Episode 433: 1 quick way to determine your brand values
In this episode, Fiona shares a quick tip on defining and showcasing your brand values. Offering a practical exercise to help align your business with these values. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
The importance of brand values in business
Exercise to define brand values: writing a brand eulogy
Examples of values and their impact on brand perception
Aligning marketing and content strategies with brand values
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Welcome to episode 433 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a quick tip episode, and this is an important one, particularly if you're somebody who struggles with this idea of your values and how to show your values as a business, with your marketing, with your content, with the way that you create and position your brand. Here are some quick tips on how to make that easier for yourself. Before we get stuck into that, I want to let you know that my book, my second book, is now available for pre-order, so you can find the book, you can find both of our books now. The second book is called Business to Brand, moving from Transaction to Transformation. I'll be doing many more episodes about this book, why I wrote it, why it's important, and how it can help you with your business and brand.
If you'd like to pre-order that book, you can do so from all the usual online places. If you are in Australia and you'd like to pre-order it from me and have a signed copy, you can do so at mydailybusiness.com. If you check out the homepage, you'll be able to find it. You can also buy our first book, Passion Purpose Profit there as well. Maybe buy a bundle, maybe buy them for some of your friends. They are both great gift ideas and we do often have people buying at least Passion Purpose Profit because business to brand has only just hit as a pre-order, but they do buy those four friends. Just put in the notes that it is for a friend and you want their name on it or their address or whatever else.
You can always just email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com as well. But if you are interested in my second book, you can pre-order it now. I would love it. I’d love it if you could pre-order it. And again, if you want to pre-order it from us, you can, if you want to pre-order it wherever you are in the world, just Google Business to brand Fiona Killackey, or Business to Brand My Daily Business. Or you can find a link to it in the show notes for this episode, which is available at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/433. And of course, I also want to acknowledge where I'm coming from and acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of these lands, which is also where I predominantly wrote the second book. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the coordination. I pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
One of the things we hear a lot from all sorts of business education, business, online articles, all the things, is that as a business owner, you need to be clear on your brand values. This is something I shout about a lot because I agree with this, and I've seen it so many times when business owners are making a lot of money from their business, maybe even turning over great profit because we all know that you can make a lot of money in business and have crap profit. The whole revenue figures don't always show you the truth. But I have seen so many times people who are hitting these goals or these success metrics that somebody told them, but they feel completely out of alignment. And usually, it's because there is a complete misalignment between their values and their business.
Values are crucial to understanding your business, particularly if you're trying to have a business that is meaningful and has a purpose and impact behind it. One of the things that people struggle with is how do I define my values. How do I, how do I come up with them? How do I know what they are? And I want to share with you a helpful exercise. I mentioned it in the second book Business to Brand as well, which can sound a little morbid or sad to think about initially. I think more so when you haven't had this happen to you. But it is to think about the eulogy of your brand. For anyone who doesn't know what a eulogy is, it is usually the speech that goes with a funeral. It is a speech about somebody's life at their funeral.
I've been unlucky in that I lost both of my parents in my thirties, which is quite young for most people. I think on average it's in the late fifties, or early sixties that most people have lost both parents, one of the most beautiful acts that my eldest brother did for our family, and I'm speaking only from my own opinion here is his sibling, is that he wrote and delivered the eulogies for both my father and my mother. He wrote incredible eulogies. He's an incredible writer and a psychologist, he's very in touch with creativity. He loves to read Irish poetry. He did an incredible job. But summing up somebody's life, in my father's case, he was in his eighties, and my mom was in her seventies, summing up 80 years of somebody's life in a pretty much 10-minute speech is near impossible. What you are telling people and relaying is the values that that person lived by, the values that they bestowed on their children or the people in their life that they loved, that they were closest to.
You're also talking about how those values underpinned their career or their journey in life, or their love of travel or exploring or food or whatever it was. Those values are front and centre. And when you listen to a eulogy, and I have been privileged enough to be at a lot of people's funerals, and now I'm going to, unfortunately, more of my friend's parents' funerals, and I love listening to eulogies, particularly people I don't know because it's just beautiful the way that people can be summed up and their life and having a life that is so meaningful for those loved ones who are delivering those eulogies. to bring it back to business, if you are struggling to think about what are the values that underpin your brand, men, consider writing a eulogy for your brand. And thinking about what would be the values that you would want people to remember your brand by?
What would those values be that they would think when I interacted with them, it was always kind, or when I interacted with them, they always had a funny spirit? When I connected with that brand, it impacted my health. It changed things around for my health or my mental health or it made me feel ambitious. It gave me this level of ambition and determination. It was empowering as a company that was impacting my life. I know it might seem like a bit of a random thing, but I think you can use this in your personal life, it'll be a bit more emotional maybe, or maybe not, maybe not. But you can use this same exercise and think about how you want to live as a person. Like what are your values? If someone were to write your eulogy, what would be the things that would stand out to people reading and thinking, I can see their values because I can see how they lived their life and what was important to them.
The same way in a business. I know people will be like, this is so morbid that you're even thinking like this. But companies and brands are living things. They're run by people. They are started by people, they are run with human influence. you want to think about, if I were to listen to a eulogy of this brand, what would be the legacy? What are the values? What are the things that stand out? What are the things that touch people, the things that people remember? And that can help you when it comes to your values. Is it okay, when I interacted with them, there was a level of freedom, they allowed me to be myself. Was it that by interacting with this brand, I became more curious as a person? Was it that I became more empathetic to the world around me?
Was it that I increased my knowledge and self-awareness of things? Was it that by interacting with this brand I felt abundant? I felt that anything was possible. Looking into that, and of course, you can find a checklist of values at our website, mydailybusiness.com/freestuff, and you can find a whole bunch of free stuff, including a values checklist. You can also just Google the values checklist. If you happen to have my first book, Passion Purpose Profit there is a values checklist on page 17. That can be a starting point as well. If you are thinking, this is the impact I'd like to have as a brand. these are the sorts of stories that would be told in that eulogy. And then narrowing down and looking at those and going deeper and deeper and deeper until you come to the word or the phrase that determines that value and brings it to life.
Once you have those values, it's much easier than to look at your content, to look at your strategies, to look at everything through that filter of, is this in alignment with my values? I have said it many times. I have my values lit, written on a Post-it note they are stuck onto my computer. I'm staring at them right now. I'm constantly assessing what we offer as a business, how we market, how we talk about our brand, and how we show up in the world against those values, both internally and externally. I know this might be a bit of a strange one for people, particularly if you have not gone through losing people who are very close to you in your life. Sometimes people can get very scared of that idea, even though it's going to happen to all of us. it's the only certainty that we all have that we will be impacted by the death of people closest to us.
It might seem a little strange or macabre or weird, but I think it could be a meaningful exercise. That is it for today's quick tip episode, and a reminder, as I said at the start, the pre-orders of my second book Business to Brand are available. You can Google Business to Brand book or Business to Brand, Fiona Killackey, or you can find it on our website and get a signed copy from me. We are only posting these within Australia at this point, but if you are elsewhere in the world, feel free to just send us a DM and we'll send you a link to somewhere near you that you can order from. And of course, it's important to keep independent bookshops available and open. If you have an independent bookshop near you, please ask them to stock the book and please look at pre-ordering from them as well so that we can keep independent bookshops available and open and in business for everyone. You'll be able to find the show notes for this and a link to our book at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/433. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
