You can have a brand worksheet that looks complete but tells you absolutely nothing. You might find yourself with a list of values that reads “trust,” “quality,” “creativity,” “care,” or “innovation.” It’s not the individual words that are the issue. It’s that we can’t see how these words connect to the offer, the audience, the tone of voice, or a customer situation. These words sound safe enough, which is probably why they tend to appear in an early draft.
Values are only useful if they influence decisions. A brand that values clarity would need that value reflected in a headline on the homepage, a product description, an onboarding flow, or some visual direction. A brand that values care would show that care in how instructions are worded, how a person is allowed to choose between two things, or how the brand prevents the user from doing something by mistake. Values that can’t direct a piece of messaging, some design decisions, or a user action probably aren’t very useful.
Pick a value and try to identify what it would change in the brand. Say the value was simplicity. Would that mean limiting the number of options to fewer than two? Using plain language? Avoiding ornate type? Helping the user compare two things? Say the value was creativity. Would it be okay for this brand to suggest two products be used in an unusual combination? Would a reference to a niche movie genre work? Would it make sense for materials like this to have a second purpose? This practice of imagining value as behavior turns an abstract word into real brand actions. It also helps tell the difference between real values and just nice-sounding buzz words.
Another option to make values concrete is to write them as short rules. Rather than trust, a rule might be, “Explain the first two steps before the customer commits to doing something.” Rather than quality, the rule might be, “Give the user the fewest choices possible, and then explain the pros of each choice rather than the cons.” Rather than innovation, the rule might be, “Show the customer the same problem they’ve solved a dozen different ways, then show them one more way that makes things easier rather than harder.” These short rules can then be used to inform how your copy tone works, message hierarchy, visual cues, and usage guidance on a one-page style sheet.
Values should also depend on the audience. What is important to one customer segment might not mean anything to another. New customers might look for reassurance and good white space. Expert-level hobbyists might be looking for options and specificity. A busy business client might respond to speed, order, and having fewer choices to make. When values are connected to the situation where people will be using the brand, these values become less ornamental and more useful as filters for all the decisions about what the brand will be.
Test out the list of values against three existing brand assets: a draft of tagline, a collection of image examples, a few sentences of social media bio. If you can only notice the value in the document where you wrote it down, you haven’t gone deep enough on the values. That promise should show up in the tagline, not the notes. A moodboard should contain imagery cues that suggest the behaviors behind the values. The brand bio should sound like the same voice that would produce the website copy. When you run values through this process, the ones that are too empty disappear, and the ones that are actually useful become more helpful for all future brand decisions.
A brand value doesn’t need to be novel or bold. It just needs to be specific enough to apply. Keep the word if you like, but add the action or behavior behind it. Next time you are writing values, don’t worry about how good they sound. Ask what the values would change in the main headline, the selection of color, the customer copy, or the rules of how the brand is used. The answers to those questions will become the part that makes the values feel like a real brand.