Brand Values: The Difference Between Competing and Leading
Brand Materials is a ten-part series for founders exploring the foundations of brand strategy, from purpose and positioning to voice, personality, and emotional connection.
Each entry is a self-guided workshop, structured to give direction while letting your ideas unfold. Think of it as a companion to your branding process: a place to ask sharper questions, refine your message, and shape a brand that’s deeply compelling.
In this post, we’re diving into one of your brand’s most powerful trust-builders: your values.
Why Brand Values Matter
Brand values are often treated as filler, or a list of words on an About page. Innovation. Integrity. Creativity. Safe choices that sound good but rarely change anything.
But values aren’t decoration but direction that shifts a brand from a commodity to a community.
When you lack clear values, the default is survival: undercutting competitors, discounting, working harder for less. A race to the bottom that leaves you drained and indistinguishable.
Brand values change that. People will pay more for the handcrafted piece over the mass-produced one. They’ll choose Patagonia over a cheaper jacket. Or reach for a brand like Lesse, where the aesthetic is inseparable from the ethic. They’re not buying things. They’re buying alignment, belonging, and a way of seeing the world.
This applies whether you’re a product-based business, a creative studio, or a service provider. The brands that endure don’t sell features alone. They sell principles embodied in practice.
How to Define Brand Values
Your values shouldn’t come from a brainstorm of buzzwords. They’re drawn from the places where your personal convictions, your audience’s worldview, and your brand’s purpose overlap. Think of them as layers to peel back rather than boxes to tick.
1. Personal Principles
What’s non-negotiable for you? What standards you hold yourself to, even when no one is watching?
2. Purpose Connection
How do those principles fuel your brand’s reason for being? Revisit your purpose: what beliefs underpin it?
3. Audience Worldview
What matters deeply to the people you want to serve? Values are a bridge that create shared belonging.
4. Distinctions
Where do you diverge from your industry’s defaults? Often your values live in the way you resist the status quo.
5. Core Set
Distill 3–5 values that are clear, specific, and actionable. Not just words to admire, but principles you actively practice.
How to Articulate Your Brand Values
Defining values is one thing. Sharing them with your team and your clients is another. That’s where a values statement is helpful—a clear, concise way of sharing your guiding principles.
Here’s a framework you can start with:
Our brand values are rooted in (your core beliefs), as we strive to (your purpose) for (your audience) through (your offer).
Examples:
Our brand values are rooted in making healthy choices accessible. We strive to empower busy professionals in London to lead healthier lives through community-focused support.
Our brand values are rooted in creating high-performance, eco-conscious skincare for women who want clean beauty without compromise — safe ingredients with sustainable sourcing.
Our brand values are rooted in the belief that slow design creates deeper impact. We strive to help creative founders build brands with longevity, clarity, and cultural weight through intentional strategy and design.
How to Make Values Visible
Don’t write your values, slap them on an About page, then carry on with business as usual. Values are only powerful when they’re embodied. They need to be visible in how you speak, what you sell, and the way you work.
Here are three ways to bring your values to life:
1. Show Alignment in Your Communication
Audit your content. Your website, social captions, even your email sign-off. Are your values clear, or are they hiding behind generic language? Small shifts can make a brand magnetic: an intentional tone, a sharper narrative, a paragraph on your sales page that explains not just what you do, but why you do it differently.
2. Tell Stories That Prove Your Principles
Don’t just state sustainability, inclusivity, or creativity. Show it. Share the story of the design choice you made, the process you refused to compromise on, or the reason you turned down work that didn’t align. Stories build trust, because they show that your values cost you something, and that you chose them anyway.
3. Build Values Into Your Model
The deepest layer of visibility isn’t copy, but structure. When values shape how your business actually operates (from pricing models to client experience to the pace you work at) they become undeniable. Whether that’s working in seasonal cycles, prioritizing accessibility, or investing in ethical suppliers, your model proves that your values are more than words.
Recap
Defining your brand values is about clarifying the principles that will anchor your brand through growth, change, and uncertainty.
In this post, you’ve:
Defined the layers of inquiry that reveal authentic, actionable values.
Translated those principles into a clear values statement.
Learned how to make your values visible in your content, your offers, and your business model.
When values are embodied, they become a lens for decision-making, a signal of trust, and a reason for your audience to choose you.
Concluding Thoughts
Your values are the architecture of your brand. They shape how you operate, how you show up, and how people experience you. And when you live them consistently, they become magnetic.
Markets shift. Trends change. Algorithms rewrite themselves overnight. What keeps your brand steady is not aesthetics or tactics but conviction. Values that you return to, again and again, until they’re not just words but ways of working.
Up Next: Crafting Brand Vision
With your values defined, it’s time to zoom out. What future are you building toward? In the next chapter of Brand Materials, we’ll explore how to craft a brand vision that connects your daily decisions with your biggest goals. You’ll learn how to link purpose, values, and long-term direction into a strategy that doesn’t just respond to the present, but actively shapes the future.
