How to Define Your Brand's Values and Communicate Them

Most published brand values are indistinguishable from every other set of published brand values. Integrity, excellence, customer focus, innovation. They appear on the websites of businesses that behave in completely opposite ways, which is a good sign that they are not describing anything.

This is not because the businesses are dishonest. It is because defining values is genuinely difficult and there is an easy substitute available — writing down the things nobody could object to.

The test that filters out the slogans

Take each value and ask whether a credible competitor could plausibly claim the opposite. Could a rival business advertise that it lacks integrity, or is indifferent to customers? Obviously not. That means the statement carries no information — it is a baseline expectation dressed up as a differentiator.

Now consider a value with a real opposite. "We will tell you when you do not need the work" has a genuine other side, because plenty of businesses sell the work anyway. "We only take on projects we can start within a month" has a real cost attached. Statements with a plausible opposite are the only ones that mean anything.

If no competitor could ever claim the reverse, you have not written a value. You have written a minimum standard.

A value is something you give up

The most reliable way to find your actual values is to look at what the business has repeatedly chosen to lose. The jobs turned down, the customers declined, the shortcut not taken when it would have been easier and nobody would have known.

Those decisions are the values, whether or not anybody has written them down. A value that has never cost anything is a preference, and it will not survive the first quarter where honouring it would be expensive.

• List three occasions the business chose the harder or less profitable option. The pattern is usually visible immediately.
• Ask long-standing customers why they stayed. The answer is generally specific and slightly mundane.
• Ask staff what they would refuse to do here. That boundary is a value in negative form.
• Cut anything that survives none of these tests, however good it sounds.

Customers judge behaviour, not statements

Nobody chooses a supplier because of a values page. They choose based on how the business actually behaves — how it prices, whether it explains things, what it does when something goes wrong, whether it turns down work it cannot do well.

Values matter commercially when they visibly change those behaviours. Published values with no behavioural consequence are worse than none, because they invite a comparison the business will lose. A customer who reads about your commitment to communication and then waits four days for a reply has learned something more memorable than the page intended.

Communicate mostly by demonstration

The effective way to communicate a value is to show an instance of it. A case study describing a situation where you did the harder, more honest thing communicates more than any page listing the principle, because the reader draws the conclusion themselves rather than being asked to accept a claim.

Reserve the explicit statement for the place where somebody is deliberately researching who you are — an about page, a proposal, a first meeting. Everywhere else, demonstrate.

Revisit rarely

Values that change every couple of years were positioning rather than values. The point of them is that they hold when holding them is inconvenient, which is impossible if they are rewritten whenever the market shifts.

Revisit when the business genuinely changes what it does or who it serves — not on a schedule, and not because the current set has started to feel stale to the people who wrote it.

Where values become visible to customers is mostly in how you handle public feedback, which is reputation management, and in the consistency of everything you publish across social media. To talk through how yours come across from outside, ask for a proposal.