Are you living and breathing your brand values?
Are your brand values sitting forgotten in an old PDF or are they embedded into your everyday activities, providing purpose, drive and unity for your team. Here are a few ways to bring your values to life and make your brand exceptional.
Hi I’m Kiri, the Business Growth Strategist at Tiny Hunter. We’ve been talking about our values a lot lately. Actually, we talk about our values all the time. And over the years we’ve implemented a number of ways to bring our brand values to life and incorporate them into our day to day activities. There’s no point in defining a set of values that sit on a page on your website or filed away in a PDF that nobody ever looks at.
One of the ways we’ve been really successful in doing this is that we nominate each other at our weekly kick-off meeting for ways that we’ve demonstrated our company values. It’s a real feel good exercise and it also allows us to constantly check-in with our values to be reminded of the types of behaviors that we’re striving for and it unites us as a team as well. Your brand values should reflect things that are very important to you as an organisation. And talking about your values often gives your organization purpose and drive. One of my all time favourite brand values of ours is ‘We play, we celebrate’. This is all about doing good work but, having a good time while we do it. And you can see how this value might impact our culture and also the relationships that we form with our clients and the types of work that we say yes to.
When an organisation comes to us to help them in defining their company values one of the first things we ask them is to tell us about an employee or a colleague that they love working with and why. Are they out of the box thinkers? Are they experts in what they do? Are they reliable or trustworthy? The type of person you would go to just to have a good laugh? Very quickly we start to get a list of attributes that are important to that organisation. And a really great idea once you have that list is to build some words or an explanation around each value that’s unique and authentic to your brand.
A great example of this is the New Zealand All Blacks one of their core values is ‘sweep the sheds’. This is all about pitching in being a team player and staying grounded. They could have just said ‘no job is too small’. But by using a phrase, ‘sweep the sheds’ something that is very unique to their team it becomes so much more meaningful. Brand values play a really significant role in building that deeper connection between your internal team and also with your external customers. It can be the wow factor in what makes a brand exceptional. I want you to think about some ways that you can bring your brand values to life. How can you incorporate them into your day to day activities? Are there some language in there that needs slight tweaking to make it a little bit more unique to your organisation? Good luck. That’s it for me, it’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Kiri White
Published: March 1, 2023