Just what you always wanted. A lovely set of brand values.

For nearly two years now, we’ve been taking credit (and blame) for the Santa Brand Book. But it wasn’t our work.

Those amazing people at Blankkplatz (formerly Umlaut und Gherkin) did it. This Christmas, they’re offering everyone an amazing gift. Just go to their website and answer 7 questions.

They’ll use your answers, their many years of brand expertise, and their bespoke software, to instantly generate the brand values your organisation needs.

Merry Christmas.

one response

1. Jon says:

   January 18, 2013 at 4:32 pm

   Values are a good thing to have. Platitudes are not.

   For large organisations, values are helpful. They are a direct way and simple way to say to employees: ‘This is what we want to stand for. This is the personality we want to convey to the world.’.

   They’re useful building blocks for the company culture. And encouraging a positive culture can be a challenge if your organistion is 17,000 people strong, for example.

   In my experience, values become weak and worthless when they are simply bland virtues, such as ‘responsible’, ‘honest’, ‘caring’, ‘empowering’, ‘innovative’.

   Show me an organisation that wouldn’t want to be any or all of these things and I’ll show you a green labrador.

   If a business chooses values that have some character, some spikiness and spirit, the values may actually instigate change. Again, no mean feat if you’re running a massive, politics-ridden organsiation.

   Personally, I think three values are enough. Two can be fairly safe but there needs to be some tension between the three. For example ‘adventurous, intelligent and subtle’ works because ‘subtle’ is the outlier. It’s not what you expect and it is juxtaposed slightly with the other two.

   Once some values have been agreed, the tricky part is making them mean something and inspire thought and action. Barclays have recently shown how not to do it:

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/17/barclays-boss-values-blueprint