What are brand values?
Brand values are the core principles and beliefs that guide your brand’s actions, decisions and communications. These values influence everything from marketing strategies and customer interactions to product development and corporate social responsibility.
At Woven, we like to give brands souls, from the mission and vision statements we craft to the brand’s look, sound and feel. So, to us, we see brand values as the soul of your business expressed as the actions you want it to take.
Seven reasons why you need brand values
Brand values are crucial for a company for several reasons:
Differentiation
Market stand-out: Brand values are brand distinguishers. They help you craft an intriguing, engaging identity that attracts and retains customers who share similar values to you.
Brand singularity: Values help craft your brand identity, giving you distinction in a sea of sameness. And if you can craft that identity around a single, big brand idea (Amazon: convenience, Nike: self-made heroism, Patagonia: saving the world), then so much the better.
Build trust and loyalty
Establish credibility: Consistently demonstrated brand values build stakeholder trust. When customers see that a company’s actions align with its values, they’re more likely to trust and remain loyal to it.
Connect emotionally: Values resonate on an emotional level, helping to create a deeper, more meaningful relationship with your workers and customers.
Guide decision-making
Consistency in actions: Brand values provide a framework for making decisions that align with the company’s core principles. This ensures consistency in how the company operates and interacts with stakeholders.
Clarity in strategy: Clear values guide strategic planning and help prioritise initiatives that align with the company’s long-term vision.
Attract and retain talent
Employee alignment: Employees who share the same values and behaviours are more likely to be engaged and committed to the company, becoming a positive advocate for it. Imagine if you could encourage all of your employees to promote the brand across their networks?
Workplace culture: Strong brand values contribute to a positive workplace culture, which can improve job satisfaction and retention. It also helps employers find those are will be the best long-term fit.
Customer advocacy
Word-of-mouth marketing: Customers who identify with a brand’s values — and, more important, can see it in action — are more likely to become advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth and driving organic growth.
Brand loyalty: Values-driven customers tend to be more loyal and can even forgive occasional missteps if they believe in the company’s underlying principles. Elon Musk and Tesla being the best example of this, whereby the sins of the (ex) CEO are forgiven because of the mission they’re on.
Support long-term growth
Sustainable success: Companies that adhere to strong values are often more resilient and better positioned for long-term success. Their commitment to their principles can help them navigate challenges and adapt to changes in the market. They also act as guiding stars in tough times, and help you emerge from them stronger than ever.
Reputation management: Consistently acting in line with brand values maintains a positive reputation — crucial in today’s interconnected and transparent world. But don’t fall foul of them. If you have a principle, you must live it, or else audiences will be see it as mere valuewashing.
Enhance brand storytelling
Compelling narratives: Brand values provide a foundation for compelling and authentic storytelling, which can enhance marketing efforts and create a memorable brand narrative. Values-driven stories can engage audiences more effectively, as they evoke emotions and reflect shared beliefs.
How to create brand values
Before we get to our how-to list, a piece of advice: don’t make your brand values boring. By which we mean, don’t just trot out the same adjectives every other business uses. ‘Integrity’, ‘Communication’, ‘Sustainability’.
If brand values help define and express your behaviour, you need to go deeper and really understand what makes you tick. What will drive your success. What will attract the best talent.
To do that, make your values interesting, different, compelling. Use language that sticks in the brain and that makes your values as unique as you are.
So, with that in mind, here’s how you can workshop your brand values:
Identify core beliefs: Consider the foundational beliefs that drive your business. What motivates you? What motivated the founders? What inspired your company mission and vision statements, and the impact you want to make?
Understand your audience: Know your target audience and what they care about. What are their pain points? What problems are you solving for them? Align your values with those of your customers to foster a deeper connection.
Spy on the competition: Look at your competitors to make sure your brand values are distinctive and not just a repetition of what others are saying. Again, go back to what makes you unique and express that in your language. Even if you share values with your competitors, you can at least make them sound more intriguing.
Involve the team: Include employees, partners and other stakeholders in the process to ensure the values speak for all of you. That way, everyone will be more receptive in living and breathing your values.
Incorporate the values into your brand: Reflect your values in every aspect of your business, from marketing materials to customer service and corporate policies.
Communicate consistently: Regularly communicate your values to your audience through storytelling, brand messaging and company actions. Remember, you want to live up to your values, which means taking time, effort and — yes — money to organise events, perks and well-being initiatives for your colleagues. That’s how you can improve your reputation, which will improve your bottom line.
Review and Adapt: Periodically review your brand values so they remain relevant and resonant with your colleagues, customers and business goals.
Four great examples of brand values
Patagonia
Patagonia are as well-known for their beliefs as they are for their clothes. They go hand-in-hand, in fact, and create that rarest of marketing goals: brand loyalty. Their brand values language reflects this, where they say ‘Environmentalism’ instead of ‘Sustainability’, ‘Justice’ instead of ‘Integrity’:
- Environmentalism
- Protect our home planet. We’re all part of nature, and every decision we make is in the context of the environmental crisis challenging humanity. We work to reduce our impact, share solutions and embrace regenerative practices.
- Justice
- Be just, equitable and antiracist as a company and in our community. We embrace the work necessary to create equity for historically marginalized people and reorder the priorities of an economic system that values short-term expansion over human well-being and thriving communities.
Tesla
Like Patagonia, Tesla’s brand is way bigger than its product. It’s about futurism, environmentalism and, as the following value attests, having fun:
- Make it (ridiculously) fun
- After safety, our goal is to make every Tesla the most fun you could possibly have in a vehicle. We build features that make being in your vehicle more enjoyable—from gaming to movies, easter eggs and more.
- Power Earth
- We design sustainable systems that are massively scalable—resulting in the greatest environmental benefit possible. Our energy generation and storage products work together with our electric vehicles to amplify their impact.
Ferrari
As you might expect with a brand pulsing with Italian spirit, Ferrari’s values are soaked in artful and evocative language:
- Passion and achievement
- Ferrari’s racing spirit lives on in emotions that transcend the road and the track, ultimately becoming an authentic attitude towards life. Nothing excites us more than setting ambitious targets and expectations – and then exceeding them. It is how the power of passion becomes the beauty of achievement.
- Individual and team
- Our talented individuals can only pursue the extraordinary by working as a team. By fostering integrity, excellence and generosity, we give each of our people the possibility to express their own full potential — and be part of something greater.
Halstock
Our work with pioneering interior architects Halstock saw us craft brand values that reflected their creativity and ambition:
- Unconventional wisdom
- Every job is different, but every job has one thing in common: it will present unforeseen challenges. At such times, conventional methods won’t work, so we find new ways of doing things, pooling ideas from the team to overcome problems and deliver outstanding results. We plan meticulously, but when plans change, it’s our creative thinking that wins the day.
- Best is a habit
- We sell a guarantee of success. Being able to do this means working together to get things right first time. It means that being meticulous, professional and creative are habits for us, formed by rigorous process and clever thinking. And it means never settling, because you only stay the best by trying to make best better.
Value your values
Brand values are the core of your business. They define you at your best. They help you attract like-minded customers — and colleagues. They can inform creative campaigns, your brand tone, mission and vision statements, and your overall brand activity.
Which makes them very powerful things indeed. So when creating yours, don’t just spend five minutes asking Google or ChatGPT what they should be. Gather the troops, do some workshops and capture what makes you special — so the world sees you as you deserve to be seen.
Or better yet, ask us to help you.