Back in the day the family store was built upon the families values, during the 80-90’s the family values were dropped as corporations took over with catchy marketing slogans. Today we are seeing companies trying to adopt and shoe horn themselves into a set of values that either don’t fit or are so complex it takes a mathematician to explain them.
Values are simple and true!
Once you have forced yourself to really identify your values, then developing collateral, messaging and everything that hooks off them is easy.
So where do you begin? I find it easier to explore some questions:
- Why did I start my business? (Freedom, Market Gap, Poor Competitors, Your Passion?)
- Where did you begin? (Geek in the Garage, Playing Football in the street, Sitting in a pub?)
- What would I expect as a customer? (Personal Service, Excellent Customer Service?)
- Why should customers use my service or a competitor? (Passion, Quality, Commitment?)
- What would I like my staff to say about my business? (Love, Loyalty, Family?)
- What is success? (Millions in my pocket? Happy Staff, Happy Customers, Stable Business?)
Through your values, tell the story about you and your business. This personal, honest approach will always engage a potential client more than snappy slogans and stock imagery.
When you answer these questions you may come up with many different values however these may have very common threads. So try and aggregate these to their core and produce three or four values you can stand by.
Then with these three or four values identified, expand upon these with a short qualifier. So one of our core values was Freedom and we spend a great deal of time travelling to some odd places and soaking up the culture of the places we visit.
