When Operationalizing your Brand, Start with Values.
Until recently, say in the last decade or so, ‘brand values’ conversations were highly insular, often created from an internal document/literature review, key stakeholder interviews, and a competitive analysis. Don’t get me wrong, those things are important elements to the work, but they don’t establish what we would call operational brand values.
Today, brand values need to activate and resonate with both internal and external audiences. They must be tied to brand and employee experience metrics. They need to apply and be actionable at the business, brand, communications, and people strategy level. They must close the gap between what a brand says and what a brand does, or they aren’t serving their proper purpose. Not anymore.
Operational brand values solve two of the biggest challenges organizational leaders are facing today.
First, internal culture, aka employee experience. At a time when the great resignation is sustaining and brands continue to struggle with finding and keeping talent, operational brand values can help fill holes and close gaps. They support congruence and continuity in the experience, mindsets, beliefs and behaviors of an entire organization. If your values don’t currently connect here, you are missing one of the biggest opportunities you have to close the gap between recruiting and retention.
Second, brand communications, aka corporate comms, sales and marketing. Brands are being held to a higher standard. They must go beyond a positioning and purpose statement to demonstrate action. Brands who can’t deliver will dwindle in comparison to those who know how to live their values out loud. Building connections with customers and consumers who share mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors are the most valuable ones to cultivate. Working with operational brand values attracts more of them.
So what does it take to do it? Here are five things to consider when thinking about or working to shift how your organization’s currently applies, adopts, and adapts what we would call operational brand values:
Give yourself space and time to do the work. This kind of work takes time. It requires a lot of foundational inputs, collective worksessions, and leadership alignment conversations. When people are working from the same mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors it means the brand does too. Operational values create conditions that are critical to building and bringing any good business and marketing strategy to life. Don’t rush it.
Build in learning (and accountability) from day one. You have to get buy-in at the highest level, especially when it comes to values work. Even if a leader has a more antiquated way of thinking, they understand the role values have played in the past. The process of creating operational brand values can simultaneously create shared understanding, language, skill, and efforts to bring them to life in meaningful and impactful ways. Find the space to integrate understanding and utility moments throughout.
Practice. Practice. Practice. Operational brand values are both the filter and the guide for how your brand is experienced, so you need to try out how they feel both internally and externally. Making brand values a strategic tool for the organization requires you to think about how it applies to everyone’s day to day work and life, hence the adding the word operational in front. You have to think about pulling brand values down as close to the ground as possible so people can see themselves in it. Trust us, the best strategic implementation, adoption, and execution happens when both employees and customers alike can see their role and impact within it.
Bring more people to the table. This is not a marketing department task or exercise, it is an organizational one. Because brand values don’t fall under any specific leadership role or department, things either stay too high-level or fall between the cracks. This work won’t live up to its potential if it can’t be integrated and internalized by the whole organization. Therefore this work must include leaders responsible for business, employee experience, partnership, communication and marketing metrics. Worksessions should include individuals who are responsible for doing the work across thought leadership, planning, implementation, and execution. Operational values require holistic inputs to truly drive impact.
Know your challenges. Projects like these always benefit from identifying the “soft” challenges that are often the culprits of what stops this work from reaching implementation and adoption phase. Think leadership misalignment, resources and rigor gaps, and process issues. We provide a gap analysis that gives our partners a holistic view of the who, what, and how before we dive into this kind of work.
Brand values need to be codified into the culture. They must become everyone’s responsibility. They must impact the day to day. They must live on beyond a leader.
If something here sparked a question for discussion or sounds like the work that’s currently in front of you, reach out. We can help you take the next best first step.
We’ve worked with CEOs, CMOs, CIO’s and other marketing and business leaders to build a new approach to Values work. Our process is designed to operationalize every aspect of brand and communications strategy, but we always start with values.
Also a big thanks to MaryEllen Muckerman for the conversation that helped spur this article.