Let’s make a series of obvious statements:
1) Your customers are human beings.
2) Human beings share certain values.
3) Human beings, as customers, are attracted to businesses that share their values.
Simply enough, isn’t it? Well, sort of. The challenge is not all humans value the same thing. This, however, can be your opportunity too since no business or brand can be all things to all people. That is, knowing your values can help your brand differentiate itself from its competitors.
Your job as CEO and leader of your organization is to determine what values the human beings in your organization can and do share. Then you need to rally your organization and your marketing efforts around those values.
Two Reasons to Adopt Core Values in Your Enterprise
This value-based, humanistic approach to management and marketing has two powerful benefits:
1) It makes your marketing efforts immensely more effective because when you know the values you stand for it is easier to attract customers who share them.
2) It helps you create a more effective and inspired organization filled with people who are more likely to enjoy coming to work.
Either one of these benefits is reason enough to take the process of discovering your organization’s core values seriously.
Two Examples of Core Values at Work
Internet retailer Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh takes core values very serious. Zappos Family Core Values plays a central role in his organization, being integrated into their brand, their culture, and their business strategies. (If you’ve ever ordered from Zappos perhaps you noticed that one of their core values is always printed on their shipping boxes.)
Zappos core values like “Deliver WOW Through Service,” “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness,” and “Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit” aren’t just company slogans that executives pay lip service to; they are powerful ideas that are actualized in many different ways within their management practices, hiring policies, and customer interactions. These values help Zappos build a distinctive company culture as well as a unique and desirable brand that attracts loyal customers.
Lifestyle brand Life is good also integrates core values into their organizational theory and marketing approach. CEO and co-founder Bert Jacobs built his business on a single core value of optimism. The Life is good Company promotes the message of optimism on its apparel lines, on its website, at its annual music festival, and within its organization.
Join Bert Jacobs and me at NRF’s Retail’s BIG SHOW on Tuesday
I will be sharing the stage with Bert Jacobs for the keynote address at the National Retail Federation’s Annual Conference next week. Come join us on Tuesday, January 14th at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. The title of our keynote is Optimism, Compassion and Joy: How Selling the Right Mindset Can Grow Your Brand. You won’t want to miss it.