Tobacco. It’s one of the most addictive substances on the planet.
Back in 1987, smokers were first told that it is easier to give up heroin than cigarettes.
Today, the CDC reports that nearly 20% of American adults smoke. Nearly one in five. That’s pretty bad.
In Thailand, the numbers are worse: 27% of the entire Thai adult population smokes and 46% of adult men. That’s nearly every other guy you meet!
Thailand’s government is very interested in reducing the numbers of people who smoke. They used a video campaign that draws on one of the most important psychological forces that influences people’s behavior: cultural narratives.
Every Cultural Narrative Holds a Tension
The video begins with images of people standing outdoors, smoking. A small child, not even yet into his teens, asks for a light.
In every instance, the adults refused to light the child’s cigarette. In fact, the vast majority of the adults went on to tell the child why they shouldn’t smoke at all.
One woman told the child how cigarettes contained insecticide, while another man talked about diseases associated with smoking. Still another man talked about not being able to play and have fun if they smoked.
All of these adults, the ones who are refusing to light the child’s cigarette, are sharing a contemporary cultural story with them.
In this narrative, tobacco plays the ultimate bad guy.
Cultural Narratives are Alive Within Us
The adults take on the role of wise adviser or guru in this tale. It’s their job to prepare the child with the warnings and wisdom they’ll need to prevail over the looming peril of addiction.
When we watch the adults telling this cultural tale, we see that they’re really invested in telling the story. They feel compelled to not only share this story, but to share it in the most effective way possible.
Think about the man who talked about the child not being able to play any more.
He doesn’t tell this kid, “Someday you’ll experience decreased cardiac function if you keep this up!” Or “In 30 years, you won’t even be able to think of taking the stairs!”
These statements would be meaningless to the child.
Instead, the adult focused on the benefit that would matter most to the child. He did this intuitively and automatically, reacting to the child’s request within seconds.
Connect with Your Customers Through Cultural Stories
This is a powerful demonstration of the power cultural stories have upon us. These narratives surround us, making up the subtle cultural background of our lives.
The role of the cultural story that smoking is bad, especially for children, is so pervasive that these adults felt compelled to reinforce the narrative—even though they were smoking at the time!
As business leaders, we need to understand which cultural narratives affect our customers the most. We also need to know how our customers see themselves in relation to that cultural narrative.
After hearing the adult’s reasons for refusing them the light, the children handed the adults a note, and then quickly left.
The note read, “You worry about me, but why not worry about yourself?” along with a helpline number.
Many of the adults threw their cigarettes away. All of the adults retained the brochure. The helpline experienced a 40% increase in calls.
Empowering Your Customers as Heroes of their Adventure
In Thailand, as in much of the world, the cultural norm is that we tell instructional, moralistic stories mainly to children, not vice versa.
By placing the child in the counter-intuitive role of the wise adviser, the subconscious mind of the recipient and the viewers are shocked into a new state of awareness and receptivity.
The adult who was not aware they were being taught, find themselves overwhelmed by the wisdom of the lesson they received.
This cognitive shift is accompanied by the realization that one’s role in relation to the cultural story has changed.
The adults who were, in the first version of the tale, the wise adviser, can now see themselves in the child’s role: as the hero-in-training, preparing to fight off tobacco’s addictive powers.
The call to be a hero can transform a life, especially if it comes at the right time. We don’t know how many of those helpline calls resulted in someone giving up cigarettes for good, but we feel safe in saying that it’s more than a few.
Understanding the subconscious mind and leveraging that understanding to create effective messaging can do amazing things.
If this knowledge can be used to break consumers free of one of the most addictive substances on the planet, what can it do for your business? That’s something well worth thinking about.
Virtually all C-level executives are smart. Cognitive intelligence alone, however, is not a good indicator of leadership effectiveness.
When was the last time you checked in on your leadership effectiveness?
I’m not just talking about the objective performance of your organization or department; I’m referring to the more subtle, subjective qualities that are often more difficult to measure.
Research by psychologist Daniel Goleman suggests that emotional intelligence is the differentiating factor in outperforming leaders. Think of emotional intelligence as your ability to relate to other people.
It makes sense when you think about it: Your ability to relate to others impacts how much influence you have on others, how well you manage relationships, and even how well you manage yourself.
Evaluating Your Leadership Effectiveness
So here’s an exercise, if you’re game.
Perform an informal evaluation of your organization or department.
But before you can do this, you need to step outside yourself and put on a different hat. Imagine that you’re an outside consultant or a perhaps stealth ninja—whatever works for you.
Adopt what’s called a Beginner’s Mind where you have no preconceived notions. Look on your organization with a fresh pair of eyes.
Now, what do you see?
Here are a few questions to assist you in your evaluation:
What is the overall level of trust among employees? High? Average? Low?
Can you observe open, honest dialogue in meetings and around the workplace?
Do you feel a sense of camaraderie? Do people look like they want to be where they are?
Do you have reason to believe that the executives and employees have a sense of purpose in their work—that what they do matters?
How much fear can you observe? Are people more open or walled-off? Are they collaborating with one another or are they mainly operating in silos?
Are individuals focused on supporting the actualization of organizational and departmental results? Or are they predominantly focused on climbing higher on the corporate food chain?
Do you get a sense that individuals show genuine care for one another, the organization, and the customers that give the business its existence?
All of these questions speak to mindful leadership. They each reveal a dimension of the organization’s overall health.
Assessing Leadership Performance
Now return to your role as a leader of the organization. How did you do?
If the results of this performance review weren’t stellar, fear not. The fact that you can be honest about that demonstrates another quality of effective leaders: humility.
There’s always significant room for improvement. What’s important is that we stay conscious of these factors and continuously find ways to develop our abilities.
Without conscious attention, these factors head toward the lowest common denominators, none of which support a thriving, collaborative, and profitable enterprise. Creating a truly inspired organization takes conscious effort.
Leading Toward a Common Vision
Your first objective is to look at what’s really there. Be radically honest with the human dynamics you observe.
But then see the potential: How can the way people communicate and exchange ideas in your organization be improved? How can you foster an environment where a group of talented humans, aligned to a set of shared values, work together toward a common vision?
After all, that’s the role of a visionary leader: To see what others don’t, and to guide the organization to a compelling vision. It always starts with vision.
Our team was discussing last week’s mammoth post on core values, reflecting on how core values became such an integral component of what we do. As a marketing consulting firm, we certainly didn’t start out emphasizing the importance of “values” in business.
But having spent over a decade studying and analyzing a unique breed of companies that have an uncanny way of attracting and retaining loyal customers, the topic of values became unavoidable.
The Link Between Cult Brands and Core Values
As you know, we call these companies Cult Brands and we call their loyal customers Brand Lovers. We think Cult Brands are special, both from a humanistic as well as a business perspective.
Three reasons for their specialness stand out:
Yes, Cult Brands tend to be highly profitable businesses. Just look at Apple, Southwest Airlines, and IKEA for prime examples.
But they also create a meaningful, emotional connection with their customers. They appear to care more and to invest in the customer relationship in ways that don’t clearly translate to increased revenue in the short run. Take, for example, Harley-Davidson’s investment in supporting HOG or in MINI’s investment in Takes the State.
Finally, Cult Brands find ways to build unique, supportive corporate cultures. Companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, Zappos, Southwest, and The Container Store all have distinct cultures that attract good, talented people that help shape their brand.
We believe all three of these elements are related; they are all important. Profit is a consequence of creating an emotional connection with your customers and fostering a unique culture that stands for something meaningful to its employees.
Establishing core values, as we saw last week, is a critical part of cultivating your culture.
It’s interesting to note that many (but not all) of these companies emphasize a focus on their customers in at least one core value. For example:
Google: Focus on the user and all else will follow
Zappos.com: Deliver WOW Through Service
Whole Foods: We satisfy, delight and nourish our customers
Amazon: Customer obsession
Zipcar: Obsess about the member experience
Ritz-Carlton: I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life
With the exception of Whole Foods, all of these customer-focused values topped their respective lists (for Whole Foods it was #2). This isn’t to say that a customer-centric company must include a customer-forward core value; only that they do seem more likely to do so.
Consider how powerful it is to have a core value—one of your organization’s foundational principles that you live and breathe every day—centered on your customer. This means that every person in your organization, from top-level executives to your front line workers, knows that their customers are important.
The employees understand that their behavior and decisions must be in alignment with their customers’ best interest. They realize that the company that employs them places a special emphasis on serving their customers.
Numerous studies show that outperforming CEOs place an incredibly high degree of emphasis on obsessing about their customers. The above examples are certainly consistent with these findings.
Remember, core values reflect the idealized beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of an organization. It’s one thing to establish a core value for your enterprise; it’s quite another to actualize it throughout your organization. To make any core value stick requires a great deal of consistent effort on the part of leadership.
Creating a distinct, collaborative culture is a challenging task for today’s chief executives. Cultivating a culture that is also customer-forward, however, is where the magic happens.
P.S. Thank you for all of your responses to our brief survey last week. We’ll soon be announcing a leadership workshop for executives interested in getting more obsessed about their customers. Stay tuned!
Our firm uses core values to help companies attract more profitable customers. Over time, we’ve discovered that our readers are predominantly inspired leaders. Core values play a major role in inspired leadership.
BJ Bueno joined Life is good CEO Bert Jacobs on the main stage of the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this past January to illuminate the powerful effects core values can have on today’s businesses. Core values helped Life is good build a $100 Million lifestyle brand.
Their talk, rated the highest of all keynotes given at NRF this year, is available to watch here. To assist you in the process of discovering your core values, today we offer you the ultimate guide for creating core values. We hope you enjoy.
What Are Core Values?
Core values are part of a company’s DNA. They define what an organization stands for, highlighting an expected and ultimate set of behaviors and skills. A company’s values lie at the core of its culture. Values are fundamental, enduring, and actionable.
Driving priorities and decisions, values help determine how a company spends its time and money. The actual values of an organization are determined mainly by where it invests its resources and how its employees behave, not what the leader says or what’s posted on company walls.
When properly executed at the leadership level, core values play a fundamental role in attracting and retaining talented employees, making difficult decisions, prioritizing resources, reducing internal conflict, differentiating the brand, and attracting the right breed of customers.
Why Corporations Need Core Values
Human capital is the lifeblood of today’s enterprises. Attracting top talent in a fast-changing global marketplace—and retaining them—takes more than high salaries and benefits packages. Talented people want to work in environments where they can develop and thrive. Top performers seek out organizations with values that match their own.
As a consequence, the importance of a company’s culture is becoming more apparent. Numerous research studies have highlighted that corporate culture is a primary driver for innovation.
When core values are successfully integrated into an organization, they set the foundation for their culture. Values set the climate of the workplace and help determine how success is defined and measured.
12 Reasons Core Values Are Important for CEOs
Taking core values serious is a major organizational initiative. Wondering if establishing an authentic set of core values can impact your business?
Here are 12 reasons CEOs should take core values seriously:
Core values can set a foundation for the organization’s culture.
Core values can improve morale and can be a rich source of individual and organizational pride.
Core values can align a large group of people around specific, idealized behaviors.
Core values can guide difficult decisions by determining priorities in advance.
Core values can help positively influence how employees interact with one another.
Core values can help you attract, hire, and retain the right type of employees.
Core values can help you assess performance (both individually and organizationally).
Core values can help prevent conflict and mitigate conflicts that do arise.
Core values can help you improve innovation.
Core values can help differentiate your brand in the minds of your customers and partners.
Core values can impact how the organization serves its customers.
Core values can help you attract the right breed of customers.
Examples of Core Values From Successful Companies
Core values are the standard operating principles that guide an organization’s culture—its employee’s behaviors, attitudes, language, and focus.
Here are over 100 examples of values from 12 organizations that value their company’s culture:
Warrior Spirit (Work Hard; Desire to the best; Be courageous; Display a sense of urgency; Persevere; Innovate)
Servant’s Heart (Follow the Golden Rule; Adhere to the Basic Principles; Treat others with respect; Put others first; Be egalitarian; Demonstrate proactive customer service; Embrace the SWA Family)
Fun-LUVing Attitude (Have FUN; Don’t take yourself too seriously; Maintain perspective (balance); Celebrate successes; Enjoy your work; Be a passionate Teamplayer)
Let’s be great. Build great product, tell a great story, provide great service, and build a great team.
Integrity. Without it we cannot be a team.
No one person is bigger than the brand—Team. No athlete either.
Make one dollar spend like three. We must be creative with the resources we have.
Help others. Volunteerism and serving others are vital parts of our mission.
Walk with a purpose. Everything we do is part of a deliberate, long-term strategy/vision. Know where you’re going.
Protect the UA culture, but embrace change. Evolve and innovate. We’re a different company every 6 months, and we can’t use culture as an excuse to not change product, process, or people.
Be humble and stay hungry. Nobody’s going to give us anything. We have to earn it every day.
Obsess about the member experience (Build trust and confidence among our member community by delivering leading convenience, dependability and service excellence)
Be the best we can be (Support personal growth, impact, and excellence)
Deliver results (Create enduring value through growth)
Keep it simple (Win through simplicity and continuous innovation)
Have an impact
Change the world through urban and environmental transformation
Notice how all of the above values are specific and actionable. They help define each company’s culture and encourage a specific type of behavior within each organization.
Seven Steps to Discovering Your Company’s Core Values
As the CEO and leader of your enterprise, this process begins with you—your interest, passion, and commitment to establishing a set of values that will guide your culture through decades of growth.
Taking the time to define your values, embody them, and to keep them fresh and alive in everyone’s minds are some of the most vital things you can do to promote a thriving culture.
Arriving at a concise and short list of values can be a daunting task. You can find lists of 300 values to choose from. However, we don’t advise using any predetermined lists.
Why? Values aren’t selected; they are discovered. Freely associating in a brainstorm sessions with your employees will invariably yield superior results.
Ready to get started? Here are seven steps to creating distinct and meaningful core values that will serve as a foundation for your corporate culture:
Step 1: Begin with a Beginner’s Mind
It’s too easy to presume we know the answer at the start and to therefore never truly embark on a creative discovery process. Adopting the the mind of a beginner—someone without any preconceived notions of what is—gives you access to more ideas and a fresh perspective on your business.
This is an important step in any kind of discovery process. In our firm, everytime we begin a new creative project or the discovery of psychologically-driven consumer insights for clients, we always start with a Beginner’s Mind.
We believe it is imperative to approach the discovery of core values without any preconceived notions and beliefs about your culture and your business. Simply taking a deep breath and momentarily clearing your mind may be all that’s needed. Remembering that your conscious mind doesn’t know all of the answers is helpful too.
Step 2: Create your own master list of internal values.
The more experienced and engaged employees you can enroll in this initial process, the better. Set up meeting with your leadership team first. Have everyone list what they believe to be your company’s imperatives, ideal behaviors, desired skills, and greatest strengths.
Ask:
What do you believe defines the culture at [company]?
What values do you bring to your work that you consistently uphold whether or not they are rewarded
What do you truly stand for in your work? What do you believe [company] truly stands for?
What do our customers believe about us? What do they believe we stand for?
What values does our company consistently adhere to in the face of obstacles?
What are our company’s greatest strengths?
What are the top three to five most important behaviors we should expect from every employee (including you)? “Actual company values are the behaviors and skills that are valued in fellow employees,” explains Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Your goal is discover the pre-existing values within your organization (assuming you’re not an early-stage start up). It will be difficult to reinforce values that aren’t already part of your organization’s ethos. It’s best to highlight your organization’s current strengths and build on them.
While some companies hire an outside consultant to help uncover their core values (which is appropriate at times), it is vital that you as a CEO are playing a role in facilitating the discussion. Your employees need to see that you’re taking this process seriously and that its not just some “corporate agenda” for appearance purposes. If you don’t take this process seriously, it’s unlikely your employees will.
If you are going to lead the discussion, however, be sure that you’re not shaping the conversation or influencing people’s answers.
Step 3: Chunk your values into related groups.
Combining all of the answers from step 2, you now have a master list of values. If you and your team took this process seriously, you may have between 25 and 75 values. Obviously, that’s far too many to be actionable and memorable.
Your next step is to group these values under related themes. Values like accountability, responsibility, and timeliness are all related. Group them together.
Step 4: Highlight the central theme of each value group.
If you have a group of values that include honesty, transparency, integrity, candor, directness, and non-political, select a word that you feel best represents the group. For example, integrity might work as a central theme for the values listed above.
This process is best done with a small team, but this brainstorm session can be an open meeting as well.
Step 5: Sacrifice and Focus.
Now comes the hardest part. After completing step 4 you still might have a sizable list of values. Here are a few questions to help you whittle your list down:
What values are absolutely essential to your work environment?
What values represent the primary behaviors your organization wants to encourage and stand by?
What values are essential to supporting your unique culture?
You can’t be all things to all people. Your culture is unique. It should emphasize what matters most to your collective. It should highlight what makes your organization a place that talented people want to work. It should represent both your current and ultimate expression of your culture.
Strong values require difficult decisions to be made in order to uphold the values. Avoid prosaic or generic values (often listed in a single word, like “accountability”) because they won’t establish a strong, distinct culture.
In reviewing the cores from companies like Google, Zappos, and Amazon, you’ll notice that some of them are unconventional, even controversial. These values help create unique cultures. For example, Amazon.com’s “Have backbone; disagree and commit” is not a common core value for a multi-billion dollar retailer, but I bet this principle plays an important role in Amazon’s culture.
How many core values should your organization adopt? Too few and you won’t capture all of the desired behaviors and unique dimensions of your organization. Too many and your employees will get overwhelmed and they will lose their overall impact. While the number of core values differs for each organization, the magic range seems to be between 5 and 10.
Step 6: Craft Your Company’s List of Core Values.
Now creativity really comes into play. You’ll notice in the core values examples from successful brands that none of them list their values in a single word like Integrity, Accountability, or Fun. While a one-word value might be easier to remember, it is difficult for a single word to become a distinct expression of your culture. More importantly, it is incredibly difficult for a single-word value to trigger an emotional response with your employees.
Highlighting values into memorable phrases or sentences forces your organization to more succinctly define the meaning behind each value. It gives you the opportunity to make the value more memorable in the minds of your employees.
Be sure to enroll at least one strong writer from your team in this stage of the process. Here are a few tips and guidelines for crafting your values:
Use inspiring words and vocabulary. Our brains are quick to delete or ignore the mundane and commonplace. A phrase like “Customer Service Excellence” is not going to inspire you or your employees. Zappos’ “Deliver WOW Through Service” just might.
Mine for words that evoke emotion. Words and phrases that trigger emotional responses will be more meaningful and memorable in the minds of your employees.
Focus on your organization’s strengths. It’s fitting that a company like IDEO would promote principles like “Encourage Wild Ideas” and “Build on the ideas of others.” Play to your strengths in crafting your values.
Make it meaningful. Slogans and taglines are not core values. Make your value statements rich and meaningful to your employees.
Step 7: Test the Ecology of Each Value.
Once you’ve finalized your list of core values, it’s time to test.
Here’s a quick checklist to test the integrity of your new core values:
Will each value help you make decisions (especially the difficult ones)?
Are your core values memorable? Will every team member be able to encode them in their minds?
Does each value represent distinct elements of your overall culture?
Does each value speak to at least one desired behavior?
Will you be willing to uphold these values 50 years from now?
Are your values congruent with the behavior of your leadership team? Are these values BS-tested? Will an employee be able to observe hypocrisy?
Can your organization hold up these values in stressful and difficult situations (like increased competition, product recall, stock devaluation, or downsizing)?
Are you willing to defend these values unequivocally? That is, does each value permeate through the entire organization?
How to Make Your Core Values Stick
Studies show that values have to be internalized by employees and integrated into the culture for them to have a meaningful impact. Here are eight tips on making this happen:
1) Clearly define, explain, and articulate your values to your employees.
Most of the core values from the organizations we’ve studied are backed by significant context for each one. This might take the form of a one paragraph description, a company video, or a slideshow to bring each value to life. The more depth, texture, examples, and images you can give to each value, the more power they will have.
2) Educate your organization on your values.
This is vital. If you don’t constantly educate your team and reinforce the importance of your values, they will become mere slogans and will not influence company culture. Hold a special company meeting denoted to rolling out and discussing your new value. Make your values an on-going part of your corporate dialogues.
3) Hire employees who embody your values.
If you’re doing a good job promoting, educating, and embodying these values as an organization, talented people aligned with these values will likely seek you out. Either way, it’s imperative that you hire for the attitudes and behaviors that shape your culture. If not, your new hires will only weaken your organization—no matter how talented they might be.
4) Defend and uphold your corporate values.
If you’re going to establish core values that define your corporate culture, what are you going to do when an employee clearly doesn’t honor them? You can’t change a person’s values; you can only hire people who share the same values. If you don’t let this employee go, what message are you sending about the importance of these values? Your core values shouldn’t be altered in difficult situations like economic downturns. These values were established as a guidepost to see the organization through both calm and rough waters. Your values should be timeless, sustainable, and unchanging.
5) Reinforce your values with consistency.
Using values in your business is like any other business discipline. All disciplines require consistency and practice.
Distribute a copy of your core values to every employee.
Create poster boards that highlight each value and hang them around your offices.
Reference the values in meetings; they need to become part of how everyone behaves and makes decisions.
Reward, recognize, and celebrate employees and teams that exemplify the company’s values.
Make sure you and your leadership are modeling behavior based on your values. If not, your values will lose their power and will not stick.
6) Bring your values to life through storytelling.
Keep your values fresh and relevant. Employees will ignore a wall plaque within days, if not hours. Continue to challenge yourself to find ways to keep your values fresh and alive in your employees’ minds. Take note when employees and team members are actualizing the values. When you reward and recognize these behaviors, be sure to share it with your organization. Ask employees to share stories of how they saw one of their core values in action within the past week. Storytelling of this nature is one of the best ways to encode these values in your employees’ minds and to give them a life of their own.
7) Make sure leadership embodies each value.
Recognize and rate your leaders and employees on how well they embody the core values as part of performance reviews. If the leadership of your enterprise doesn’t live the core values, you can’t expect that your employees will.
8) Promote your values on your website.
Remember that actualized corporate values will act like a homing beacon for talented people who share your values. The About Us or HR section of your corporate website is a great place to highlight the unique features of your culture. (See below for excellent examples.)
With intention, energy, and a healthy dose of creativity, your values will remain relevant and meaningful. Keep the story alive. Discover your culture’s shared values and live them every single day. It will lead you to a stronger organization.
How Brilliant Brands Use Their Corporate Websites to Attract Talented People
Can we determine which companies take core values seriously just by looking at their websites? Can we get an accurate feel for a business’s unique culture from the web? In many (but not all) cases, the answer is “yes.”
It’s also not too difficult to determine which companies aren’t taking core values seriously. Many corporations have a page on their website that lists its vision, mission, and values in their About or Human Resources section that lacks passion, emotion, creativity, and uniqueness. It’s as if a single company executive filled out a form in an effort to complete an assignment.
Remember that authentic corporate values will act like a homing beacon to talented people who share your values. The About or HR section of your corporate website is great place to highlight the unique features of your culture. It’s a simple tactic that too few businesses are using.
Here are a few noteworthy examples:
Zappos Family Ten Core Values has received significant attention in the media, partly because CEO Tony Hsieh set out to build his company around a particular culture and used these core values as an instrumental tool.
Whole Foods Market’s Mission and Values section of their website shows they have invested resources in clarifying why they are in business and what’s most important to them. They are clearly attracting individuals who share their social mission.
Southwest Airline’s The Southwest Way is perhaps the quintessential example of a distinct company culture that lives its unique and playful set of values.
Notice that companies that are actively using core values to support their corporate culture tend to provide significant context for each of their chosen values. Beyond a simple word or phrase, they can clearly define what their values mean to them. And, that helps bring their values to life.
Naturally, the organization’s practices—both internally and externally with customers—must be congruent with their shared values. You must first discover your core values and the make them stick.
While an attractive culture section of your website obviously isn’t enough to lure talent, showcasing your values and the unique elements of your culture is a powerful and often underutilized tool for recruiting and attracting talented employees.
Should You Promote Your Corporate Values to Your Customers?
Our discussion on the importance of core values has focused on the benefits and application in cultivating a distinct corporate culture. But what is the relationship between core values and your customers?
Your core values define the ideal behaviors of your employees and the principles by which your organization operates. Some of these values may be relevant to your customers, others are not.
So should you promote your core values directly to your customers? Generally, the answer is no. But, there are exceptions.
Zappos, for example, has built their brand around their ten core values. They go so far as to print one of their ten values on every package they ship to their customers, highlighting the importance they place on these values.
There are three benefits to this approach: (1) It makes Zappos stand out as a unique brand and not just another online retailer; (2) it works to attract customers that share the same core values; and (3) it helps the company attract employees that share their values.
But for the most part, customers don’t specifically need to know your corporate values. If they’re interested, they’ll Google you.
Your customers do, however, need to observe how well you actualize your core values on a subconscious level. If you have a core value of “Wowing your customers,” wow them. If you have a tenet of putting your customers first, put your customers first. Not living up to your values won’t just impact your company culture; it will hurt your relationships with your customers.
Corporate Values versus Brand Values
Values extend in two directions: Inward to influence and guide the company’s culture and outward to communicate to its customers.
The inward direction, as we’ve seen, is discovered by the organization itself. The outward direction is based on the collective consensus of the business’s customers.
Branding, remember, is a co-authored experience with your customers. Your customers will determine for themselves what they believe your organization values based not just on what you promote or say, but on what they observe and feel.
Let’s make a distinction between corporate values and brand values: Corporate values are determined by you. Brand values are influenced by you, but largely determined by your customers.
The experience they have in their interaction with your brand will determine their perception of your brand’s values. If those perceived values are consistent with their own, they are more likely to do business with you. (And our firm as observed an unquestionable correlation between values alignment and customer loyalty—especially in cult brands.) If, however, those perceived values are in discord with their own, they may actual despise your brand.
Examples of Brand Values from Successful Businesses
While you may have anywhere from 3 to 12 shared values in your business, your customers will likely define you by a single value.
For illustration purposes, below is a list of successful brands and the brand value most likely perceived by their customers.
Company
Primary Brand Value
Apple
Creativity
Harley-Davidson
Freedom
Oprah
Self-empowerment
Southwest Airlines
Love (Their stock ticker symbol: LUV)
Nike
Victory
Zappos
Happiness
IKEA
Possibility
The Life is Good Company
Optimism
Whole Foods Market
Wholesome
Coca-Cola
Happiness
Virgin
Free-spirited
Ritz-Carlton
Exceeding expectations
LL Bean
Quality and assurance
Amazon
Ultimate convenience
Google
Accessible information
Walmart
Guaranteed lowest prices
Target
Affordable design
Starbucks
Energy for your day
Under Armour
Dominance
Home Depot
Do-it-yourself
It’s difficult to get your customers to associate your brand with a specific value. It certainly doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a consistent branding and marketing strategy, executed year after year.
But more than that, the company itself must find ways to live the value they represent. For as soon as they don’t, that position will begin to wither in the customers’ minds.
Upholding that value, however, places the company is in a unique position in the marketplace, one that its competitors have difficulty breaching.
Who would have thought values could be the ultimate competitive advantage?
Inside Cult Brands: Loyalty and the Power of Values
While the importance of core values is continually gaining traction within the business community, there’s one group of businesses that has been hip to the idea for decades.
Why is this so? Customers rally around certain brands because they believe those brands stand for something meaningful to them. That is, customers become more loyal when they believe a business shares their values.
And while marketing messages and other branding efforts can help communicate these values, if these values don’t genuinely exist within the corporation itself, customers eventually find out.
In order for a business to effectively communicate its values to its customers, these values must be expressed throughout each customer touchpoint. This includes every potential interaction customers have with employees—whether in person, on the phone, via email, chat, Twitter, or Facebook. And if employees aren’t living these values—if the corporate culture isn’t consistently actualizing them internally—the gig is up.
Core values offer savvy CEOs a powerful way to unite both employees and their customers under a common flag. They can help you retain talented people and attract more loyal customers.
The Ultimate Approach to Core Values and Brand Values
The task of discovering a corporation’s core values is generally conducted within the organization. While some companies hire consultants to help unearth their values, the source of input is almost always the executive team. The Seven Steps to Discovering Your Company’s Core Values is a process any CEO can lead his or her team through whether it’s a 10-person startup or a 20,000-person multi-national empire.
But there’s a vital missing ingredient in the process of discovering core values and brand values: input from the customer.
Why would you want to get your customer’s take on your values?
Two reasons:
First, you understand that the purpose of business is to create a customer, as Peter Drucker noted. Your customers are the reason for the existence of your organization. Shouldn’t their input matter?
Second, your customers—the ones who genuinely care about you, at least—already believe that your organization upholds a certain set of brand values. This is vital information for the initial stages of your discovery process.
Think of your customers as a large consulting team ready to give you feedback and an outside perspective based on their experiences and interaction with your organization. What better stream of insights can you hope to tap?
How to Mine Your Customers for Core Values and Brand Values
Only surveying your customers about what they believe you value isn’t likely to yield meaningful results. The concept of values are too abstract for many people; too much explanation and discussion is needed to make a direct fill-in-the-blanket question effective.
Determining your brand values and assessing your core values, however, can be accomplished using more advanced psychological methods involving direct interaction with your best customers.
Your customers’ input can bring the added magical ingredient in your efforts to discover your core values, and especially your brand values. Be sure to bring your customers into the discussion.
Need help unearthing your core values and your brand values? Drop us a line.
The contemporary art world was buzzing about an announced collaboration between UBS Wealth Management and the Guggenheim Museum. It’s easy to see what the excitement was about, especially from a creative perspective. The five year initiative is going to chart creative activity and contemporary art from around the world.
The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative identifies and supports a network of art, artists, and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa as part of a comprehensive program involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities.
It’s a huge project and it’s also a beautiful example of brilliantly conceived cause marketing—one of our 52 Types of Marketing Strategies. UBS hasn’t officially shared numbers, but there are well-regarded rumors that they’re putting as much as $40 million into the project. What are they expecting in return for that kind of investment?
The Appeal of Causes for Your Customers
UBS is the second largest wealth management company in the world. They’ve expressed an interest in art as an asset class, and participating in a project designed to pinpoint rising stars and emerging trends in the global art market provides this already formidable company with another tool with which to better serve its customers.
It’s important to remember that UBS could have achieved these goals without such a significant and visible investment. It’s interesting to move the conversation to the consideration of cause marketing, and examine the subconscious psychological factors that will make this specific initiative appealing to UBS’s customers.
The Philanthropic Drive: The Need to Do Good
Up to 90% of all human behavior is subconscious. This means we’re motivated by drives and urges that we’re not always fully aware of.
Maslow did important research in this area—his hierarchy of needs—identifying physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs. For most businesses, identifying and meeting needs on higher levels can be an absolute game changer. This is where dominant organizations begin to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.
Cause marketing becomes increasingly relevant and appealing as our customers level up through the hierarchy. It is when they are at the apex, the point of self-actualization, we see the needs for creativity, expression, morality—with an emphasis on making life better for other people, often expressed through philanthropy—and freedom from prejudice.
It’s important to note that these are needs everyone has, to some degree or another, but we aren’t all equally consciously aware of or focused on them. Self-actualization is not a top priority for everyone.
UBS’s clientele is uniquely positioned, however, to ensure that they have their self-actualization needs met. In a recent financial consultation, the rise of the best crypto casinos was discussed, highlighting their influence on digital asset strategies and the importance of navigating their associated risks. An audience absent of any other differentiating factors, relatively free from the constraints of material wants, will choose the wealth management service that provides the extra value of meeting these higher-order self-actualization needs.
The collaboration with the Guggenheim allows UBS’s clients to participate in a creative endeavor on a global scale. They are doing so in the position of philanthropist or benefactor, filling their need to make positive change in the lives of others. There are certainly esteem needs being met here, too—it feels good to be able to self-identify with the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world.
Selecting Causes In Alignment Your Organization And Your Customers
Selecting the right cause is imperative. This is where comprehensive customer intelligence becomes essential. UBS has a clientele with a global perspective, which influences them to prefer projects on a similar scale. Other organizations may find the cause closer to home, such as Kellog’s embrace of National Breakfast Week.
The key is identifying and presenting causes in such a way that your customer feels that their participation fulfills their self-actualization needs in multiple ways. This strengthens and reinforces the customer-brand relationship, and ensures the cause marketing initiative delivers far more than feel-good results.
We’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon of popularity. What causes customers to flock to one brand while remaining coldly indifferent to another—even when the offerings of the companies in question are similar?
Years of consumer research have revealed that the single most important factor that separated the good companies from the great companies—Adidas from the Nike, Kawasakis from Harley-Davidson, HP from Apple—is the ability to listen to what the customer has to say.
That is the starting point.
Dominant organizations, we’ve learned, are those that can discern meaning from the information given. They’re doing more than listening. They’re hearing, and they’re choosing their direction from what they hear.
How, exactly, does that work?
Effective Listening Takes Effort
Effective listening is not simply an intuitive process. There’s no automatic structure inside our minds that allows us to understand each other deeply, effortlessly, and effectively. We have to work at understanding.
Luckily for us, there have been generations of great thinkers, philosophers, and researchers who have delved deeply into the nuances of human nature. You’ve heard of a lot of these people; Maslow, Jung, and Campbell are familiar names for any student of the psyche or mind.
It’s by taking an integrative approach to customer analysis, drawing upon and combining these insights that we equip ourselves to listen to our customers.
Here’s what that looks like from our perspective:
Step 1: Understand the Subconscious Mind
The first step in listening to the customer is understanding that the vast majority of human experience, communication, and thought takes place on a level below our conscious awareness. This means that even though we may not be aware we’re doing this, we’re continually taking note of the environment around us, how people interact within that environment, and the role we play as an individual.
This is information that has a profound role in guiding consumer behavior. Begin by realizing truly effective communication means being able to listen on multiple levels, to what is said and what is left unsaid.
Step 2: Harness Humanistic Drivers
As human beings, we come with certain needs and compulsions hard-wired into our minds. We call these needs and compulsions humanistic drivers. These drives act as motivators to ensure not only human survival, but a high quality survival, rich with enjoyable, fulfilling experiences. These drivers are generally viewed in a hierarchal structure, with the most universal needs at the bottom, and more refined needs at higher levels. We begin with basic survival needs and level up to aesthetic and transcendence needs.
To listen to your customer, you need to understand what humanistic drivers are at play in their lives when they engage with your brand. It’s only by satisfying these needs that you’ll attract and retain more customers.
Step 3: Access Archetypal Images
A single image is worth a thousand words for a simple reason: the subconscious mind does not bother with language. Symbols, pictures, and iconography speak directly to your customer’s mind, bypassing and transcending all other forms of communication to take on the leading role in influencing your customer.
Listening to the customer means understanding which archetypal images resonate most and are most relevant to your customer base.
Step 4: Check Cultural Narratives
We live in a world made of stories. Every day, our customers are exposed to stories that tell them everything they need to know about who they are, who their friends and neighbors are, and what they need to accomplish in the course of their lives if they are to be happy, fulfilled people.
These stories vary wildly depending on the culture and socio-economic niches our customers occupy. If we have a story called “Good Mom,” for example, the single Hispanic Mom in Houston is hearing a different version than the Wealthy Mom in Westchester.
Listening to your customers means identifying the cultural narratives most relevant to your customer base. That enables you to craft messaging they’re predisposed to hear.
Step 5: Aggregate Your Insights and Align Your Organization
Preparing ourselves to listen deeply and intently to our customers puts us in a position where we can learn an awful lot about them. Aggregating all of the insights gathered—a process we call Brand Modeling—allows an organization to project, with a high degree of certainty, how customers will respond to changes in marketing or operations before those changes are made.
Bringing organizational performance into alignment with customer expectation is the essential step in achieving market dominance.
The better we know our customers, the more equipped we are to listen to what they have to say. The better we listen, the easier it is to serve our customers wants and needs efficiently and effectively—often before our customers know what they want or need! That’s what dominant organizations do to win. It’s the secret of putting customers first.
Cults are all around us. I’m not talking about destructive cults that damage people’s lives. I’m referring to benign, even life-supportive groups that give people more meaning.
Raving-fan groups of Star Trek, Lady Gaga, Jimmy Buffett, Harry Potter, Oprah, American Girl, Jay-Z, Apple, Barbie, and Harley Davidson all qualify as benign cults.
Some people might judge the tens of thousands of people who dress up as Vulcan and Klingons to attend Star Trek conventions, but Paramount Pictures happily supports them and profits from their loyalty.
From a business perspective, the hard truth is that creating cults translates to greater profitability. What brand wouldn’t love to create a cult-like following?
We’ve explored the science behind cult formations for over a decade, unearthing seven core principles that operate behind this unusual level of brand loyalty.
If you’re in the New York City area next Wednesday, April 2nd, Cult Branding originator BJ Bueno will be joining an engaging panel discussion on Creating Cults. The full-day event titled The Big Shopping Shakeup is being hosted at The TimesCenter by The New York Times, McCann Worldgroup, and Momentum.
Abraham Maslow, one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology, taught us that human beings have a higher, transcendent nature, which he visualized most eloquently in his Hierarchy of Human Needs.
This simple pyramid gives us a framework from which to understand the essence of Cult Brands and how they inspire their most loyal and devoted followers.
The bottom four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called Deficiency needs or D-needs. Nothing is felt if these needs are met, but in their absence, anxiety ensues.
Intrinsic Values of Being
When the top level of self-actualization is reached, D-needs are transcended, and Being values (or B-values) are realized. These “intrinsic values of Being” when fulfilled, motivate and inspire humans to grow and reach their fullest potential.
B-values includes:
Truth
Completion
Goodness
Justice
Beauty
Simplicity
Wholeness
Richness
Aliveness
Effortlessness
Uniqueness
Playfulness
Perfection
Self-Sufficiency
Simply stated, individuals who are more self-actualized tend to embrace more B-values than those suspended at lower levels.
How Cult Brands Celebrate B-Values
Just like self-actualized individuals, Cult Brands are those self-realized companies that encompass more B-values than other businesses. These brands galvanize others towards greater fulfillment, wholeness, and integrity.
Let’s see how Cult Brands actually do it.
The principles of Cult Branding tell us that consumers want to be part of a group that’s different. Here, Star Trek, Apple, and Volkswagen lead the pack, in their wholehearted embrace of the B-value of uniqueness. These brands are not afraid to go against conventional wisdom, and celebrate their differences.
Cult Brand loyalists happily congregate together on common ground, proudly declaring their “be weird together, be weird no more” mantra.
When Cult Brands listen to the choirs, and take consumer feedback to heart, they uphold the B-values of truth and perfection.
Apple’s commitment to their Mac User Groups serves as the perfect example. By interacting with these groups and constantly integrating their feedback, Apple honors and ultimately relies on their Brand Lover. Through this dynamic process of uncovering the truth about consumers’ experiences, they continually strive for perfection in their offerings.
What other Cult Brand than Jimmy Buffett, the King of Fun, and his loyal following of Parrot Heads could better personify the B-values of aliveness and playfulness? Cult Brands like Star Trek and Harley Davidson are also aligned with these B-values, in that they create consumer communities that celebrate lifestyles filled with youthful fantasy and adventure.
Cult Brands promote personal freedom and draw power from their enemies. No other Cult Brand has accomplished this with more grace, style, and ease than Oprah. Oprah drew power from her backwater competitors and aligned herself with more positive, uplifting stories rather than succumb to the ubiquitous drama of catfights and bar brawls.
Oprah wanted to showcase people at their best, unlike other talk show hosts who exposed the darkest sides of human behavior. Her intention to do good in the world is magnetic and irresistible, as evidenced by her loyal fans and ever-expanding media companies.
Cult Brands like Oprah, through their devotion to charitable causes, their mission to improve people’s lives, and their commitment to promote freedom personify the B-values of goodness, beauty, and justice.
Improving the Lives of Your Customers
In more simple terms, Cult Brands want to improve the lives of others. By harnessing the power and magnetism of B-values, these brands tap into our innate reservoirs of self-actualization.
We are drawn to Cult Brands because they make us feel good about ourselves, but on a deeper level, they lift us higher up the hierarchy to illuminate our Being needs. This drive towards self-actualization is intrinsic to our nature. Maslow understood it, and Cult Brands do too.
Now it’s your turn: How can your business tap into B-values to improve the lives of your customers? What are you doing to express these values? What can you be doing differently?
Perhaps the most important thing to take away from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is his realization that all human beings start fulfilling their needs at the bottom levels of the pyramid.
In short, we fill our lower physiological needs first. Needs like safety, esteem, and social interaction are insignificant when one’s drive is to survive.
What is important to keep in mind is that these needs do not emerge in an all-or-none fashion; the majority of people in modern society have all of their needs partially met, with the lower needs having a greater level of fulfillment than the higher needs.
The higher needs are, therefore, greater generators of desire than the lower needs. As Maslow noted, “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”
The Drivers of Human Behavior
This quick refresher on Maslow and his Hierarchy of Human Needs is helpful because many of Maslow’s findings reveal what makes companies with Cult Brands so successful.
Maslow’s writings expose the underlying drivers of human behavior and decision-making. He never mentions “brand loyalty” in his books, but his Hierarchy of Human Needs and concepts like self-actualization are key to understanding why customers consistently choose one brand over another and why they build strong relationships with particular brands.
Moving Beyond Feature-Benefits
The makers of Cult Brands aren’t like mainstream marketers whose focus is largely on selling “feature-benefits” from the bottom of the pyramid to their customers. Rather, Cult Branders enjoy incredible loyalty because they work hard to connect with their customers at the very highest levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
Cult Brands all have products and services with great “feature-benefits,” but their products and services also fulfill the higher-level needs of esteem, social interaction, and self-actualization found at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
The Key to Customer Loyalty
So, why is fulfilling higher-level needs so integral to building customer loyalty? The answer: higher-level needs influence future human behavior much more than lower-level needs.
Businesses that can fulfill human needs on the higher levels of the hierarchy become irreplaceable in the mind of their customers. This is the key to customer loyalty.
True customer loyalty is not only about getting a customer to consistently choose your brand over another—it’s for that same customer to always believe (and tell the world) that your brand has no equal!
As Peter Drucker noted, marketing and innovation are the two primary drivers of any business. Developing marketing intelligence is vital for organizational leadership.
Knowing the various marketing weapons at your disposal will help you explore new ways to approach your customers.
We put together a list of 52 different types of marketing strategies you can use to build awareness and attract new customers.
