In the current globalised and digitised world, brand value has become a critical component for business sustainability, growth, and competitive advantage. The concept of brand value encompasses the perceptions, emotions, beliefs, and attitudes a company associates with its products or services, thereby creating a unique identity.
A brand’s values are defined as its core beliefs and principles that guide its activities, operational decisions, communication, and governance. Generally, brand values refer to attributes that a business wishes to be identified with how it behaves, how it wants its employees to act, and how it interacts with its audience. With the importance of brand values to business growth, it is essential how to discover brand values. This essay provides insights into the process of discovering brand values in the contemporary business world.
Step 1: Start with Internal Discovery
Internal discovery refers to the process of intrapreneurial and stakeholder involvement in identifying the company’s values. In essence, each participant contributes towards defining the company’s purpose, passions, and principles that guide its practices, communication, and activities. The internal discovery process involves reflecting on the company’s culture, beliefs, and standards of practice, ethical principles, and governance. Brands must strive to integrate employee, management, and stakeholder perspectives in defining the company’s values since it helps create a strong sense of shared values, purpose, and visions.
Step 2: Conduct a SWOT Analysis
Conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis is a critical step in discovering a brand’s values. A SWOT analysis aims to evaluate the company’s internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This helps in identifying areas needing improvement and areas where the business has a competitive edge. The SWOT analysis becomes invaluable in helping businesses identify their unique selling propositions or unique value propositions, which in turn become critical in defining the company’s core values.
Step 3: Carrying Out Market Research
Market research involves analyzing market data, consumer preferences, and trends and identifying the unique selling points of the business. It is done to obtain feedback on market opportunities and to pinpoint the most viable spot to build the brand on. To find the values that best represent the brand, businesses should also research what’s important to customers, which products are bought more and which are in demand, and which part of the market they should focus on.
Market research can be qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative research involves interviewing, focus group discussions, observation, and ethnographic research targeting the target audience. Quantitative research is often based on secondary data research.
Step 4: Create a Persona of The Target Audience
Understanding the target audience is fundamental in discovering the brand values. Consumer demographics, psychographics, and socioeconomic factors must be fully analyzed. In essence, a clear understanding of consumer needs, wants, concerns, and preferences assists in forging an emotional connection between the brand and its target audience. Marketers use personas for this purpose, a key tool in developing a comprehensive understanding of the customer.
Step 5: Develop A Unique Selling Proposition
A unique selling proposition (USP) articulates the product or service’s benefits that make it exclusive compared to competitors in the market. It is the brand’s unique quality that makes it stand out in the market. Therefore, a USP must be clear, simple, and easily understandable by the audience. By developing a clear USP, businesses can more quickly develop a clear brand identity that resonates with consumers’ preferences.
Step 6: Formulate Brand Personality
A brand personality refers to the distinctive appearance, tone, style, and general identity of the brand. The brand personality is often expressed in the tone of communication, visual identity, and sponsored activities. Much like the target audience persona, businesses must define their brand personality to create an emotional connection with customers. Brand personality cannot be defined in its own right but rather it’s a combination of tone, typography, colour, voice and brand name choice.
Step 7: Define The Brand Values
The cumulative result of the internal discovery, SWOT, research of the target audience, and the development of the USP and brand personality helps define the brand values. Values are essential attributes, beliefs, behaviours or characteristics that are characteristic of a business. Businesses can use a wide variety of methods to define their brand values, some of which include ethics, governance, legacy, culture, and mission statement. This requires honesty and transparency in reflecting the business’s essence.
Step 8: Test The Brand Values and Messaging
After identifying the brand values, it is essential to test them and the messaging in the marketplace. This involves incorporating the values into the company’s activities, messaging, and communication channels. For instance, if a business identified excellence, quality, and innovation as its core values, it must be present across all business activities from customer service, product design, marketing, and corporate responsibility. It would be best to test the values and messaging with selected focus groups to obtain feedback and revise for effectiveness.
In conclusion, discovering brand values is essential for enhancing business sustainability, competitive advantage, and identification. Discovering brand values is a process that involves internal discovery, SWOT analysis, conducting research, creating a target audience persona, developing a unique selling proposition, formulating the brand personality, defining the brand values, and testing the values and messaging. This process is ongoing since businesses continue growing, evolving, and incorporating new changes to address the dynamic business environment. Developing a clear brand identity helps businesses connect with and retain customers leading to increased sales and profits.
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