Create and Communicate Your Values

You don't just communicate your values, you need to live by them.

You can tell people you're one thing, but you've also got to make sure you act upon those values. Anyone can write on the wall “we stand for these values” - but you've got to live and breathe those values.

So how do you define your actual values?

As a start, you should be clear on your purpose as a business. Your purpose should have driven your product or service to begin with. So consider, why does your business exist, and what are you in this world to do? Diving into this will give you an insight into what your values are, because - even if undocumented - your purpose would have been driven by someone’s core values.

Businesses that ‘win’ generally have a purpose. It's no coincidence that the sort of clients we've had for the longest are brands that sell life-saving products, or sustainable products - we’ve always found it far better from marketing stance.

Those brands think of every sale as another life protected, or making the world just a little bit better. For those businesses, making money has been a by-product of making a difference. So if you can set up a business with a purpose and a set of operating values from the start, your marketing and messaging will be so much clearer and easier to communicate.

Your whole business should be aligned with your values internally too - you might have somebody in your workforce that's brilliant at their job, but you want to ensure that their work is aligned to the values that you have as your organisation.

So your values and what you mean as a business should be driven from the top - from the founders, from the boardroom, from the leadership team, throughout the whole business.