A Free Tool To Define Brand Values and Kickstart Your Brand Strategy Efforts

Maximize your branding impact with our free Brand Values Worksheet, Now with Positioning & Voice Options

Clearly defined brand values are an essential part of establishing a brand strategy. A brand’s values guide decisions, shaping company culture and customer relationships. Brand Values ensure a consistent identity, foster employee loyalty, and create emotional connections that build credibility and differentiation, ultimately influencing long-term success and growth. However, many teams get stalled by blank-sheet starts or roadblocked in inflexible branding frameworks. Many companies end up with the same generic buzzword-heavy values list their competitors have. Such lists never get buy-in from the market. They aren’t authentic, no one believes them, and go largely ignored. The Brand Values Worksheet is designed to get you over those initial hurdles and help your team find a Goldilocks List they can use to move your brand story forward. The worksheet is free and open-source. I don’t collect any data, or hide any formulas or code, and —if you’re comfortable with GoogleSheets— you’ll find it easy to customize it to suit your team. Since it’s constantly being updated based on feedback, shoot me a note with WORKSHEET in the Subject and I’ll reply with an updated link to the current version. It’s also free to anyone who Connects or Follows on LinkedIn.

The Brand Values
Worksheet

Establishing super-specific Brand Values has never been easier thanks to this Open Source tool!

How Can You Use the Brand Values Tool?

The Brand Values Worksheet helps you define your Brand Values in clear, concise and descriptive terms. It distills your unique qualities into a Goldilocks List that you can then use as a basis for your brand strategy efforts

Knowing your company’s unique brand values is an important first step in creating a distinctive brand that potential customers, partners, and employees can identify and relate to. Your brand values are more than just the basis for any branding work that comes along. They are foundational for your company’s operations in the marketplace. The C-Suite can use the information they unveil to train the managers and teams to implement the brand values in their interactions with other employees, business partners, and customers. Your HR Department can create the personnel handbook based on your Brand Values so that the company environment from the top to the bottom is well equipped to personify your brand in every interaction. Skilled marketing personnel, copywriters, and designers can use this tool to create compelling content based on your specific values, positioning, and tone. If you’d like to talk about how I use the information gathered by this tool as a catalyst for company messaging, send up a flare. I’d love to talk to you.

See how Susan, a marketing director in a Regional Wholesale Distribution Company used the Brand Values Worksheet to survey stakeholders, report findings, set a course for reasserting the company’s original brand values.

Meet Susan, a marketing heroine faced with a mystery: Where did the Brand Values go?

Start your own Brand Recovery Story* with my free open-source Brand Values Worksheet (BVW)!

*TP Parade not guaranteed

In the harried halls of a rapidly expanding but unimaginatively named Regional Wholesale Distribution Corporation, Susan, a marketing director with a penchant for sharp insights and sharper pencils, found herself wrestling with a peculiar dilemma. As the company grew—acquiring entities and employees like a magician pulls rabbits from hats—its core values seemed to disappear, much like Susan’s perpetually lost spectacles.

One day, while pondering over the company’s latest brand misadventures (an ad campaign featuring a rhinoceros in roller skates had not gone as planned, HR was involved, and The Bronx Zoo), Susan had an epiphany. Armed with the Brand Values Worksheet (BVW)—a tool from the ever-generous and weirdly large-headed inventor at Chachwick Creativity Co.—she set about her quest.

Susan Surveys the Situation

Susan interviewed the company’s founder, stakeholders, customers, and employees, with each of her interviews in separate versions of the worksheet. Susan unveiled these findings in the large conference room, using a single file that combined the widely diverse responses.

The survey revealed troubling tilts away from the original brand values. “Hospitality” was muddled by “Stingy,” and “Innovation” was missing entirely, replaced with “Methodical”.

Alarmed by the lost focus on his original vision, the founder burst into a flurry of florid mixed metaphors, stopping only when Susan stepped in with a clean Brand Values Worksheet ready for fresh input. Surrounded by the Founder, his trusted advisors, and several long-time employees, Susan got to work.

Susan Sails to Success

Using the BVW’s pick-list, synonym finder, and a Brand Positioning effort, she helped distill the founder’s original values into practical language that executives could apply and use to train others. Slowly but surely, the founder’s personality became the brand personality, expressed by every employee in every interaction.

Within months, Susan’s surveys showed a remarkable turn for the better. “Generous” replaced “Stingy,” “Creative” ousted “Conventional,” and “Innovative” came out of hiding.

The founder generously invited Susan to take a victory lap culminating in a TP parade down the warehouse paper aisle. Curling rolls of white toilet-paper streamers sailed through the air in wide arcs of joyous exuberance, cut short only when Betty from reception was nearly beaned by a full block of bar napkins hurled by Carl, the clumsy sales intern. Susan resolved to make “Restrained” a value in the next list.