Brand principles and transparency in your market.

Your business objectives, along with your brand ideas — vision, mission, values, ethos and purpose — are all documented in your official brand guidelines. While you may have all of these critical components of your brand system well documented, how do you ensure that you, your team and your business are actually bringing these important concepts to life authentically? That activity is slightly harder, but perhaps far more important.

Are you minding your brand principles?

Brand principles are essentially operating instructions for everything to do with your brand. Think of brand principles as bringing your values to life across every interaction with your business — both inside and outside of the organization. Your brand principles define clear and consistent parameters about what is acceptable to your brand and what is not acceptable together with what your brand stands for. Every. Single. Time.

Your brand principles are essentially how you bring the brand system together, in real life. Far more than nice words neatly organized, rather the principles are intended to actually outline the appropriate actions and behaviors — all the communications, experiences and touchpoints.

Why are brand principles important?

It’s all well and good to talk about your values, your mission and your purpose because that’s what is included in the brand guidelines and what you actually had in mind when you began your business. But in today’s business world, living these ideas — communicating and acting upon them at every engagement — is where your brand principles become reality. For your staff, customers and the market at large.

People may not remember what you say, but they’ll certainly remember the interactions with and the behaviors modeled by your brand and your business. Brand principles help make what you intend for your brand to stand for, authentic and real.

So now you and your team are working to ‘live’ your brand principles. How does that relate to transparency? Brand transparency is key in helping you earn trust from customers and the marketplace at large. Building brand trust and loyalty is vital to help your business grow. Principles, transparency, authenticity, trust and loyalty — it’s all very connected.

The definition of transparency in business means being open, honest and genuine. As regards your business and your brand, it means taking every action with intention and integrity and standing behind those actions. This includes your product or service offer, your employment practices, your communications and marketing. It’s about taking pride in all that your brand does as well as the manner in which it's done.

In this 2018 Accenture survey, 66% of individuals said that transparency attracts them to buy from certain brands over others. That transparency encompasses everything the brand does, from the product and service offer to internal practices and policies to brand values.

Simple activation ideas.

An equally important piece to superior customer service is the formation of a strong customer support team that delivers positive ‘on brand’ customer experiences. This includes staffing your team with the right employees who value patience and are solution oriented.

The takeaway.

Living your brand principles and achieving brand transparency are inextricably linked and clearly require a long-term commitment and ongoing effort. Successful brands know this and invest in these efforts accordingly.

Your brand values help inform every aspect of your operations, service and staffing. Ensure your team is on the journey with you and be sure to clearly communicate what success looks like as relates to every experience with your brand — it will be well worth it.