or even monthly goals for your business. After all these values are how you strive to do business, so let them be your starter point, and make sure that all these goals feed back into your overall values.
If you have a value around being a sustainable brand, you might set a goal to reduce your carbon footprint by x amount, which will feed into smaller bite-sized KPIs of working with your distribution provider to offset your delivery’s carbon footprint.
Keep the brand values front and centre
Setting your brand values is not a one-off, box-ticking exercise, once they’re set, you need to uphold them. Keep these brand values at the forefront of your company’s collective mind. Display them in the office, talk about them in your Town Hall meetings and make sure to regularly review how you strive towards them.
Make them accessible
There’s absolutely no point in creating brand values and keeping them behind closed doors. Make sure they’re visible to your customers, on your website, as part of your welcome email workflow, and with every story, you tell in your marketing.
Keeping them visible will help build trust between you and your customers.
This post was written by our Inner Circle member, Allie. If you’re in any need of Branding advice or help, do be sure to book a 30-minute discovery call.
