Building Your Brand - Core Values

In crafting a brand, people can be so focused on achieving success that the miss something essential that every successful brand has: Core Values.

In essence, what do you and your brand stand for? What’s important to you? What do you value?

These are important questions because your clients, prospects and colleagues will recognize your core values based on how you managed and respond to various situations.

To be clear, your core values are different from your personality attributes. If you’ve ever taken a standardized personality test like the DISC Assessment, Myers-Briggs or the True Colors Test then you’re familiar with identifying and understanding personality attributes.

If you haven’t, basically your personality attributes help us understand how we think, feel or respond in certain situations. In most cases these are unconscious and automatic reactions.

Core values are different because these are the ideals or qualities you admire. You make a conscious decision to emulate, follow, champion and practice these.

It rings back to the old saying that actions speak louder than words. You can usually typically spot someone who espouses a set of core values and their actions don’t speak to them. It gives you an odd feeling, like mental whiplash.

A fun way that I’ve come up with to define what I consider my core values is to use my first name like an acronym. Not my full name, mind you – my mother is the only person on this Earth with the rights and freedoms to use my full name.

So think about it – what do you want your core values to be? I’ll share mine with you to get you started:

C - Creative

H - Honest

R - Reliable

I - Intelligent

S – Strategic

This is how I want to be perceived and my brand to be assessed by others. It’s not always easy – but nothing worthwhile is easy.