How to Embed Values in Your Business

What do you believe in? Why did you start your business? Why do you work for your organisation? What mission are you on?

(Tip: it’s rarely about money!)

The values you have in your business are so important to you, your team, your brand but more importantly your customers. In his famous TED Talk ‘Start With Why’ Simon Sinek explained to a global audience why people buy from companies like Apple and why you should care.

It comes down to believing in the companies and brands you buy from. You only have to look at the recent PR disaster with Nike caused by them simply aligning their brand with a quarterback who did something many of their fans and followers disagreed with. When customers find out the business no longer aligns with their values, they don’t like it, they leave… and they get rather upset as shown with burning trainers and socks!

Your values need to be embedded in your business.

They need to be weaved through everything you do so that your marketing, branding, messages, social media, emails, letters, talks and EVERYTHING you do follows your core beliefs, and ultimately your company’s mission.

 

First of all, you need to work out what your values are. This takes a little time and effort but we can certainly help you with it. What we want to do here is help you make your values the centre of your business and brand so that you’ll attract more of the right customers by ensuring your messaging is on point, aligned and congruent throughout.

Values are a key part of your company’s DNA.

 

 

Differentiate your business

One of the main reasons you’ll buy from one company over another (apart from them having the product or service you need) are their values.

Take the Apple example from above. Many Apple users freely admit that their devices are not the best and that they really don’t warrant the ticket price alone. So why are they so immensely popular?

Simon Sinek explained it when he said:

“Every single organisation on the planet knows what they do, but very few know why they do what they do”.

Apple know why they do what they do and they translate that perfectly through their products, marketing and branding.

Apple believes in challenging the status quo and they believe in thinking differently. They challenge this with beautifully designed products that are so simple to use, you can’t help but enjoy using them.

The legions of Apple fans buy into that. Apple also play this out with their famous product launches, their adverts, and their branding.

Apple is Apple through and through. That ‘simplicity’ is in their stores, their branding, their staff clothing, their packaging, their adverts, and of course their products.

It’s like a stick of rock – no matter where you look – it’s written through the business.

Should inspire great behaviours

 

To continue the Apple example, the core values and beliefs of the company then play out to the way they behave in the market and in store, on the phones and live chat support. If you’ve ever communicated with Apple you’ll notice something – it’s always on-brand.

With the obvious few exceptions, when you interact with them, buy from them, or engage with them, Apple are thinking differently and keeping everything simple to use. Bringing endless music to your pocket, phone calls to your watch and making tablets a true competitor to the laptop is just what they do. What you’re really buying is the culture.

Apple stores are designed as beautifully as the devices and the branding. That’s what billions of people are buying, the products are the what, not the why. Apple got it right.

Align your team and future hires around specific actions in order to be to the company you want to be

 

When it comes to growing a business the company culture should be at the core of it. Why should people buy from it then changes to why should other people be a part of it? Looking at another large US giant, Google, we can see this culture playing out there too.

The huge HQ building in California stands on 2,000,000 sq feet of farm land in Mountain View. ‘Googleplex’ has its own campus, free push bikes to transport people around and has water pools, plazas, and open spaces.

Google hasn’t created a building – they’ve created a city. But they’ve also embedded their values into it.

Here are Google’s core values:

  • We want to work with great people.
  • Technology innovation is our lifeblood.
  • Be actively involved; you are Google.
  • Don’t take success for granted.
  • Do the right thing; don’t be evil.
  • Earn customer trust and user loyalty and respect every day.
  • Sustainable long-term growth and profitability are key to our success.

“Be actively involved; you are Google” is interesting, isn’t it? They include their employees in Google by making them Google. They then play this out on their service by ensuring that their users are a core part of the company too. This is hugely empowering and motivating for their employees.

 

 

Achieve the goals and vision you aim to reach

 

Your values are far greater than your brand and business – they’re your mission! They help you achieve your goals and realise your vision. When you know why, your team know why and your customers know too, you grow together.

Embedding your values into your everyday culture and ethos helps you to grow and achieve far greater success because everyone with you understands what it is they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

When your team and your customers can rely your values and your mission to others without you having to intervene, you know you’ve got it right.

It all starts with knowing why and then it moves into your brand, which for many is the cornerstone of everything they do. We often meet with companies who have little in the way of a mission statement or beliefs laid out, but when we build a brand for them and help them work out their mission (we all have one) it really starts to make sense and change things for them.

If you’re ready for that to happen to you, let’s talk. We know that’s why we do what we do as well as bringing integrity, openness, consistency, and fun to the world of branding.

Just how brave are you?

In the course of our working month, we deal with a lot of different clients in the briefing process.

The briefing process is a necessary stage for us, as your design agency, to understand what you’re trying to achieve so that we can craft the best solution to achieve the best result.

As part of that process we’ll ask you questions, not just the basic Who, What, Where, When but the deep searching questions that really get to the ‘big idea’. One of the questions we’ll ask is ‘How brave are you?’ Now you could be reading this thinking ‘what on earth has that got to with the price of chips?’ We ask that question because it’s very important to us (and to you hopefully!) to provide a creative solution that gets real results. The answers we receive are varied, depending on the person we’re dealing with and the culture of the organisation. Many clients like to be seen as brave and will want something that turns the status quo on its head but the reality is often quite different.

As a design agency it’s our responsibility to push creative boundaries and we’ll often come up with 3 or more creative concepts depending on the project that range from ‘safe’ to ‘more exciting’ and ‘wow!’.

When we present the concepts, the client who has briefed us will love the most off the wall option and their response is immediate. But once it goes round the exec team or the marketing team for ‘feedback’, nine times out of ten I can bet a tenner that the creative will be watered down and tamed.

Our observations are that probably only 1 in 10 clients are brave enough to go with the most off the wall concept.

And this is a real shame, because with a watered down concept comes watered down results and therefore the money spent has not been maximised.

So come on people, be brave, take the leap and get much better results for your project!

Why do you need brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines are a set of rules for the use of your logo and other brand elements to create a unified identity when connecting colours, your logo or your typography. Sometimes they can extend to include your brand style or in other words the look and feel of all your marketing materials. The guidelines define how the elements that make up your brand are used and in essence defines how your business communicates with your audience.

It’s an important document because it can be used by employees and external creative suppliers to ensure that your materials are always ‘on brand’.

So what’s the business case for having a set of brand guidelines?

1. Consistency

When you have a predetermined set of rules, you will get a consistent look and feel to all of your marketing so when your ideal client visits your website, sees your advert or receives your sales brochure, they perceive your company in a certain way and the guidelines help you control that perception.

Consistency is important because it makes your brand recognisable and therefore reliable.

2. New employees benefit

You may well know your brand’s identity inside out, but a new employee probably won’t. It’s also particularly useful for giving to design agencies or publishing houses so that they may create new marketing materials that are ‘on brand’.

Your brand guidelines are composed of rules on how to use your brand’s visual elements. These rules will include when to use a logo versus a wordmark, whether you have a stacked or a long version of your logo, the exclusion zone around your logo, where it appears consistently on the page and the hierarchy of colour and typography.

Brand guidelines are a valuable tool for your employees to keep your brand cohesive. In larger organisations departments other than marketing or comms produce materials too, for example HR or the leader of a large project, so it’s important they all have the brand guidelines and more importantly are familiar with them.

3. Recognisable

By keeping your brand consistent, it allows it to be more immediately recognisable within your industry and with your target audience. Building a recognisable brand can take time but your brand can quickly start to stand out by adhering to your brand guidelines.

4. Staying focused

When introducing new products or services, a brand can get stretched too thin. By implementing brand guidelines, you have the tools to quickly and effectively maintain consistency. Brand guidelines help you align your business’s interests with your intended audience.

5. Value

With a cohesive brand identity you increase the brand’s perceived value. Consistency allows your brand to appear more professional and reliable. By implementing brand guidelines, you make it easier to maintain the quality and integrity of your brand’s image. This is particularly useful in a more price driven market, as consistently communicating your brand in a cohesive way means people will see the value in choosing you rather than your cheaper competition.

What’s included in brand guidelines?

Colour palette

These are the colours that make up your brand. Normally you’ll have a primary colour palette that will include the colours of your logo and the secondary colour palette will include complementary colours that can be used on marketing materials. It’s not wise to use too many colour options or you’ll start to lose your identity. Brand guidelines should include RGB and CMYK colour codes, so your colours stay consistent between web and print formats.

Typography

Brand guidelines will include typefaces and families, font sizes, and the hierarchy of the fonts your brand uses. It could include the typeface you use for headlines and the typeface you use for body copy as well as the preferred system typeface for documents you produce internally.

Logo design

How your logo should be displayed in different formats is a very important part of your guidelines. This could include size restrictions, exclusion zones, which colours to use, and how your logo should be displayed on different backgrounds. It’s also wise to show what not to do with your logo in terms of stretching or distorting it.

Additional elements that may be included:

Imagery

Imagery could include the style of photographs, illustrations or icons your company uses on your website or other marketing materials.

Tone of voice

Tone of voice is the personality of your brand that is expressed through words. It governs what you say in writing and how you say it. As we know, when we communicate via text or email, things can be taken out of context so it’s important to establish your personality in words across all medium in order to maintain control of your target audience’s perception.

It’s pretty much impossible to keep your brand identity consistent without brand guidelines. If you feel you need to create new guidelines then it’s important to engage with a creative, reliable and expert strategic design team like Be Smart Design. Not only can we create them for you but we can work with you on the strategic stuff that are the foundations of your guidelines document.

Contact us and we’ll create your brand’s visual elements in order to build guidelines that help you main a cohesive, impactful and strong brand.

How housing associations can define their core purpose

In my previous article ‘Branding and the social housing sector’ I discussed the need, as part of the branding process, to understand your organisation’s core purpose.

From our work in the social housing sector over the years and having seen the recent challenges faced by social housing organisations, we observe that the core purpose of some housing organisations are mere statements and not many are really emotive, the core tenet of branding itself.

Core purpose has been identified by Built to Last authors Jim Collins and Jerry Poras as one of the key ingredients for a high performing organisation. Collins and Poras conducted a 6 year study of exceptional and long lasting companies like Hewlett Packard, 3M, Procter & Gamble, Disney and Marriott, who have an average of over 100 years of sustained business performance.

They uncovered some key components that ensured these high-flying businesses endured and thrived over time. One of these key components is their core purpose that creates a strong sense of identity and continuity throughout a business.

What’s your housing association’s core purpose?

Your core purpose is your reason for being and engages and motivates employees. It’s who you are and why you exist and should be idealistic in nature. It’s not about what you do but what you believe. Unfortunately we have seen housing associations fail to define their core purpose and end up with uninspiring mission statements that motivate no one.

The point of your core purpose is to motivate and lead your people and employees at every level so they know that everything they do has a line of sight to the organisation’s core purpose and is therefore meaningful to them.

Defining your true purpose is all about clarity, genuineness and alignment. It doenst have to be overcomplicated or even unique, but it has to be meaningful to your organisation.

Why do you exist?

We’d like to see more on the rich earthy stories about why housing associations exist that really connect with their many and varied audiences. There seems to be a lot of statements of core purpose but not many that are really emotive. How did you come about? Where are you going? Who do you help and what difference do you make to customers’ lives? In the hierarchy of messaging this needs to be right up there, not buried deep within your site. Your core purpose matters more than anything – give us emotion not just facts; good branding is all about you communicating how you do it not just what you do.

Core purpose means engaged employees

Your team knows that what their daily responsibilities are and when they know their daily work is part of the bigger mission, they are more driven to show up every day on time and do their job well.

A well-communicated core purpose results in a workforce that is more engaged. Engaged employees work with passion and they feel a deep connection to their company. They co-operate to build a company and they create new customers because they have become brand advocates.

A clear understanding and line of sight of how a person’s job contributes to their company’s reason for being is a powerful form of emotional compensation. It, quite simply, is more thrilling to share a common purpose than complete a job.

How do you identify your core purpose?

Jim Collins identifies five important characteristics of a company’s core purpose:

• It’s inspiring to those inside the company.

• It’s something that’s as valid 100 years from now as it is today.

• It should help you think widely about what you could do but aren’t doing.

• It should help you decide what not to do.

• It’s truly authentic to your organisation.

But, your core purpose is not your unique proposition. In fact, you can have the same or a similar core purpose as another company, even one that is in an entirely different industry.

So having defined the importance of your core purpose, here’s some questions that can help you determine it.

1. Why does your organisation’s existence matter?

2. What is your most important reason for being here and why?

3. What would be lost if your organisation ceased to exist?

4. Why are you important to the people you serve?

5. Why would anyone dedicate their oh-so precious time, energy and passion to your company? (And it’s not just about money).

If you’d like help defining your core purpose in the branding process, please give Philippa Smart a call on 01902 797970 or email her.

 

 

Branding and the social housing sector – my take on it

We’ve worked in the social housing sector for 18 years and in that time we’ve got to know the sector pretty well, having worked with quite a few housing associations; Bromford, Orbit Group, Halton Housing, Stafford and Rural Homes, Trent and Dove, The Wrekin Housing Trust and Pierhead.

It goes without saying that we pick up on both the social housing big picture and their branding and how they communicate with their audiences.

Housing associations are always conscious of their need to deliver large on social purpose, but these are the organisations that have the greatest need to develop strong communications.

The social housing sector has changed, and this was impacted even more with the introduction of George Osborne’s rent reforms in 2015. There are challenges all ways round for social housing organisations;

Their audience has changed

Social housing organisations now need to be more refined in the way they communicate with a wider-than-ever-before range of audiences. Customers, local and central Government, the financial sector, other housing associations, home buyers and developers are all audiences that now need to be considered. But not only that, shared ownership and market rent has joined the mix and the demographic of their customers has changed because of the need of younger people, including professionals, to get their foot on the first rung of the property ladder.

Needing new and varied services

Funding the original social purpose of the social housing sector has meant that market rent, shared ownership and homes for sale have entered the mix. Some housing associations are utilising their maintenance division by offering their service to other associations. Some associations are moving into the homes for sale sector which means they have a totally different audience and therefore need to communicate very differently. This can be challenging for them.

The rent reforms in 2015 have created an impact. It started a wave of mergers and acquisitions which still continue and this means that those organisations are looking for new and more effective ways of being able to stick to their core principle of social purpose.

So what do we advise?

We see that the social housing sector acknowledges the need to consider brand and communications from the flurry of mergers and acquisitions and the subsequent brand evolution. But in some cases, strategic consideration is not given to the brand and of those who do look at it strategically, money is not spent as wisely as it could be.

If you look at other sectors as a comparison, the quality of communications could be higher. Where money is spent it is not always spent well with some poor quality design, writing and production.

One of the challenges for housing associations is to produce professional and good quality brand communications at a reasonable price, since the core purpose of housing associations is to help those in need. It is almost as important to not give the impression that things have cost money but the cost of poor quality design or failing to invest at all, may be greater than investing carefully in quality.

Housing associations like Bromford demonstrate it is possible to look professional without seeming like they’ve spent too much money on the communications piece.

As a Communications Manager ask yourself these questions:

Can you afford not to invest in your brand and communications?

Remember the cost of poor quality design or failing to invest at all, may be greater than investing carefully in quality.

Why do you exist?

We’d like to see more on the rich earthy stories about why housing associations exist that really connect with their many and varied audiences. There seems to be a lot of statements of core purpose but not many that are really emotive. How did you come about? Where are you going? Who do you help and what difference do you make to customers’ lives? In the hierarchy of messaging this needs to be right up there, not buried deep within your site. Your core purpose matters more than anything – give us emotion not just facts; good branding is all about you communicating how you do it not just what you do.

How do you differentiate yourself?

Many in the social housing sector are swimming in the same direction in the same river; using happy people images, bright colours and iconography, so achieving no differentiation from each other. This is a real opportunity to achieve stand out. How could you differentiate yourself?

Break out of the housing association design ‘straight jacket’ – now more than ever you need to stand out, so swim against the tide and create something more sophisticated away from the bright colours and iconography.

Does your brand identity have visual flexibility?

With the additional new audiences and services, the ‘straight jacket’ visual language doesn’t extend well across other applications so there is a fall-back default position to create sub brands which end up being managed awkwardly and lead to confusion for the user on their websites.

Build more flexibility into your visual language and messaging – don’t default to automatically creating new sub brands. Flexibility in your visual language and messaging may be all you need to create.

If you do develop sub brands, create a ‘family’ – ensure the relationship between your various brands is clear and that your master brand benefits from the shine of everything you are doing.

If you’re interested in finding out how Be Smart can help with your brand give Philippa Smart a call on 01902 797970 or email us.

 

SFRS – Revamped Awards

branding for events uk

Following internal feedback from their colleagues, Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) decided to give their team recognition awards a complete overhaul for 2017.

Be Smart Design were asked to create a dynamic and fresh new awards identity and style to really make their team the main focus.

They received many nominations recognising team members for the inspirational work they do on behalf of SFRS and the contribution that they have made to improving the lives and well-being of the communities they serve across Stoke on Trent and Staffordshire.

This is the tenth award ceremony of team recognition awards and it was the perfect opportunity to revamp the whole event which has been the same since it began in 2008.

The new look was designed across posters, letterheads and web banners and has been really well received for its contemporary look and feel.