The best brands of today spend as much effort marketing to themselves as they do to their consumers. While the culture behind your brand will form naturally, you can use a brand purpose and values to steer everyone who works behind the scenes of your brand.
Finding your brand purpose answers the big question of “Why does your brand exist?” It should force you to explore the underlying personal and honest motivation for why you do what you do.
Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.” It is an intersection of what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
To illustrate, click on the diagram to zoom in.
Brand purpose
Finding your brand purpose
Brand purpose can be a powerful way to build culture behind your brand, helping to connect with both employees and consumers, helping define your brand soul.
To illustrate, click on the diagram to zoom in.
This Venn diagram looks somewhat crazy at first. It works as an excellent tool for building your brand’s purpose. This Venn diagram has four significant factors, which match up:
- To start, does it fit with what consumers need or want?
- Next, does it fit the core values of your team?
- Then, does it deliver your passion in loving what you do?
- Finally, can you build a beloved and successful branded business.
Your brand purpose will come to life at the intersection that meets the consumer needs, fulfills your passion, stands behind your values, and yet still builds a successful branded business. Having clarity on your brand purpose helps build the culture behind your brand.
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Brand purpose example
Five questions to help find your brand purpose
- To start, when it comes to your business, what aspect creates the most passion for you, and how does that passion build a bond with your most cherished consumers?
- Second, what is the most unique, ownable, and motivating offering from your business, that puts you in a position where you believe others cannot replicate what you do?
- Then ask, what is your core belief or behavior about your business that leads to creating the best consumer experience possible?
- Next, what do you do to make your brand one of your consumers’ favorite brands, and how is it making a difference in their day, year, or life?
- Finally, consider that we all have choices in life. What was the final reason you chose to build your life through this business, instead of the other options?
With the answers to these questions, begin piecing your purpose statement together. Here’s an example using Gray’s Cookies.
To illustrate, click on the brand purpose diagram to zoom in.
Brand values
Discovering your brand values
Brand values form the backbone of the culture behind your brand. They may come from your background. It could be how you grew up. Or maybe, it is rules you identify with. It could be how you see your priorities in life.
Your beliefs come from your experience. They explain why and how you choose to do business, how you treat your people, how you conduct yourself as a leader and as a person in the community. These beliefs should be personal, ethical, or rooted in frustration for how you see things happening in the world.
Your inspirations should excite the team members who work behind the scenes of the brand. They should stimulate your people to go beyond the norms of effort or passion.
It works best when your people have input into creating and building your values. They will feel included, heard, and invested in your brand’s success. The closer your values reflect the realities of what your people believe in, the more successful you will be in using those values to inspire greatness.
Five questions to help find your brand values
- To start, think of what is in your background–whether that is how you grew up, experiences that shaped the priorities in your life–that you bring to your business?
- Second, what are your beliefs that come from your life experience that can explain how you choose to do business?
- Then ask, how does your life experience impact how you treat people, conduct yourself as a leader, and how it affects your perception as a business?
- Next, what are the inspirations from your life, whether a life lesson you keep thinking about or saying you repeat to yourself during a tough time, that shine through the way you do business?
- Finally, where do you see a behavior exhibited by one of your people when you think it is offside for the way you wish to do business, even if that behavior is generally-accepted in other companies?
Use the answers to piece your brand values together to steer the culture behind your brand. Here’s an example using Gray’s Cookies.
To illustrate, click on the diagram to zoom in.
Building the culture who work behind the scenes of the brand
Use a brand idea to steer everyone who works behind the scenes of the brand
Brand leaders must consistently deliver the brand idea at every consumer touchpoint. Whether in management, customer service, sales, HR, operations, or an outside agency, everyone should consider the brand idea to guide and focus their decisions.
With old-school marketing, the brand would advertise on TV to drive awareness and interest by using bright, bold packaging in the store with reinforced messages to close the sale. If the product satisfied consumers’ needs, they would repeat and build the brand into their day-to-day routines.
Today’s market is a cluttered mess. The consumer is bombarded with brand messages all day and inundated with more information from influencers, friends, experts, critics, and competitors. While the internet makes shopping easier, consumers must now filter out tons of information daily. Consumer shopping patterns have gone from simple, linear purchases into complex, cluttered chaos.
Using your brand idea to build a brand credo document
Having spent time at Johnson & Johnson, I was fortunate to witness how their credo document has become an integral part of the organization’s culture. It permeates the company, and you will likely hear it quoted daily in meetings. It is a beautifully written document and ahead of its time.
You should have all the material necessary to create a brand credo document.
- Start with your brand idea and turn it into an inspiring promise statement that explains to your people how they can positively impact your customers.
- Use your brand’s core point of difference to outline the expectations of how everyone can support and deliver the point of difference. Then get every department to articulate its role in delivering the brand idea.
- Connect with your people by tapping into their personal motivation for what they can do to support your brand purpose, brand values, and core beliefs. Make it very personal.
Expected employee behaviors
One of the most overlooked aspects of building a brand is ensuring that your culture lives up to your promise.
It’s not enough to write down an EVP or craft a set of values; you need to translate those ideals into the everyday behaviors of your people. That’s where this model comes in. By explicitly linking expected behaviors to the EVP, you give employees a roadmap for how to act in ways that deliver on the brand’s promise.
Take the example of Gray’s Cookies. Their EVP talks about “Making Healthy Delicious” and “Crafting Cookies, Nurturing Well-being.” On its own, that sounds inspiring — but the culture becomes real when those words are tied to tangible actions: seeking out healthier ingredients, experimenting with new recipes, following rigorous quality standards, and paying close attention to sensory details like taste and texture.
These behaviors bring the EVP to life in ways customers can actually experience.
The power of this approach is that it moves culture out of the abstract and into the practical. Employees aren’t left wondering what the EVP means for them; they see exactly how their choices and actions contribute to delivering the brand promise. Over time, this creates alignment, consistency, and credibility — not just inside the company, but in every customer interaction.
Summary of each of the tools
1. Brand Purpose – Why you exist
- Your purpose is the soul of the brand. It sits at the intersection of consumer needs, your passion, your team’s values, and building a sustainable business. Purpose gives meaning beyond just making money. For example: “To make healthy snacking joyful.”
2. Brand Values – What you believe
- Your values are the principles and beliefs that shape how your team behaves. They often come from the founders’ life experiences and should inspire how people inside the company act. Values might include integrity, creativity, well-being, or innovation.
3. Brand Credo – How you promise to deliver
- A credo is the internal manifesto that turns your purpose and values into an inspiring promise for employees. It outlines expectations in practical terms, helping people see their role in living the brand. For example: “At Gray’s Cookies, we help people make healthy food choices, so they can stop feeling guilty about having a cookie.”
4. Expected Behaviors (linked to EVP) – What you do every day
- Behaviors bring the EVP down to the level of action. They make culture tangible by defining what employees should actually do — things like experimenting with new recipes, following strict quality standards, or paying attention to sensory details. These micro-actions ensure the brand promise is consistently delivered.
How to use these to steer the team:
- Purpose = the big why
- Values = the beliefs guiding you
- Credo = the inspiring promise that connects purpose and values to people
- Behaviors = the daily actions that make the culture real
