5 Ways To Define Your Brand Values

Let’s talk about five exercises that you can use to define your brand's core beliefs. My name is Bipul Barnwal, and I'm a Digital Marketing Manager cum Brand Strategist at the ADG Group. I help entrepreneurs change the world with what they know. We do this by uncovering their innate brand advantage so they can grow their business and impact more people.

Your brand's core values are an incredibly important part of your core brand strategy. Instead of just thinking about them as values, which seem kind of maybe stagnant or not as easy to apply, right? It's just something that's internal. I like to think about your values as your point of view statements.

So, it's actually dictating the way that you operate in the world and what you talk about in the world because your beliefs are what create your identity and your brand's beliefs, which are a synonym for me, with your brand's values are what guides your brand's actions.

But, sometimes, it's not obvious what those core values or beliefs or point of view statements are. So, we're gonna do five different exercises to help uncover what's already inside of you.

I like to say that every entrepreneur is a genius and I believe this wholeheartedly but sometimes, you just need help articulating what's already inside of your head or translating it into consumer-basing cues.

Whether that's your messaging statements, or your visual language, like your logo and your colors and your font, etc. That's why people like me exist to help you translate what's already there.

The first exercise that I recommend for my clients, and you, dear reader is the "I Believe..." exercise and it is pretty much that simple.

So, you're going to pull out a piece of paper, number it on the side all the way, as far as you can go. So, one through twenty, one through twenty-five, and every sentence on that piece of paper you're going to start with the two words "I believe".

So, what literally do you believe about the world? So few of us, not nearly often enough do we sit down and actually articulate "what do you believe to be true about the world?" And if you don't know these things, if you haven't taken the time to reflect and articulate on them, then it's going to be really hard to bring them forth in your business.

So, the first step is just to articulate them. If you've seen other pieces of content you've probably heard of this exercise but if you haven't done it yet you really need to. It's super, super powerful.

When you're writing your belief statements, you don't have to just think about your product or service specifically.

Write I believe statements about your industry and then about really big human topics like: what do you believe about success? What do you believe about family? About relationships? About work-life balance? What do you believe about personality? Does it change? Do people change or are people always the same?

Think about whatever topics kind of trigger you or just get you fired up and write an I believe statement about that. This isn't to say your belief statements aren't ever going to change. We're humans, we evolve. Of course they're going to change.

But if you don't ever take the time to write down what you believe now, you won't be aware of that and you won't be able to use it in your brand. So, write all these belief statements. You can always make a judgment call later if you want to incorporate something into your brand messaging or not but give yourself permission to go beyond the obvious scope of your business.

Okay, exercise number two in uncovering your brand's core values to finish the prompt, or the question, "This is the change that we want to see in the world" so in other words, what is broken? What's wrong with this world? What do you want to see changed? What are you being called to actually improve in this world?

I mean, we have more problems as humanity than we can count, right? There's stuff going on in every corner in the world, in every aspect in our lives, that could be improved. But, what are you being drawn to uniquely? What is your individual quest or mission to change?

Alright, exercise number three is to think about your brand's legacy. The one exercise or the one way of framing this that really made a difference for me is to think about: what impact does my brand have to my client's grandchildren? What is the legacy? What's that ripple effect of not only the people I'm helping right now, but how does that impact their children? Or their friends? Or their other people in their family? And, once you start to think about that ripple effect, you get down to that stuff that really matters.

Like for me, if I can help somebody grow a successful business that naturally attracts their ideal clients to them, I'm showing their children that entrepreneurship is viable, that it is a possibility, that it's not just a pipe dream. It's something that you can choose to do and it doesn't have to be impossible or you don't have to wait for permission from somebody else to assign you some value. You get to decide your value. You get to decide how you best serve the world and you can build a business around that.

So, that gets me all fired up. So, think about your product or service and what are the residual effects on other people. What's the stuff that's so strong that it's actually going to ripple out over time and over more relationships?

Core value exercise number four is to start curating your bothers list. Now, this is the flip side of beliefs. So, especially if you had a problem filing out that first exercise of all the I believe statements, start to pay attention to the stuff that pisses you off. And, I get it, this isn't the most fuzzy and light bringing of all activities but it can be extremely illuminating. So, if you just start to pay attention to when somebody either triggers you online or just says something that you don't agree with, start to curate a list of these things as your bother's list because I can guarantee you that if you have a list of these, you'll be able to flip them around into your own belief statements.

And you now have this strong point of view because you're disagreeing with some idea, you don't have to necessarily disagree with a specific person, but if you disagree with an idea, that gives your brand a unique and compelling point of view based off of your core beliefs, your core values.

Alright, and final exercise, number five, about discovering and uncovering your core brand values is to list out your non-negotiables. And, you can think about this in different frames, right?

So, what are your non-negotiables for a well-lived day? For me, it's like spending time with my spouse. It's having the freedom to honor my energy and go work out in the morning. It's about creating content, creating valuable stuff for people. Maybe just beautiful stuff. And then you can also startto widen that time frame.

So, what are your non-negotiables for an awesome week or month or year? And those are going to start to point out to you what your core values are. And again, depending on how much intersection there is between you as a person, and then your company, because sometimes companies are larger entities, right? There are more team members, especially if there are other people in leadership, you're going to have a different discussion about what from each of your personal values that you're going to integrate into this company.

But as a personal brand, this discussion is easier, right? It's authentic to just use your own. It's not like you're going to make up values that you don't really believe in. That wouldn't make sense. You're just going to uncover your own personal beliefs and use those for your brand.

So, there's a little bit of juggling there to do if you have a larger team. But, these exercises are going to be very, very useful, no matter what size your company is to start uncovering some of these strong, core values for your brand that you can use to inform your clients, your decisions about how to treat your customers, what products to develop, everything. Have fun. Let me know what your favorite one was. Let me know which one you enjoyed the most in the comments section.

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