What makes you outstanding on your market is not your product or service, nor your logo on its own, but not even your entire branding. These are all just the outwardly representants of inner values of your company. When you filter your company culture, your ambience and set from them clear core values to follow, then you create a corporate philosophy. It is good for your employees, as they can emotionally relate to you and become brand ambassadors themselves. But is also a great tool for brand awareness.
In a corporate world you can meet with the following phenomenon:
1.) Mission statement: this is a summary of what is your aim with your existance. This tells to your internal and external audience why you do what you do, what are your goals. As a sports company you can stand for sustainability and submit your profit to reforestation, recycling materials, or collect plastic waste from the oceans and use it to make football jerseys or running shoes. Every mission statement is made of two components: from the goals and the reasoning. The goals show what is your long-term achievement with your brand, what is your higher purpose you work for. The reasoning shows your inner motivation, this is the emotional connection between you as an employer and your team, so as between you as a brand and the society. This is also the main motivator why cause-aware influencers choose you over others, when it comes to purchasing.
2.) Corporate philosophy: it has a wider and deeper meaning than the mission statement, it sets core values, what come from the mission statement. Philosophy gives you basic ideas, what you can keep in mind whenever you deal with a customer, employee, business partner and act accordingly. It helps you communicate effectively, because you have principles that define your everyday operations. Staying with the above mentioned line of an enviroment-friendly sports company, philosophy can be the following: 'don't throw away, fix it', 'collect your trash selectively, we will make a jacket from it', 'we stand against animal cruelty, our down is not coming from harming birds', 'we are fairtrade, our factory pays a fair wage and is against child labour'.
3.) Code of ethics or code of conduct: based on the mission statement and the philosophy, it creates a system of rules about common situations during operations. These rules are usually formulated into policies what has to be followed while a conflict appears. This can be about customer-service, employment rules, transparency of finances or handling of confidential information.
When crafting the corporate philosophy and set up rules for brand behaviour, you have to keep in mind a few things to do it right. The first thing is that you have to do it. Of course your main motivator as entrepreneur is profit and growth. But that comes from people, who are willing to purchase and spend their money on your product or service. 64% of consumers told that the primary reason why they have a relationship with a brand is because of shared values. Imagine if your values are not clearly articulated or even worse, not existing. What do you think how loyal will they be to you on their next purchase? Do yourself a favour and have a philosophy and craft it well! Do not save time and effort on this, no matter how irrelevant is it to you compared to finances and marketing. According to statistics, 63% of people met with negative brand content, which means that they have not shared the same values. 50% of them said that they will most likely not going to have relationship with that brand and 23% of them said that for sure they will avoid any contact with that brand. The second important thing is to find a balance between being too short and superstitious, and being too long and hard to remember. The third, like with every rule is to put it into action. Your mission can look great on your website, but if you are not behaving accordingly, you are in danger for criticism about not being honest.
With this we came to the point of explaining what a corporate philosophy can give you:
1.) It gives you the possibility to recruit people, whom you can work for the same goals. If you hire people who share your values, you can be sure that they will not only perform well, but they will find their inner motivation easier in bringing your business and brand closer to success. Success, not only in a financial meaning, but also in terms of goals and achievements.
2.) It shortens your decision making. When you are leading a business, most of your time you are either preparing a decision or making (execute) a decision. If you have standards, how to solve certain issues, like a collision of interests, consumer-complaint or simply a wrongly branded content, you can reduce the time for the response. Ask any PR professional, what is the best way to react to a crisis situation! They will say, to do it as soon as possible, as well as possible.
3.) It strengthen the emotional connection between your brand and your clients. When making a new purchase, everybody is having a fear of risk in investment. You can lower this fear with trust. Trust can be earned only with transparency and effective communication. If there is a philosophy what is shared throughout the entire company, the customer can be sure that he or she will meet the very same behaviour everytime, everywhere, on every level of hierarchy, when contacting you. Think about football or rugby! A team is a big family, the entire group holds together. Next time when you watch a match and can catch the time when players are still waiting in the tunnel to run out on the pitch, look for what managers do! They shake hands with all players, they shake hands with the referee, but they also so that to the security staff and sometimes even with the cleaners of the stadium.
4.) Finally, the hardest part: it gives you a mirror, over the time. It is very common that fundamental values change in the life of a brand. The question is what to do with them. They can be changed, or maybe the attitude of the founders, leaders, entrepreneurs have to be changed and return to the original roots. The first case is easy, but risky. It can just be simply rewritten. But it can cause misunderstanding among the audience, especially if the change is big. It can alienate customers, brand ambassadors, influencers or employees. The second is harder, because it requires self-awareness and the capability to admit error or even failure. But it is worthy to do so! Very often perspectives are changing in the life of the company, the brand grows and the original core values are not anymore sharp and clear, they fade in time and management can become unaware of them. Therefore it is worthy to think it over and adjust ourselves to stay true representants of our brand.
