Walking down the hall of one of my client’s corporate offices last week, I saw these six power words artfully displayed in tall, bold letters on a wall. The letters must have been at least 18 inches high and the black printing against the white walls caught my full and undivided attention. The words were:
Imagination
Creativity
Fun
Learning
Caring
Quality
These are the LEGO® brand values. As they say on their web page, “The LEGO brand is more than simply our familiar logo. It is the expectations that people have of the company towards its products and services, and the accountability that the LEGO Group feels towards the world around it. The brand acts as a guarantee of quality and originality.”
Does it all start with personal values?
I was in a friend’s house last week and saw this piece of artwork hung in the entryway from their garage to their kitchen. Notice the clever positioning of “Family Rules.” Although intriguing and filled with positive ideas, there are certainly are a lot of rules to follow. Argh!
I wonder if the people who live in this house stopped noticing this visual communication after a while.
I imagine them walking right on by, unloading their groceries, coming in from work/school, without a second glance at this family manifesto.
And isn’t that what we all do? Slip back into unconscious awareness and old behaviors? How often do we lose sight of our organizational and personal mission statements, and go on automatic pilot in our daily lives?
It got me to thinking about my own brand values.
What expectations do my clients, customers and friends have of my products, services and brand? How do other people experience me? How do I want them to experience me?
I’m wondering if you’ve spent any time pondering these questions for yourself. And not just for your organization, but for your own personal brand? What are the core principles that you strive to live each and every day?
As you read the rest of this blog post, please do so through the perspective of your own personal brand values.
Corporate branding versus personal branding
Over the course of my marketing career, I have spent many long hours writing, rewriting, brainstorming, facilitating, and unearthing vision and mission statements for various organizations. It can be a tortuous process, involving many people and many long hours. I am sure this is where the expression “getting caught up in your underwear” originated from. In the end you have an unusual outcome – a statement of purpose that most people keep at a safe distance.
Marketing thought-leaders have tried to simplify the process. For example, Guy Kawasaki promotes Mantras versus Missions. “A mantra is three or four words that explain why your produce, service, or company should exist.”
Other people have tried to reinvent the process of getting to a vision/mission by calling it a “Manifesto,” or “Axiom” or “Credo.”
How do large, successful companies express their brand values?
I was curious about what brand values that other large, successful organizations have.
Starbucks serves up their brand values a little differently than most (but then, you’d expect that). I have summarized in one or two words what I believe each of their six pillars stands for:
- Our Coffee (Quality)
- Our Partners (Diversity)
- Our Customers (Human Connection)
- Our Stores (Humanity)
- Our Neighborhood (Responsibility & Community)
- Our Shareholders (Accountability)
Google brand values are expressed through a philosophical manifesto “Ten things we know to be true.”
- Focus on the user and all else will follow
- It’s best to do one thing really, really well
- Fast is better than slow
- Democracy on the web works
- You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer
- You can make money without doing evil
- There’s always more information out there
- The need for information crosses borders
- You can be serious without a suit
- Great just isn’t good enough
Amazon’s mission statement was harder to find. Every time I queried the phrase Amazon’s mission statement, the web site tried to sell me a book. Go figure? I finally found a short mission statement on the FAQ page of Amazon’s Investor Relations page of their web site:
“We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company for four primary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators.”
Further research into founder/CEO Jeff Bezos’s bio landed me on this page http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0bio-1 where I garnered a little more insight into the founder’s vision and core values. “Our vision,” Mr. Bezos said, “is to be the world’s most customer-centric company. The place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
Six Core Values of Amazon:
- customer obsession
- ownership
- bias for action
- frugality
- high hiring bar
- innovation
Put this idea into action
So that you’ve seen how the big boys do it, it’s time to identify your own personal brand values. This is not an exercise in copycat, although you might have recognized something of yourself in these icon company’s brand values.
Make a list of words or phrases that you live by. Include principles that you deeply care about. Don’t worry about how other people will react or perceive your values, just capture them on paper.
Write a few sentences about what these words/concepts mean to you. Use a journal to capture your free spirited thoughts.
Now, create some sort of visual picture of your personal brand values. I like to use Wordle.net to create a word montage. They call it a Word Cloud. I call it a motivating piece of visual communication. Here’s my Wordle visual depiction of my personal brand values as I understand them today:
References
- http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/lego-group/the_lego_brand/
- http://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/mission-statement
- http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq#14296
- http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0bio-1
- http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/mantras_versus_.html#ixzz3AkU27dk9
- http://www.wordle.net/
