During unprecedented times, like global pandemics it’s really important to lean into your brand values.
Your brand values are the backbone of your brand, and actually, they’re the backbone of you as a person too, so it’s important now, more than ever to lean into your brand values. I like to think that your brand values represent the inner strength of your brand and are there even on a sub-conscious level.
Do you know what your values are?
Ideally you want a maximum of 5 brand values. A couple of questions you can ask yourself to discover your brand values are:
What’s important to you?
What’s important to you in the way you serve your clients, suppliers, and team if you have one?
And if you’re struggling to think of anything right now, try journaling on them.
Allow yourself some time to sit, breathe and journal on the above questions. You could light a candle, put some calming music on in the background – this is a really nice one on YouTube and give yourself permission to relax and bring your energy back to you. Once you get into the right frame of mind and state, you’ll be able to journal on the questions more easily.
For Mastery (a collaboration I’m a part of) we have three brand values: Community and Fun, Strategy with Soul, Alignment and Balance.
We used our ‘Community and Fun’ value recently in a virtual meet up on zoom by giving everyone a bingo card to use with things like ‘I was on mute’, ‘we can’t see you’, ‘awkward 5 minute silence’. Everyone loved it!
How can you lean into YOUR brand values even more? Let’s look at some good, better and best ways.
A Good way to lean into your values would be:
Firstly, write your brand values down on a piece of paper.
Next, take each brand value and think of 5 ways you can expand on each one in regards to your current products/services, potential new offerings, written content and visuals.
As an example, if I took mine and Lucy’s Mastery brand value of ‘Community and Fun’ – we could:
- Set our Marvels a challenge in the Facebook group for some fun.
- Ask our Marvels to join us on Facebook lives to share their positive stories around what they’ve done with their businesses during these challenging times.
- Ask our Marvels to donate items of food to their local food bank, to support their wider community and the more vulnerable.
- Set up a virtual co-working session on zoom to boost productivity.
- When everything blows over, organise a social event, like afternoon tea or bowling to bring everyone together for some fun.
Do you see how I’ve expanded on ‘Community and Fun’ and how we can bring those elements to life even more? If you do this for each of your 5 brand values you’ll potentially have 25 new pieces of content and/or new ways/ideas to present your offerings.
This is something you can do with your own brand values and it means every piece of content, service/product offering is infusing your values throughout them all. And if you consistently do this – your brand will become more consistent and more recognisable too, which will ultimately improve your market position.
A Better way to lean into your values would be:
Combining your brand values and ideal clients.
Spend some time stepping into your ideal clients shoes and asking yourself:
What are they seeing right now?
What are they hearing?
What are they feeling?
Then write all your answers down on a piece of paper, along with your brand values. With everything in mind, ask yourself how can you help your ideal clients even more?
So with Mastery, we could think, our ideal clients are juggling home schooling at the moment with running their businesses, so with our ‘community and fun’ brand value, could we give them a blank version of our Big Hairy Audacious Goal Monster so their kids could colour them in and then everyone could take a photo and share theirs online in our Marvels group. Even the members in the group who aren’t Mum’s could do some colouring in themselves too.
A Best way to lean into your values would be:
Combining your brand values, ideal clients and core message.
Every successful brand has one core message that they share, over and over and over again. And the beauty of your core message is you can expand on this too.
Your core message is that ONE message you have to get out into the world. So you could step into your ideal clients shoes, really think about how they’re feeling right now, what their struggles are, look at your core message and your brand values and look at how you can creatively share your core message even more.
If you’re going to start anywhere in leaning into your brand values more, I would start with the good way first and then once you’re consistent in that area, progress to better and best ways. Are you going to give this ago? If so, let me know how you get on.
