How to Use Your Brand Values to Make Better Business Decisions

How to Use Your Brand Values to Make Better Business Decisions

You’ve done the work. You've gone through the Expression Sequence and defined a set of 3-5 core Brand Values for your business. Words like "Integrity," "Innovation," "Simplicity," "Community," and "Transparency."

They look great on your website's "About Us" page. But what are you actually doing with them?

For many companies, brand values are just feel-good marketing words. They are a decorative plaque on the wall, but they don't have any real impact on the day-to-day life of the business. This is a massive missed opportunity.

Your brand values are not meant to be decorative. They are meant to be a practical, powerful, and profitable decision-making framework. They are the constitution for your company, the strategic compass that guides your every move. When used correctly, your values will help you hire the right people, build the right products, and navigate the toughest business decisions with clarity and confidence.

The Values as a "Decision Filter"

Every day, you are faced with dozens of choices. Should we add this complex feature to our product? Should we partner with this other company? Should we use this edgy, aggressive marketing campaign?

When you have clearly defined values, you have a powerful filter to run these decisions through.

Imagine your company's core values are:

1. Customer-Centricity: We put the customer's experience above all else.
2. Simplicity: We fight against complexity.
3. Transparency: We are open and honest in our communications.

Now, let's look at a common business dilemma:

The Dilemma: "A new enterprise client wants us to add a highly complex, custom feature to our software. It will be expensive to build and will make the interface more complicated for our other 99% of users, but it's a huge, profitable contract."

• The Decision Without Values: This is a purely financial decision. You weigh the cost against the profit. The huge contract is tempting, and you'll likely do it, creating "feature bloat" and harming your core user experience.
• The Decision With Values: You run it through your filter.
  1. Does it align with Customer-Centricity? No, it harms the experience for 99% of our users to please one.
  2. Does it align with Simplicity? No, it directly adds complexity to our product.
  3. Does it align with Transparency? Maybe, but we'd have to explain to our other users why the product just got more confusing.

The answer becomes crystal clear. The short-term profit is not worth the long-term cost of betraying all three of your core values. You say "no" to the contract, confident that you are protecting the integrity of your brand and the experience of your core audience. Your values have just saved you from making a strategically disastrous decision.

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Putting Values into Action Across Your Business

A value-driven brand doesn't just use values to say "no." It uses them proactively to guide how it says "yes." Here's how a single value can and should ripple through your entire company.

Let's say your core value is "Empowerment."

• In Product Development: How can we build features that don't just solve a problem, but also teach our users and make them feel more capable and in control? Is our user interface empowering or confusing?
• In Marketing: How can our content empower our audience with knowledge and skills, rather than just pushing our product? Our blog should be a resource for empowerment, not just a sales tool.
• In Sales: Is our sales process empowering for the customer? Are we giving them the information they need to make a confident decision, or are we using high-pressure tactics?
• In Customer Support: Does our support team have the power to solve customer problems on the spot, or are they bound by rigid scripts? An empowered support agent creates an empowering customer experience.
• In Hiring & Management: Are we hiring people who are passionate about empowering others? Are we giving our own employees the autonomy and resources they need to do their best work?

When a single value is translated into tangible actions across every department, your brand becomes incredibly powerful and consistent. Your culture and your customer experience become a living, breathing proof of your brand's promise.

How to Get Started

If your values are currently just a list of words on a page, here's how to activate them:

1. Make Them Visible: Don't hide your values. Talk about them in your team meetings. Put them on the wall. Make them a part of your company's shared language.
2. Incorporate Them into Your Processes: Add a "Values Alignment" check to your project kickoff documents and your hiring interviews. Ask the question explicitly: "How does this project/candidate align with our core values?"
3. Reward and Recognize Value-Driven Behavior: When you see an employee make a decision that perfectly exemplifies one of your core values, celebrate it publicly. This reinforces the behavior you want to see across the entire organization.

Conclusion: From Words on a Page to the Way You Work

Your brand values are your brand's immune system. They help you fight off the short-term temptations and bad-fit opportunities that can weaken your company over time. They are also your brand's conscience, guiding you to build a business that you can be proud of, one that is as principled as it is profitable.

Don't let your values be a passive decoration. Turn them into an active, strategic tool. The Markolé platform is designed to help you uncover and articulate these values in the Expression Sequence. Your job is to take that output and weave it into the very fabric of how you operate. When you do, you will build a brand that is not only successful but also resilient, respected, and truly authentic.