How to Identify Your Brand Culture
Who are we? What do we stand for? Sometimes those questions can be the toughest to answer.
Answering these questions however, will help you make business decisions, set the overall tone of your company culture, inspire others to share your vision, and help you identify your story. Each of these elements also become critical in developing a PR and content marketing strategy.
Start by identifying your core values and brand standards. List 5 to 7 adjectives that describe your company’s culture. How would your team and your customers describe you?
Then uncover what you are about. This is your vision – why you do what you do. Aside from making money, what motivated you to start your business?
Your brand’s vision will become your guiding light. A vision is a clear, laser-focused, picture of what you want to do and where you want to be. Don’t get this confused with your goals (we’ll cover that in the next blog post).
To determine your vision statement, answer the following:
- Why did you start your business? What was the motivating factor, aside from making money?
- Who do you want to serve? Why?
- What type of resource do you want to be for your target market?
- Where do you want your business to eventually be?
- List 3 to 5 values that encapsulate your brand. (This should match what you have listed above.)
Next describe your business as you envision it (this maybe different from its current state). Now distill this into one sentence. Does this statement motivate you? Is it something you can easily restate to others and get them excited about it?
Give yourself time to uncover this. It can be one of the most challenging pieces of the business puzzle for some. Finally, share this statement with people you know will give you honest feedback. They help you refine and polish it.
