Don’t Pick Fights. Even when values are in sync with mission, they should not be used as a battle flag. Being combative may work in politics, but not for brands. Aggressive campaigns run a high likelihood of alienating core customers. This happens when the long-standing image of a brand is not aligned or is incongruous with contemporary beliefs and values. The old may need to change but disparaging the old image in some way, even if slightly, will often do nothing but pick a fight. There have been a couple of instances recently in which doing so has hurt brands. Consumers want brands to be clear on values, but they don’t want brands getting distracted by social advocacy. This is not to say that brands should feel free to ignore values or social issues. That’s important, too. It’s just to say that brands must be mission-central and that’s hard to do while picking a fight.

My Brand. The real challenge facing brands, though, is not neglecting the product but upending the branding itself. Core customers, even noncustomers, have an understanding of what a brand represents—intangibly, emotionally, symbolically, stylistically. These are the symbols and messages that tie people to a brand’s identity. Flipping these abruptly, especially with a message saying the old identity was flawed or corrupt, is disorienting to consumers, especially those most committed to the brand. Consumers want companies to be clear about the values they stand for, but there is no clarity at all in sudden turns of positioning and messaging. Obviously, values have to change sometimes—the brand changes, society changes, consumers change. But change should be approached as a progression, as an improvement—not as a repudiation of the old branding and thus, by extension, of consumers themselves.

Human Values. What I am saying is not new. I think all marketers would nod in agreement, and even wonder why I’m stating the obvious. But it’s clear in recent years that striking the right balance between mission and values, between product and purpose, is hard to do. And not just in going overboard with values, but also in doing too little about values out of fear of doing too much. In the fractious political climate of today, a lot of marketers feel they can’t win for losing. But such resignation tends to come from a misperception that this is all about aligning or not aligning with political values. That kind of thinking will always lead to trouble. The issue at hand is about aligning brands with human values—core values true for all people, not left or right values. And the secret to clarity about a commitment to human values is to be mission-central in solving universal human needs. Then people know you truly care.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about our purpose, mission, vision and values and brand culture workshops and programs.

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That’s because the human emotion of love is not associated with self-interest. Love is more closely associated with selflessness. The old model built on self-interest was never able to fully explain why people would choose to have children, or why they would sacrifice so much for them. Love is an unconscious motivator that moves the human condition past the base motivators of self-interest toward social awareness, or even preference toward others.

In Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton’s hypothesis on Identity Economics, they questioned the original concept of behavioral economics. They found that belonging and values of community are core to human identity. That’s why values are often the most powerful force of influence in consumer behavior, or any behavior for that matter. Indeed, they wrote about the rules for behavior saying modern scholars “agree on the importance of anxiety that a person experiences when she violates her internalized rules.”

That means the consumer brain feel less anxiety over choices about features and benefits than they do when they make choices that might violate their core purpose or values. These core values are tied directly to the most powerful motivator in the consumer brain: love.

The consumer brain is less interested in meeting its need for preferences toward features and benefits than it is in maintaining its need to get love or provide love to others.

Let’s talk tactics. How can we make this practical in the automotive industry, for example. The values of the automotive manufacturer are more important to its consumers than the features and benefits. People don’t fulfill their need for identity from a car that tested high in crash safety. However, that doesn’t mean that crash safety features and benefits are irrelevant either. In fact, these features and benefits may become critical to demonstrate your brand values.

Perhaps you think it’s silly for a brand to promise selfless love to its consumers, but consider Subaru. It wasn’t flattering to show a car smashed in a commercial about Subaru. In the commercial titled “I’m Sorry,” after a teenager gets in a car accident, the mom says, “You’re OK? That’s all that matters.”

When Subaru demonstrated safety as a selfless value owned by the brand, they earned the right to say, “Love, it’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” They were able to tie crash safety features to emotionally charged values of self-sacrifice that Subaru demonstrated by showing its vehicle smashed.

Values such as love are verified by action. That’s because the evolved consumer brain is acutely perceptive. It possesses an authenticity barometer that will test your values to be sure they are true. Before the consumer brain assigns love to your brand, your brand will need to demonstrate love first.

In this belief structure, the brain’s left hemisphere weighs in on your brand’s emotional promise with a desire to see action. That’s why you can’t fake your values in advertising. What good would it do if Subaru said it loved your kids, if their cars put them in danger? In this commercial, Subaru never had to say they loved your kids. They demonstrated love by their “lifetime commitment to getting them home safely” through crash survival outcomes.

In our updated belief structure, we must appeal beyond the preferences of our consumers to identify with their values. The consumer brain seeks preferences in the “what I want” part of the brain, but it will never violate its identity, or the “who I am” part of the brain. The latter function has been proven to short circuit self-interest. As we meet the preferences of our consumers to come into alignment with their identity, we will find values alignment. That creates a condition where love is found.

Best Practices For Employing Values

Consumers connect emotionally to your brand values. These are not soft, intangible feelings. Leading brands are flipping the pyramid. Brands are feeding and clothing consumers who can’t afford to pay. Brands are healing people through commerce. Brands are giving purpose to employees and to the consumers who love these companies more than any generation before us ever thought they could.

The longer brands take to get into the movement, the more they will look like inauthentic followers of this powerful trend. Significant benefits will be rewarded to brands who act now with authenticity, seizing control of early-mover advantages.

These are the key best practices to keep in mind:

1. Determine North Star Values For Your Brand: Establish a moral true north for your brand values that guides everything your company and its employees do. Plan a safe launch for these brand values in today’s socially charged marketing landscape.

2. Love Is The Greatest Value Driver: Most importantly, love is the universal value driver. If in doubt about a complex values question, test it to see if it falls under the definition of selfless love that you can demonstrate as a brand.

3. Social Cause Is The New Personal Service: In recent studies, a brand value proposition tied
 to social responsibility has shown more impact than personal service, which is being replaced by mobile apps and self-service.

4. Action Speaks Louder Than Words: That means demonstration is better than assertion. So, don’t be anxious to promote your values in your ads by talking about them, unless you can show accountability.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Daniel Brian Cobb, excerpted from his book Surfing The Black Wave: Brand Leadership in a Digital Age.

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It seems obvious at first glance that brands would use the values they have created to decide what was in and what was out in terms of activities and opinions. And yet many brands seem not to have connected the brand DNA with the business realities. They have not translated what was agreed into principles that define what they consider to be acceptable to and for the business overall.

For example, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued its 2017 Digital Terrorism and Hate Report Card, it was quick to point the finger at social media giants for not doing enough to prevent or discourage the online marketing of terrorism and hate groups. At a briefing for the release of the Report, the Associate Dean of the Center said, “Google/ YouTube earned a C- on the digital report card for allowing the proliferation of “how to” videos that instruct people on how to build and deploy explosives from materials found in the home. They also earned a “D” for their failure to remove thousands of hate group posting[s].”

None of this seems, on the face of it, to align with Google’s own unofficial slogan of “Don’t be evil”, unless you only interpret that statement to mean that as long as Google itself doesn’t do anything it considers to be evil, then any evil that happens through or because of Google’s presence in the world does not count. That’s not a distinction that consumers find easy to make. For many of them, Google’s undertaking can be read as the company saying it won’t associate with anything that can be considered evil.

Which brings us back to where this started. How does your brand fix limits around what it tolerates and what it doesn’t? And who gets to decide? For me, the onus is increasingly on brands that pride themselves on their values to explore the implications of those commitments for not just what they stand for but how they behave, who they do business with and what they will and will not tolerate.

“Because we value [this], we will always do this”. Or “because we value [this], we refuse to do [this] or [this]”. That way the boundaries are clear and the risks of overstepping what your own people and your customers expect are much reduced.

I’ve raised this a number of times in workshops over recent years and the pushback is always that such an approach limits what the brand can do competitively. That, I’ve always counter-argued, is precisely the point. Building operating principles out of your values helps guide what you initiate and how you respond. It sets clear and consistent parameters around what is acceptable to your brand and what is not – and while, yes, that does tell your competitors how they can expect you to behave, it also tells customers what your brand continues to stand for.

There’s plenty of noise now from brands about their social awareness and their advocacy for good things to happen in the world, and all the signs are there that they will continue to move this way. According to a recent EY Beacon Institute and Harvard Business Review study, 85 percent strongly agree that they are more likely to recommend a company with strong purpose and 84 percent strongly agree that business transformation efforts will have greater success if integrated with purpose. But the realities of behaving in ways that are consistent with what the brand says it stands for are much lower: only 46 percent think that their organization has a strong sense of purpose and 37 percent believe that their business model and operations are well-aligned with purpose.

The very real risk here is that brands will continue to espouse their values and purpose publicly but only act on them when it suits them to do so. That in itself says a lot about how values have become vanilla bullet point items in the strategy deck rather than the underpinning characteristics for competitive distinctiveness and consistency. Such values are worth nothing because they mean nothing. They should probably be renamed ‘convenient ideas’.

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This is often the case with great leaders, who are often fascinating characters to study because they are full of paradoxes and contradictions. We know from his legacy at Apple that he had a deeply soulful side, which is evident in this story: When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he found that the Apple brand had gone through a long period of neglect and was in need of renewal. He lamented the fact that Apple had drifted from its founding values, as its marketing had followed an old and tired product positioning formula used by other technology firms that extolled the virtues of “our product” versus “their product.”

He knew that the way back was not in talking about why Apple’s User Interface was better than Windows, or why Apple’s processors were faster. Instead, he saw that the marketing challenge was to give the brand more heart and soul.

Jobs realized that if Apple were to become great again, it needed an inspirational brand story. This is how Steve explained his understanding of Apple’s brand challenge shortly after returning to Apple after his ten-year absence:

“Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated and noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance for people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us. Now Apple fortunately is one of the half a dozen best brands in the whole world, right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke and Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats, not just in this country but all around the globe. But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to maintain its relevance and vitality. The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect. We need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz. It’s not to talk about why we’re better than Windows.

The best example of all and one of the best jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike. Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet when you think of Nike, you think of something different than just a shoe company. In their ads they don’t ever talk about the product. They don’t ever talk about their air soles and why they are better than Reebok’s air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are. That’s what they are all about.

Apple spends a fortune on advertising. But you’d never know it. So, when I got here Apple had just fired its agency, and there was a competition between 20 ad agencies to win the business in maybe four years. So I blew that up. And we hired Chiat Day. We started working a few weeks ago with Chiat Day, and we learned that our customers want to know, ‘Who Is Apple? What is it that Apple stands for?’

What Apple is about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost everybody in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple at the core, its core value…is that, we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. And we believe that in this world people can change it for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do.

And so what we’re going to do in the first major brand marketing campaign in a number of years is to get back to that core value. The things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple believes in today. And so we wanted to find a way to communicate this. What we have is something that I am very moved by. It honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living and some of them are not. But, the ones that aren’t as you’ll see, you know that if they’d ever used a computer it would have been a Mac. The theme of this campaign is ‘Think Different.’ It honors the people who think different and who move this world forward.” ~  Steve Jobs, September 23, 1997

Apple’s profoundly successful and influential Think Different campaign emerged from an internal brand purpose review to locate and project the core values of the brand. It was an expression of the genius latent in the Apple brand, and an enduring example of iconic, empathetic and soulful branding.

Think Different projected heart and soul into a category where those energies were almost completely absent, and directly attached those positive energies to the Apple brand.

It then stood out against the industry backdrop of product positioning ads, and said something important about what Apple as a brand stood for. It spoke directly to the identities of the people it was striving to reach.

And most importantly, the tone of the campaign was delivered in such a way that it struck an emotional chord. The campaign generated an elevated feeling about the nature of genius, the nature of Apple’s genius, and about the genius of people who buy Apple computers to do creative things with a certain kind of spirit, intention, and style. It was itself an act of genius to align all of these things and to also push the internal culture of the company forward in the process. This is an excellent example of a deep campaign and how such a campaign can successfully communicate on multiple levels at the same time.

How Microsoft Has Outperformed Apple Since Steve Jobs’ Death

Yet, Apple has drifted since Steve’s death from the Soulful brand trajectory that he put it on. Returns on Apple’s stock over the past four years haven’t been as good as those as one of its rivals: Microsoft. Microsoft threw down the gauntlet on Friday, drawing plaudits for its CEO Satya Nadella, after the technology giant posted one of its best stock performances in more than decade, driven by quarterly results that beat Wall Street expectations.

Now it is Apple’s turn to deliver.

The principles of Soulful Branding aren’t very well understood or used very often. It requires rare insight and instincts to know how to use them. Steve’s insight into Soulful Branding seems to have been sourced from studying what myself and others had done at Nike with Just Do It, which is 27 years old and running. Apple had something special with Think Different, but they didn’t creatively explore and extend that theme. What they need now is another deep campaign concept to return the light on the brands unique integrated value and on its core values.

Excerpted from Soulful Branding – Unlock The Hidden Energy in Your Company & Brand, Jerome Conlon, Moses Ma & Langdon Morris, FutureLab Press 2015. This book presents a deep paradigm shift in what the art of marketing & branding can become at the highest level. Few companies have ventured this high up the brand pyramid.

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Google itself has kept the No Evil clause. It’s been part of its own code of conduct from the time it was founded and served an important purpose in showcasing the company’s independence and trustworthiness in delivering unbiased and objective search results, not ones that had been paid for by advertisers.

The “Don’t Be Evil” clause is a rare instance of where a company value is both well-known and a source of brand differentiation. Most of the time, company values are worthy but entirely without merit in terms of inspiring employees or directing the company towards or away from specific actions.

Lucy Kellaway took on the subject of company values in a recent column in the Financial Times pointing out that, in the first place, most employees have no idea what their company values even are. She doesn’t find that all that surprising because, as she says: “all corporate values are much of a muchness.” A recent audit she references found that three words: “integrity, respect, and innovation” crop up over and over again—all noble but all hopeless as means to inspire people.

Lucy concludes her piece by proposing that companies get out of the values-creating business. She even had her statistics department run some numbers which showed that the seventeen companies out of the top 100 British companies that have not published their values on their websites outperformed the others on the FTSE Index by about 70%.

So, is this the answer? “Yes” if you’re going to come up with a list of politically-correct, feel-good words that work for every eventuality. But perhaps “no” if you can identify opportunities for distinctiveness which at least some companies have been able to do:

1. Companies Driven By Values

The fact that the same suspects appear over and over again as examples of companies driven by values should be a flashing warning sign that, although there is legitimate opportunity to differentiate via values, it’s not easy or frequently achieved. Has there ever been a list of such companies that didn’t include Patagonia, Toms or Zappos? These companies have succeeded in leading with value and using it to direct all of their activities. The question for “normal” companies is whether taking a few steps in this direction, for example by making a commitment to the environment or social issues, gets you all that far.

2. Companies Driven By A Strong Mission

This is a bigger list of companies—ones that have figured out where they want to go and use this as a way to harness internal resources and articulate their story externally. Aside from the “evil” mantra, Google has also benefited from a strong mission: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That was very powerful in its early days but has become more problematic as the company has moved beyond search, and a key reason for the creation of Alphabet is a way to incorporate other initiatives that were outside of the original mission. Other examples include LinkedIn: “Connect the Worlds professionals to make them more productive and successful”, Southwest: “friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.” (Note that, for Southwest, it’s the combination of mission (low price) and attitude (friendly) that differentiates it from other carriers.) Whereas few companies can succeed in differentiating themselves by values alone, all companies should be able and should aim to define their mission and use it to drive action and differentiation.

3. Companies That Are Driven By A Strong Competitive Instinct

Perhaps just a subset of #2, but worth pointing out that there are some companies that gain their energy and direction from their competitive attitude. Challenger brands like Pepsi, Virgin and Apple all were inspired by being different from and attacking Coke, British Airways and Microsoft. Uber has taken on taxis by tapping into consumers long history of grievances against the industry, succeeding in turning that raw emotion into a customer acquisition machine.

Whether your company is able to find a path to distinctiveness or not, you should at least stop spending valuable company time coming up with and then disseminating lists of values that are the same as everyone else’s and do nothing to advance a company’s performance or operating practice. Interesting to note that VW’s basic principles on its HR site are: “Top performance, Leading by example, Active involvement and Social responsibility.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Values Alignment Workshop

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