In a day and time where values play a critical role not only in marketing but also in attracting skilled employees, many companies are faced with one question: how can we turn our brand values into our DNA, ensuring that we practice what we preach?
Your company’s values are what make it unique. Without properly defined values (which are intertwined with your brand’s personality), neither customers nor employees have a way of knowing whether or not they like your company.
So if your company doesn’t have clearly defined core values yet, it’s time to get cracking on that – they are part of your USP, after all.
Some examples for common brand values at the moment would be sustainability, innovation, creativity or honesty – but keep in mind that the sky’s the limit here: I’m 100% sure that companies such as Who Gives A Crap have something like “make the world laugh” among their core values. 😉
One very common brand value these days is diversity and inclusion (D&I), but while many, many companies do have some sort of statement saying that they really care about D&I, it becomes obvious that they struggle with implementing it throughout their organisation when you take a closer look.
The challenge of diversity & inclusion when building brand values
Since I believe we all can agree that we need a more diverse, inclusive and just world, I think we all should do what we can to work towards that goal. Unfortunately, even with the best intentions and lots of effort, this can be quite the challenge.
One of the main problems I see with diversity & inclusion is that it goes so far beyond the individual: it’s a gigantic topic with a huge amount of very fragmented subtopics that come in all shapes and forms. But beyond that, it’s first and foremost a structural problem that no one person can solve.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though.
A good first step for your company in that regard is to say out loud that you care about diversity & inclusion – many have done that by defining D&I as one of their core values.
But this alone is meaningless if you don’t follow it up by action that ensures your company actually lives diversity & inclusion.
Many companies make a big deal of things like pride month or celebrating religious events like Hanukkah or Ramadan – but the rest of the year, everybody just does their job and na actions are taken towards a less biased, more open and just world. And while this kind of broad attention is great to raise awareness, it often feels like it’s nothing more than a marketing tool to certain companies rather than something that can enable actual change.
Taking action towards living diversity & inclusion
Some steps your company can take towards making diversity & inclusion not just part of your brand’s values on paper but also of your company culture include:
- Hiring people with diverse backgrounds for all kinds of positions including management
- Equal pay for everybody, no matter their gender or background
- Awareness workshops that bring attention to unconscious bias
- Representing all kinds of people and life plans in your internal and external communication
- Implementing a strict no-harassment policy with serious actions in case of any kind of wrong behaviour
Apart from those well-known actions, there are of course many, many more – and one of the lesser-known options is making diversity & inclusion a part of your company’s style guide.
The power of the style guide in building your brand’s values
Since there are many kinds of style guides out there, give me a sec to clarify the kind I’m talking about: the style guide I mean is focused on how to create well-written copy for your company that communicates your brand’s values in your company’s tone of voice, creating a consistent experience for your customers and employees.
A good style guide can do a lot for your company, but one thing many people don’t seem to be aware of is that it can also help you in establishing your brand’s values.
For examples, if building a community is one of your core values, your styleguide can help make that happen by ensuring that all communication is warm, friendly, supportive and helpful. Or if one of the brand values is creativity, you could help communicate that by saying in your style guide that you want copywriters to use out-of-the-box thinking and all kinds of (im)possible images in your texts.
Now, with the example of diversity & inclusion, your company’s style guide can create clear guidelines on how to communicate in a way that supports this. Here are some of the aspects this could cover:
- How to use inclusive, gender-neutral language – while this is fairly straightforward in English, many other languages are gendered and need specific instructions on how to write inclusive copy.
- How to avoid sexist or racially biased stereotypes – think about texts that give illustrative examples where managers are always men, nurses are always women and a family is only ever a heterosexual, married couple with no more than two kids.
- Which biased phrasings to avoid and what to replace them with – many industries use heavily biased terms for certain things, which often carry a lot of meaning that has no place in today’s society anymore. Common examples are the more neutral parent/child for components in programming instead of the previously used master/slave or the more neutral blocklist/allowlist instead of blacklist/whitelist.
While all of these might feel obvious to many of us, they aren’t. All of these things (and many, many more), are only slowly coming to the surface for a lot of people. We’re currently living in the time of a huge cultural shift where younger people grow up with a certain awareness about these things but where a lot of people who grew up in a different time often struggle with keeping them in mind.
The cool thing is that once diversity & inclusion is part of your style guide, every person in and around your company is confronted with these ideas each and every day. The people who write copy have to use or avoid certain wordings, which helps in moving these things to front of mind and creating awareness and sensitivity to such issues – and yes, that also works passively if you’re not the one writing the texts but only the one reading them (as your employees would in internal communication and customers in marketing material).
And the true power of the style guide shows itself when this leads to a ripple effect: if you have to think about something a lot while you’re at work, it becomes ingrained into your head. That means you might start using or avoiding certain wordings in your everyday language and that you might discuss these things with other people, which heightens their awareness as well.
And isn’t that a beautiful thing?
While a style guide certainly won’t solve all your problems when it comes to building your company’s brand values, it can definitely serve as a supporting measure that helps speed things along.
If that sounds interesting to you, drop me a line so that we can discuss how a style guide might be able to help your company in building it’s core values.
