Welcome to the podcast where we talk about building African brands. So this episode is all about your brand values and how your brand values should actually be guiding the way that you do business. In the last few episodes, we've just really been going through. Workshop material for a branding workshop that I facilitated, and I thought it would be a good way to actually just go into your brand core and just give you some actionable steps to actually start thinking about your brand, core and building your brand core.
So I encourage you to actually implement on what's in this conversation. This is a podcast by the Created creative, and I'm your host Anesu Chikumba.
So your values are essentially what guide, how you do business, how you operate, and I want to even say how you create as well. Think about behavior and think about again, what you want people to know you for. So there is, um, a site called core values list.com that you can essentially go and have a look at of this session.
And it essentially just is that, it just has a list of values that you can just look through and pick from Armstrong Way to get started on this in terms of creating values, cuz sometimes we actually just do need something to. To look at and actually see what kind of values you actually can have, right?
If you, if you are struggling with creating your business values. What I've seen with a lot of personal brands and even business brands is that people tend to shy away from defining their values or defining certain areas within their business in fear of driving other people away. But the truth is, is that if you actually speak up about what it is you stand for, the people that align with that will come to you and will like, it's like an anchoring thing in the same way in which, again, if you're looking at your group of friends, you know each friend for something, you know that each friends dance for something and they have something that they are for and something that maybe they don't tolerate.
And the more they stand by that, the more you actually trust them. Cuz it shows integrity. It shows that they are who they say they are and they're not willing to compromise on certain things. You actually have to do the same for your brand, but this isn't something that happens by chance. You actually have to create it, decide on what it is you want to stand for, and then continue to do that.
People will trust you more and more all the time as they see you actually stand by what you're saying you do, or stand by what you're saying. You're actually anchored for. Your values can essentially be aspirational in terms of you aspiring to have them grade forward, but they can be aspirational. So again, this can be futuristic.
You can think about it in terms of where you want to be. Where you want to be, what you want to be known for in the future. It doesn't necessarily have to be happening right now, but what happens when you think about it in that way is that you actually start to work towards that, and it's like committing to actually working towards that and committing to trying to stand by that and learning how to stand by that.
Then your values can also be behavioral in terms of, let's say, Looking at things like high quality, I'm sure if you've seen business values where that you'd have seen things like say high quality, um, creative, let's say for Mark marketing agencies like to use creative, disruptive in innovative, you know, for their values, things like that.
And then you essentially want to kind of go in and see the values that you create and see how many of them are aspirational, how many of them are things that you're actually doing now. Then you also want to be very intentional about seeing whether your values are driven by more personal values. The minute that you decided that you actually wanted to have a creative business and become a business offer, offer services, right?
You essentially needed to separate yourself from what you were doing. So you can have your personal values and you can have your business values. As a person that has founded something, what will tend to happen is that your personal values will tend to guide your business values, but then you also need to start looking at things like the market that you're operating and what else you can actually add onto there, right?
So even looking at something like sustainability, for example, that might be something that you haven't fully considered in your personal life. But you see that within your business, it actually could serve you and it actually could be something that you might want to work on. Um, doing just an example of how to actually think about this and how to actually apply your values and how they, they actually come through in business setting.
Let's say if you decided that collaboration was one of your values, then you'd want to look at your entire business in its entirety. You want to look at your business in its entirety, right? So look at your services, look at your creation process, look at um, your service delivery methods, your post service, um, customer care, everything.
Then actually look at where you can actually put in collaboration on there. So I just put on like a few questions on here as part of the example. Which are, what parts of your process are you actually collaborating with other, with other creators, with other people on? Do you collaborate with people only in the actual project?
Do you subcontract work each time? Do you collaborate with people in the, um, sorry, I just lost my train of thought, but, Do you actually envision with other people before creating? Do you only collaborate on certain projects? Let's say if you decide that you have projects that you collaborate on, but the rest of your business actually doesn't facilitate for collaboration, that's another way of fulfilling that as a value that might be driving your business.
Then also now looking at things like when other people are giving their input. Are you actually open to it? Collaboration in theory versus in practice? You can say that you like to collaborate, but when it actually now comes to the collaboration process, you don't want to hear anyone else's opinions. The collaboration is just about your vision for the project, and they're coming to do what you said they need to do that actually doesn't foster collaboration.
Then also looking at things like, are you also open again to. To to, to giving information. So when other people do come and try to collaborate with you, are you actually open to collaborating or are you gatekeeping certain information because you feel like, nope, they must go and learn things by themselves.
Cause you had to learn it for yourself and it was a difficult journey. Are you actually open to, you know, having other people be at the top and be the front of a project? Yes, you will get your credits. But you always need to be the one that's being given credit and the one that's being recognized for something.
When you decided to have collaboration as your family, you would actually now need to to walk in that and to make sure that everything within your business aligns with that. Also, thinking about this, again, there are a lot of personal brands on here, but you always want to think about it. Futuristically, it might be just you right now, but imagine if in five years time as a photographer you were able to have an assistant photographer that you actually had on full-time and you were able to have someone come in and do editing or, um, you were able to ha like actually have a manager or whatever it is, right?
You always want to think beyond yourself if that person that actually came into your business, Came into your business? Like would they be able to communicate the way that you communicate? Would they be able to relate with your customers the way that you do? When you create all of this? It allows for that to happen.
Cuz then you actually have something to package and to show them and say, okay, this is how we do business. This is how we present ourselves and this is how, um, we interact with all of our stakeholders and this is where we're going. But if you don't actually define this and it just kind of stays in your head and it stays in the way that you just do things, um, on a personal level, it will be very difficult for you to actually have a team or to work with other people, um, in the future because they'll also just come in and just do whatever they think they should be doing and you will be misaligned on that.
So tell me what do you want to be known for and what are you doing to get there? I would love to know who you are and what you're working on. So send me a message or a DM and let's connect. And before you do, please do leave rating and a review. Thank you for listening to this podcast.