Meeting Topic
Brand Strategy by Marijka Timmers
Introduction
The values that guide decision making in business often stem from the personal values of the business leader. Whether you’re driving your business through conscious alignment of your values already or you’ve not yet considered what these might be, subconsciously they’re still very much integrated in your day-to-day. Being intentional about your brand values and building them into your brand strategy and marketing content, helps connect you on deeper levels with your audiences. It also helps you recruit and lead a team in alignment with your innate code of conduct.
Read more detail below and consider your 3-5 core values. Share them with your group during your 1 minute pitch.
If you would like help defining your 3-5 core values, you’re welcome to access my free Brand Values module, from my Brand Blueprint programme.
Brand Values – A Fundamental Of Your Brand Strategy
Whether we’ve purposefully defined them or not, we all make decisions based on our value-system. We all hold hundreds of values that underpin our behaviour, and honing in on our core 3-5 can help us attract our ideal customers, partners and team members.
Like attracts like. When you have absolute clarity on what your brand values are and you and your teams operate in alignment with them, you can create a magnetism to your brand.
Brand values declare who you are, what you’ll take a stand on and how you’ll hold yourself accountable. They also help differentiate you from your competition and can help define your visual identity and tone of voice, through the psychology of good design and linguistics.
As business owners, we are often led by our heads. But, when defining our values, we need to dive into our hearts. We feel our way through it rather than over-thinking, analysing and logically debating it with ourselves. This is where the right brain leads in terms of creativity and intuition, because you eventually want your brand to evoke the same feelings and emotions in your audiences.
Consider your values as an individual. Consider your family’s values. Which ones do you feel strongly about? In most cases, they will be fairly similar.
Most importantly, they’re unlikely to be things that don’t change over time. For example, if caring for people matters to you, you may have a business value such as ‘human-centred’ or ‘better together’. You’re unlikely to wake up one day and no longer care about people – it’s a constant that you’ll take through life and business.
In branding and marketing, consistency is key. Your values help you remain consistent over time, even as the marketing changes and your business evolves. These are the things you’ll stay steadfast on and this is one way you can build understanding, connection and loyalty over time with all your internal and external peeps.
If you would like to learn more about how Marijke helps small businesses deliver marketing strategies and tactics that drive profit, while purposefully impacting those around you, please visit www.themarketingcollective.co.nz.
Next Meeting Topic
Why are you doing what you’re doing?- Raelene Rees
You need a job/work to make an income to live the life you want. How’s that working out for you? It’s time to re-evaluate!
You may have just started out and progress is slow, or maybe progress is too fast and you aren’t coping. You may have been going a few years now but stuck in a rut, lost sight of the original plan. Or maybe you’re one of the OG’s still doing it because that’s what you’ve always done.
So lets take stock:
How much profit do you make each year – is it enough? Or could you reduce your hours to give you more me-time?
What is the value of your business? You might be surprised here. There is definitely a market for small businesses already set up as that is the Hard Bit, especially if the business can be run from home as this means low overheads for the owner. When you sell your business the goodwill component is tax-free so this is a great reason to get your business pumping to the maximum.
Increasing the value of your business is achieved by increasing turnover, reducing overheads. You may need to take staff on to assist with additional work, but you will reap the benefits of leveraging off their work. Staff costs are higher than just the cost of their wages as you will include HR advisory, cost of additional assets required eg computer, phone, and possibly car; ACC levies & insurance will probably increase.
Is there a life span on your business? Is technology going to overtake what you do? Is now a good time to get out while profits can still be made by new owner?
Be aware that baby boomers are probably in the process of retiring – you don’t want to end up with your business for sale at the same time theirs all are.
Also, what is the lifespan of your clients? Are they going to all retire soon? Meaning your turnover may take a hit – although not everyone retires at the same time. Same applies to your staff – are they all approaching retirement, are you going to find yourself looking to replace key personnel.
Can you operate your business as you get older? Is it a physical job that is now tiring? It may be good to get staff trained to assist you sooner rather than later.
Is it just time for a change? You could reinvest your proceeds of sale from your business into something else. Or it could become part of your retirement fund, that you can invest to support yourself in your later years.
Talk with your accountant, as there could be hidden taxes on exit from your business such as depreciation recovered on sale of assets, also Retained Earnings balances that need to be paid out by way of dividends.
Plenty to think about!
If you’d like to discuss this further contact Raelene Rees at Raelene Rees Chartered Accountants www.reesaccounitng.co.nz
