Tag Archives: core values


3 Intrinsic Branding Lessons All Startups Should Learn – From The Store Next Door

This article was originally published on Forbes on 11/25/16.

As a brand strategist, I mostly work with new businesses on establishing themselves as brands – as quickly and as honestly as possible. With the growing awareness for Small Business Saturday, I felt it was time to analyze how small businesses brand themselves in an organic grassroots manner – and how startups can learn from these businesses that are rooted in localism and fueled by brand advocates.

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Our view of what a small business is has changed over the past decade. The financial crisis of 2008 led to uncertainty and unemployment, which led to people crafting and cooking again and, not so coincidentally, preferring local eateries and buying artisanal products. Many of these products were passionately created by people who had just one product and little to no business background. The best (and often only) way for them to market was by talking to their neighbors. At the same time, a new generation was becoming fed up by corporate America.

To gain insight on all matters local, I sought the opinion of a fellow local entrepreneur who is an expert on the subject, DW Ferrell. I met Ferrell locally when we shared the stage as panelists at the California Women’s Conference a few years ago, and his name popped in my head automatically when I started thinking about this topic. Ferrell was a retail strategist for major brands and shopping centers before veering in the complete opposite direction. He is co-founder of a social enterprise startup, a campaign community and platform marketplace for local makers and merchants that works to accelerate the local marketplace. Needless to say, he lives and breathes this subject matter.

I translated our lengthy and insightful conversation into three key lessons on how a local mindset can propel your startup into a meaningful and dynamic brand that remains true to itself:

1. Think Community First

Having the right mindset is key. Most brands have a community manager who, more often than not, turns into a social media PR machine who spends half their time nurturing social followers, and the other half putting out social fires. But that’s not the community we’re referring to. Successful local businesses are deeply involved with the city and its initiatives, with community events and planning. They want to contribute as much to the community as they are benefiting from it. If startups apply this desire to connect with their followers, share experiences, build upon them and use their shared values for the greater good, their brands will win big.

The next time you make a sale, think about what you can give in return (besides the product). If the customer isn’t expecting anything additional, a small unexpected gesture will lead to them seeing you as a friend, and that’s the basis of any relationship. When you repeat that step and that thinking, you create a community.

2. Define Your Vernacular

Just like any brand, a small local business stands for something and has to create meaningful values. These values need to embody the values of not only their customers and clients, but also the community and their contributions to it. “It isn’t enough to follow traditional brand marketing principles that are based on ‘push marketing.’ Instead, you and the company have to intentionally ‘live the story’ that embodies the brand’s values,” Ferrell said during our conversation. As Ferrell asks, “How will you align profit and purpose? How will your model support your mission?”

You have to create your vernacular and define your terms. When you define it and share it publicly with your community, you can ensure that you have the right community, as members will celebrate your values if they share your views. Furthermore, this forces you to hold yourself accountable. You’re saying: This is our ideal, our identity. Does it resonate with you? Great. We now need to be true to you, because you are behind us.

3. See Your Competition As An Advertisement

Your “biggest” competitor is not your enemy.

This lesson may be a bit tough to swallow, but you are nothing without a supportive network. And when you launch locally, that very network includes your competitors. In the small business world, the local coffee shop supports the other local coffee shop to leverage their unity and create a network that only has one enemy – in this example, Starbucks. If the small ones stick together they generate more word of mouth about each other and hence sales while forming a support system as a side effect.

The only thing that will hold you back from that handshake with your competitor is fear. And as Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “Only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Stop fearing; instead, cross-pollinate. “Cross-market” would be the correct term, but let’s keep this local and share the love.


Your Brand’s Core Values: From Document To Embodiment

Deriving your venture’s core values early on is essential to formulating a strong brand from within.

Imagine your core values being displayed beautifully in your company’s lobby: Your team will see them every day and it should engage and inspire them. At the same time, clients and shareholders should be able to read, and be in agreement with, your core values actually representing, and serving, your brand well. They need to resonate across the board. We advise to keep those value-statements to three very short and actionable sentences (some of the more universally applicable examples we derived with our clients in the past months are shown below):

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It is easy to notice that core values often sound similar, perhaps even a bit generic if taken out of context, regardless of how hard we worked with our clients on crafting them. They often do not feel naturally implementable either. No surprise then that they often stay put on a desktop in a PDF document, rather than being embodied by the team.

I gave this issue a lot of thought as I urge my team and myself to create work that is intrinsically being embodied by our clients to push their ventures into great brands.

I recommend embodying your core values the same way I would recommend you preparing for a very important presentation: Once you have the presentation deck done, the speaker notes inserted, and you start practicing, you will realize that the more you practice, the more you embody the content and overall spirit. The day of the presentation you will notice that you fully embody the content, to the extent that you could hold a successful speech even if a major electricity outage hit – in candle light, without slides, without speaker notes – because you are living the content.

Treat your core values the same way: Try assigning one of your new brand’s three core values to each day of the work week, then make it your goal to do something each day that turns the words of one core value into action. It might be a project scope document and you decide to question the status quo and try to turn it into a better product. It might be actively doing good and being the example by staying late to help a co-worker meet her deadline.

Examples are endless, core values there are only a few, so if you start checking one value off the list day after day over the course of two weeks, and you ask your team to be doing the same, you will quickly realize that you do not have to be reminded about the values anymore – you will just be doing it. This will be the magic moment where you will be embodying your brand’s core values, and that brand document that resides on your desktop can now be accidentally erased, because it does not matter anymore. Action, as we all know, speaks louder than words.

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