What do we do with our Brand Values?
“We’ve listed our Brand Values on our website but what else can we do?”
There are actually many places and ways to incorporate and activate your values:
❧ Thought leadership and podcasts
❧ Web content and organization
❧ Philanthropic efforts
❧ Customer experience
❧ Design and imagery choices
❧ Employee experience
❧ Onboarding
❧ Interviews and performance reviews
❧ And more…
To do any of these, you may need to better understand where your values came from. Are they desired values or established? And how do they relate to the other pieces of your brand strategy like your purpose?
One of the first steps you should take is to link your brand values more closely with your messaging and desired employee behaviors.
Your values should be woven into your brand messaging including how you talk about your firm, your offer, how you work, and more. Creating real examples of language to use for your employees is crucial. Give them more than guidelines. Give them words to use. Write out “about us” language that can be used and customized by various functions and for various audiences.
Incorporating values into behaviors is next. Spell it out for your employees. If we want to be X, then we must Y. Explain how everyone can live each value but also show how the company lives the values and leads by example. “Here’s how we’ve done this, here’s our plan to keep doing it. Here are real proof points and examples.”
