Why your brand needs values
There are millions of brands in the world all competing to be heard. Yes, they don’t all do the same thing but there’s not many businesses who are the only one of their kind. So why do customers choose to buy from one business over another?
Values are the heart of your brand. They’re what drove you to set the business up in the first place and how you behave towards people. They make up a huge part of our identity as human beings. They connect us with our friends, give us our beliefs and are what makes us strive to change things for the better. We don’t all have the same values but many of us share similar ones. That’s how long-lasting friendships and loyalties form.
In business everything comes from your values: your proposition, your personality and your purpose.
Values make your business unique
Effective branding communicates what a company stands for. It makes us feel something. Branding helps businesses form relationships with their audience and when we find a brand that shares our own personal beliefs, it takes a lot to tear us away from it. Without values there’s no unique proposition and purpose to grow your business from.
You can market a product without a brand and values but it’s a lot harder.
According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, “95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious.” We’re driven by unconscious urges and the biggest of these is emotion.
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
The reason you choose a business or brand isn’t just about price
95% of the 250,000 new products that are launched each year will fail, according to Harvard business review. We use values and feelings that they incite in us to differentiate one product or service from another.
Values create brand loyalty because when we find a brand that enables us to live by our own values, we stick with it.
How do you define your values?
Here's 3 ways you can start to define the values that are unique to your business.
1. Start with thinking about what you don’t like.
It’s often easier to understand what you don’t like because negative emotions are much more intense than positive ones. Once you’ve got what you don’t like or ‘what you’re not’ written down, try to work out what the opposite of that is which you do believe.
2. Think about the reason you’re in business.
There’s nearly always a reason why a business was created that isn’t just related to making money. Maybe you could see a better way of doing something or wanted to change your industry because of X, Y or Z reasons. Values are behaviours and beliefs and drive our actions. In understanding this, you’ll also be closer to understanding your purpose.
3. Your values should be unique to you.
What I call ‘standard values’ are things that should be a given in any business such as ‘reliable’, ‘trustworthy’ or ‘has integrity’. If you have anything down that sounds like this, try to work out if you do it in a different way or is there a better way of describing this action that is more unique? Occasionally a standard value is unique to a particular industry so explaining why it is important to your business will define it.
Once you have your values defined, write a couple of sentences explaining how you go about enacting each one. This sets out how you do business and should come across in everything you do, whether that’s through your marketing or your customer service experience.
Values are an external and internal part of your business. They affect your culture, your community and your behaviour. When they’re strongly defined, you will live and breathe them and attract employees who have the passion to drive the business forward.
By being clear on what you stand for and sticking to your values in everything you do, decisions are easier (especially in times of change) and your customers are likely to look to you for support and be loyal because they trust and believe in your business.
Get in touch if you want to explore how to refine your values to support your brand’s growth