Brand values and your customers – do they understand your brand?

Up until now a lot of the brand values work we’ve done has focused on brand values and looking inward via internal comms and employee engagement, whereas today we wanted to talk about your external audiences and customers.

Brand values done well will carry through to the experience and relationship your customers have with your brand. Southern Airways is a great case study of this, so definitely give them a google. Therefore, your brand values need to work for external audiences and customers as well as internally. They need to resonate with your customers and align to their own values.

We asked two statement related questions in our recent primary research relating to customers. Below, we are resharing the results:

We understand how our brand values align with customers

We understand which of our brand values are the most important to customers

What you can see from these graphs is that the marketers we surveyed felt they understood how the brand values aligned, but less agreed that they knew which ones were important. At Marketing Moments, we believe that this provides organisations with an opportunity to dig a little deeper and get to know their customers better.

Why is it important to know which brand values are the most important to your stakeholders?

To put it simply customers have and always will choose brands that align with their personal beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. When brands are not able to do this, it creates a conflict for that consumer that they will look to reduce. This isn’t a new concept and this need for alignment has been widely spoken about within marketing and consumer psychology journals and textbooks. With one our favourites being the theory of reasoned action.

However, what is changing is that we are seeing the growth of the ethical consumer, going much further than is a brand environmentally friendly to include wider social issues that they are worried about. Consumers are much more vocal know if brands aren’t behaving in a way that they think is acceptable.

How do you get to know your customers better?

Ask them! It is really that simple, if you want to know what they care about and what they think of your brand values and brand then talk to them. Work with your front-line customer service teams to work through themes in complaints and compliments to understand how those beliefs and values might be translated into behaviour that needs to be focused on.

Use social listening tools to really unpick what customers are saying about your brand both to you and when you’re not in the room. This can give you a real insight into what is and isn’t working with your current brand positioning.