Welcome back to part 3 in this series on developing your brand. If you missed our first two posts from this series, you can view them here and here. This time, we’ll look at how you can define the values that will make up your brand.

Take the information from your audience research

To start defining your values, it’s important to look back at the audience research you’ve conducted from part two in this series. This research should have been split up into two categories, that which is relevant to the products and/or services that you offer and that which relates to the experiences you can provide beyond these areas.

When you’re looking through your research, search for common perceptions that arise either that your audiences would like to see from you or ones that they enjoy that you currently present to them. Look for patterns and consistent themes within the research and narrow down their meaning to fit within at least one value and a maximum of two both for your products and/or services and what you can provide beyond these areas. So, you’ll end up with at least two values and a maximum of four. If you have any more than four values, it can become difficult to manage them over time, so it’s best to limit yourself here so you can keep things simple.

For example, for your products and/or services you might have the values of:

Flexibility

and Quality

and for the experiences you provide beyond these areas you might have

Trust

and Inspiring

Descriptions of your values

At this stage, you’ll probably want to add a bit of detail to your values. They sound decent, but it’s not exactly clear what they mean in relation to the work you do day to day. This is why it helps to create some descriptions to go with each of your values.

If we take Quality from the example above you could define this as the following:

We always deliver work that generates clear value for our clients

This means that you’ll be able to see that you’ve broken this brand value any time that the work you deliver to a client doesn’t generate a significant level of value or if you’ve not made it clear to the client how the work will do this.

If you’d like to give even more detail to your values, you can provide some specific examples of how your actions have fulfilled each of the values and you can also create a list of ways in which you can communicate this value to your customers.

Actions moving forwards

Lastly, you should form some actions moving forwards that you can work on to fulfil your values to a greater extent and help them adjust to your clients’ needs. This is important because, just like with your marketing, your brand should develop over time to become more effective and valuable to help you grow.

If we look again at the example value of Quality you could have the following actions to provide more quality to your clients over a pre-determined timescale:

• Create a plan for adjusting working deadlines
• Increase the number of meetings with clients
• Offer additional services e.g. SEO or PPC via AdWords
• Use tools to increase efficiency e.g. Microsoft Project or Basecamp

Once these have been completed, you should define a new set of actions to perform and, therefore, continue to improve your brand.

That’s it; join us next time for a description of how you can start to implement your brand values through your brand’s tone of voice.

Do you have any top tips on branding? Feel free to share them in the comments below.