The core values of many businesses are primarily used as a marketing tool, with companies simply producing brand values examples that function as generic terms (words that have no real application to their daily operations) which do not have any tangible effect on their operations.
More importantly, these businesses should be aware that trust is derived from the clarity and relevance of their actions in comparison to the stated purpose of their business, rather than by simply producing a corporate mission or vision statement.
This guide provides an intensive review of each individual case that has been verified from successful businesses, as well as the manner in which such companies convert ambiguous corporate values into solid corporate policies and processes, and a structure to build upon existing core values to create effective principles upon which to base business decisions.
The Problem with Empty Corporate Words
If you consider the search results under ‘corporate values’, you will see a plethora of familiar terms such as ‘integrity’, ‘quality’, and ‘innovation’. This search shows how little effort people have put into thinking about what the words mean in terms of a business's actions. Having a page of nice adjectives gives you a positive image on your website, but it does very little to help your employees to make difficult business decisions or for your customers to expect a certain type of experience when using your products or services.
According to Edelman’s 2025 trust research, 80% of people trust the brands that they purchase, and 73% of respondents stated their trust would increase if the brand they purchased from was to reflect the values defined in their stated culture. Qualtrics data shows that employees who believe their organization embodies the stated core values are 27% more likely to have high levels of engagement at work and 23% more likely to remain with the organization for three or more years.
What distinguishes weak brands from strong brands in these brand values examples is evidence. A weak brand states that it values transparency. Companies that truly have great brands will show it through regularly publishing updates and incident reports, communicating pricing changes prior to renewal, and clearly demonstrating what data they collect about their customers. A brand value that has no measurable impact upon the way in which a company builds its product, hires or trains employees, or supports its consulting clients is nothing more than a marketing tagline.
How to Tell the Difference Between Values and Taglines
In order to understand how top companies operate, we need to create a clear distinction between each part of the brand strategy. When you combine your mission, vision and core values, then that is where the confusion comes into play for many, thus producing inconsistency and internal divisions.
What are a Mission, Vision, and Core Values?
The mission of a company is a description of why the company exists and is an immediate solution to the needs of a specific market segment. The vision of the company is what the company hopes to accomplish in the future and describes what the company believes will be the ultimate outcome of their efforts 10-20 years into the future.
The core values of a company are the standards and guidelines of conduct that your team will follow to reach the vision of the company. They represent the "guardrails" that help define the parameters within which a company's actions will fall. The core values of a company also define what actions are rewarded, and penalized, by the company and those actions or compromises that your company simply will not make; even if it means a loss of revenue.
Connecting Actions to Core Beliefs
The bridge between behavior and value is the piece that most companies are missing from their overall corporate strategy. It is the link between an abstract word and a tangible behavior. Employees or consumers not only need to know that their company values "speed" they also need to have a clear illustration of what speed looks like in action. Is the idea of speed just about pushing out a software update more quickly at the cost of forgoing a final code review? How about speed - does that mean that a customer support agent has to respond to a customer's phone call in less than 30 seconds?
Without a behavior bridge, every department interprets speed differently. Large organizations address this by translating their core efforts into specific operational guidelines. They define the product's durability; supply chain decisions; what type of ownership structure they're using; and their marketing budget and activities. Through repeatable and measurable actions, they show they believe what they profess.
12 Verified Brand Values Examples That Drive Business Decisions
Brands demonstrate how to translate high-level concepts into real-world applications. Brands include the stated principle, practical meaning, observable behaviors, and the trade-off each brand makes to maintain it.
1. Patagonia: Quality and the Environment
Patagonia has great credibility as an early supporter of sustainability, but their sustainability efforts extend far beyond traditional green marketing. They state their principles as quality, integrity, environmentalism, justice, and no boundaries with regard to conventional thinking.
For Patagonia, "quality" does not simply mean the promise of excellence. Officially, Patagonia defines "quality" as the production of functional, multi-use, durable, repairable, and recyclable products. Observable behaviors are clear: Patagonia operates substantial repair centers for their products and advises their customers to repair their old jackets rather than buy new ones. Patagonia's ownership model serves as the ultimate proof: Patagonia states that the Earth is their sole shareholder. The trade-off is enormous—Patagonia sacrifices retail sales volume in the short term and profit for shareholders in the traditional sense to support their climate change initiatives, donating 1% of all sales to grassroots nonprofits since the company was formed in 1985.
2. Microsoft: Innovation and Creativity
Microsoft has historically placed a high value on innovation and creativity. They have developed their corporate philosophy based on these important principles.
Microsoft's innovation and creativity principles include (1) building products with the user in mind, (2) putting the user first, and (3) designing products to create the most value for customers. In Microsoft’s corporate philosophy, their goal is to provide value to customers through product innovation. Their philosophy emphasizes providing users with value for their money. The user-centric product design that Microsoft strives for directly affects Microsoft’s bottom line and is the lifeblood of their company.
Microsoft has built an innovative and creative business environment where employees can work together to develop and introduce new products that are focused on customer needs. Microsoft’s corporate culture enables it to continually increase its market share. Microsoft has created a unique corporate identity through the application of its core principles. Microsoft’s business has excellence written all over it, from its product to its core values. The company has established a corporate culture that fosters teamwork and innovation through its principles, which has created an environment that allows for, encourages and expects innovation and creativity from all employees.
3. Amazon: Customer Obsession
Customer obsession is used as an overall benchmark to determine how Amazon approaches their business through internal meetings. Instead of being reactionary to other competitors in the industry, customer obsession means looking at what the customer needs from your products.
The trend demonstrated by Amazon is an aggressive investment in logistics to offer the standard, free, two-day delivery and, now, same-day delivery. In order to create the unbreakable habit of consumer buying with Amazon, Amazon operated at extremely low and sometimes nonexistent retail margin for many years, and absorbed significant losses in shipping costs for the purpose of building that habit.
4. Starbucks: Belonging and Craft
Starbucks believes that they have created a culture of "belonging" at their stores. Their career focus and culture documents refer to principles such as craft, courage, results, joy and belonging.
Starbucks does not treat "belonging" as a term that has a HR element to it. It is an everyday function of the company's stores, and is part of its overall operational values. Starbucks describes "belonging" as listening to customers actively, being warm, and recognizing everyone. The observable behavior of "belonging" is reflected in Starbucks' "third place" policy that allows people to sit in a Starbucks store and use the internet without being required to purchase a drink. The trade-off is that during the busiest times, there may be limited number of seats available for customers looking to purchase a beverage, which means that Starbucks will potentially have less revenue and a greater number of customers waiting for an open seat in the store.
5. Ben & Jerry's: Mission-Driven Operations
Ben & Jerry’s is focused on being a mission-driven company that has built its brand identity around three interrelated missions: providing the best ice cream, providing an economically sustainable model of growing a successful business financially, and applying the company’s resources to have a positive social impact in the world.
By factoring all three of these types of missions into its overall mission statement, Ben & Jerry's offers an overarching view of how it operates, balancing the social and economic impacts of its decisions with its desire to create high-quality ice cream.
Because Ben & Jerry's intentionally separates itself from traditional marketing strategies and markets its product through the lens of social justice, climate change and voting rights, the company has the potential to alienate certain consumer demographics. Now that the company acknowledges that it will lose some customers because of these issues, they hope to build strong, loyal customers who share their beliefs about these issues and values.
6. Netflix: Expected Behaviors
Netflix has produced a highly publicized cultural guide in the tech industry. Netflix’s corporate values are defined not as marketing statements, but rather as expected behaviors. These expected behaviors include demonstrating good judgment, being selfless, having courage, demonstrating strong communication skills, treating everyone with respect and dignity, being honest and behaving with integrity, showing passion and commitment to innovation and showing curiosity.
For Netflix, having the “courage” to speak out on matters that contradict the company's core values will require employees to demonstrate courage by questioning such actions. The observable behavior of courage is reflected in the "Keeper Test," a process in which Netflix managers evaluate the “Keeper Test” statements to determine if company values align with how they feel about an employee. If the answer is “no,” then the employee will be given the opportunity to leave the company with a generous severance package. The trade-off is a high-pressure environment that isn't for everyone; it exchanges traditional job security for high performance and high talent density.
7. Nike: Category Specific Principles
Nike's principles focus on a particular category, not broad corporate language. They include: "Do the right thing", "Be on the offensive", "Serve athletes" and "Create the future of sport."
"Serve athletes" is a specific filter through which Nike views everything they do. Nike defines an athlete very broadly; if you have a body, you are an athlete. You will see this with the products they produce, ranging from elite Olympic gear to running shoes for beginning runners. The trade-off for Nike is that they do not produce (or very rarely produce) general lifestyle clothing that has no connection to movement or sport. This means that all of their supply chains and marketing budgets are dedicated to athletic performance and sport culture.
8. Trader Joe's: Frontline Authority
Trader Joe's has developed its own unique approach to how it creates its corporate philosophy and ideas on how to operate its business. This philosophy includes integrity, being product-focused, creating "wow" service to customers, not having bureaucracy and believing that, "The store is the brand".
"The store is the brand" is a great way to take a brand positioning strategy and turn it into a daily operational responsibility. This means that Trader Joe's doesn't spend money on huge national television advertising campaigns to build their credibility; they rely solely on the experience provided to customers by the local store. They give employees (Crew Members) autonomy to open packages for customers to taste products and are known for being very casual and friendly with customers. The choice is to invest in customer service vs using technology for more efficient transactions.
9. IKEA: Cost-Consciousness and Simplicity
IKEA includes togetherness, caring for people and the planet, simplicity, and cost-consciousness among its core principles.
Cost-consciousness is a highly effective parameter that limits business decisions in a constructive manner. For IKEA, this means they will never design a product that cannot be efficiently flat-packed and shipped. The observable behaviors are evident in the entire store layout, the self-service warehouse structure, and the requirement for customers to assemble the furniture themselves. The trade-off is clear: IKEA completely forfeits the luxury, full-service furniture market to ensure they can provide the lowest possible price to their customers.
10. Marriott: Core Values
The Marriott corporate culture utilizes five core values: pursue excellence, embrace change, act with integrity, serve the world, and put people first.
The simple phrase, "We put people first", makes a big impact. The observable behaviors have been that Marriott has been committed to employee training and giving promotions internally. Their culture supports the belief that if you take care of your associates, they will then, in turn, take care of your customers. In this instance, the investment made to develop and train the associates is generally large, especially when you consider it is in an industry with high turnovers and part-time seasonal workers.
11. Etsy: Marketplace Identity
Principles that come to mind for Etsy are crafting, reducing waste, embracing differences, digging deeper, and leading with optimism.
The statement of "We are committed to our craft" puts the corporate staff into alignment with the independent sellers that use the Etsy site. The observable behaviors are Etsy's continued focus on handmade, vintage, and craft supply products, and continually monitoring and deleting products that are mass-produced and violate Etsy's seller terms of service. Etsy does lose out on vast amounts of easy revenue from cheap, drop-shipped items. This is a trade-off to stay true to the integrity of their marketplace identity.
12. Qualtrics: The TACOS Acronym
Qualtrics uses a very memorable acronym for its culture, TACOS, which stands for transparency, all in, customer obsessed, one team, and scrappy.
Adding the term "scrappy" as part of a software company's core is important because it indicates that innovation occurs through being able to achieve great things with small amounts of resources and being able to create solutions to the problem without spending a lot of money. In reality, the behavior of this term is centered around creating an internal culture that values speed of delivery while being able to carry out the project management of the organization with the least amount of waste or excess resources. The challenge here is that for your employees to adopt this "scrappy" way of working means they will need the ability to operate within a certain level of uncertainty and to deal with rapid changes in product direction. This can be challenging for employees who are more comfortable in structured and slow-moving corporate environments.
How to Create Your Own Brand Values Framework
A review of successful companies is a good starting point to help develop a value framework; however, it is unlikely that you are going to find a value framework that exactly matches your own.
For example, a young software start-up is not going to require the same level of support or guardrails that a global coffee company would need. In order to effectively build an internal culture and build a clear brand identity externally, you need a method to develop a value framework that can be tested.
Prioritize Meaning Over Quantity
Quantity of words should not detract from the message you intend to convey. If your staff sees a one-page list listing twenty abstract nouns, chances are they are going to ignore it. There are various schools of thought among strategic thinkers about how many 'core' ideas you should have.
The most common recommendations are that you should limit your 'core' ideas to between three and five. In order to determine which 'core' ideas pass the test, you will have to filter through each of them in order of priority.
The process will involve asking: would the leadership of the company not give up this concept? What are the current policies to support this concept? Finally, could a direct competitor easily utilize this same word? If a direct competitor could use the same word easily, then the word may not be specific enough.
Using the VALUE Test to Convert Values into Behaviors
To make sure that your concepts will help you make decisions, use the VALUE test. Use this test to determine how much risk each word represents.
Verifiable: What evidence exists that this is already true?
Actionable: What specific actions must your employees take to fulfill this value?
Limiting: What trade-offs must the business make to implement this value?
Useful: How does this value simplify decisions made throughout the organization every day?
Expressive: Does the value relate directly to how your company communicates to its customers?
You can also create a simple scoring system for your words. Rate each word from 1-5 based on evidence, uniqueness, strategic alignment, and behavioral clarity. Once you have rated each word, total the values you assigned to all four categories and divide by four. Remember that the scoring system is subjective and should be used as a planning guide rather than a definitive measurement of whether a word is effective or not.
For instance, when looking at brand values examples, if a company is trying to communicate "transparency" to its customers, they need to evaluate what the term means. If the term simply means "we are honest" to them, it will score low on all four categories and will not be very valuable to the customer. If the company defines "transparency" as "we will proactively inform you of any changes in pricing, limitations, or delays prior to you having to ask," the word would be extremely valuable to the customer. The behavior to demonstrate transparency will require publishing a page on their website that shows the status of their servers and sending regular emails to their customers about any increases in pricing. The downside to demonstrating transparency is that it exposes the company's weakness to competitors. Therefore, this demonstrates a genuine commitment.
The Bottom Line of Corporate Brand Identity
A company's brand value becomes meaningful when it causes a customer to change their behavior. If a company identifies a word as a compliment rather than an operational tool, they will be making a mistake. To stay in business, it’s important to have values that go beyond what’s written down. It is the principles that create friction in an organization. They help determine whether salespeople should walk away from a deal, whether product teams should ignore certain features and whether hiring managers should pass on talented candidates who would not fit into the company’s culture.
When creating a strategy you need to observe your current behavior. Your strongest beliefs will usually come through in the way your top performers solve problems and in how you treat your top customers. Your strategy should document those behaviors, and then give your entire organization the tools they need to adhere to them.
Q&A: Finding Operational Leaks in Your Brand Culture
How can a company measure if employees adhere to operating principles?
To determine if employees are actually adhering to operating principles requires an organization to change its metrics for success from that of marketing to HR and operations data. Behavior can’t be measured by words.
For example, if the primary focus of your company is based on “obsessing over your customers,” you should track how often support agents proactively use their discretion to waive fees without having to contact their manager first. If your primary focus is “speed,” the average time from the inception of a product idea to its launch should be documented and analyzed. You can also conduct internal employee satisfaction surveys or customer satisfaction surveys to measure how an organization’s operating principles are being used. It is important to measure both what our people think about leadership decisions and to develop a consistent approach to documenting the percentage of positive survey responses within our company on a quarterly basis.
If you notice that the amount of positive survey responses within your company is decreasing quarterly, it is possible that leadership is making decisions primarily on a financial basis and is disregarding the culture of your company that has been established.
How do we resolve conflicts between two important priorities?
The conflict of two competing priorities will be the greatest test of who you are as a company. A company that has a clear commitment to both of these core values will have to make a difficult decision about which one is most important. For example, if a company values both "speed to market" and "performance to perfection" equally, when they find that they cannot deliver the product exactly as planned but the day to launch is still there, the two core principles will conflict.
Leadership must create a decision tree or hierarchy of principles during the planning process. Which principle will take precedence when there is a difference of opinion? If you look at Google, the principles of speed and scale often prevail, while Apple has developed a philosophy that values the design and quality of the products they sell to the extent that they often miss their launch dates. You should document the history of how conflicts have been resolved and include this guide with the employees so they can see which principle was followed when the pressure was on.
How do B2B companies define priorities differently from consumer brands?
Consumer brands tend to focus on the emotional aspects of their messaging, the lifestyle of their consumers, and their social impact (the greater good). On the other hand, B2B companies tend to focus on the reduction of risk, the reliability of their operational capacity, and the value of being a partner to other companies.
To illustrate the difference between consumer and B2B messaging, the consumer coffee brand may refer to its products as providing "joy," focusing on the relationship of its customers with its baristas and the colorful packaging. A B2B logistics company is going to be unable to utilize the word "joy." A more appropriate description for the B2B company could be "absolute certainty." The exact definition of a belief in "absolute certainty" should include the details of how the B2B company guarantees its 99.9 percent uptime, offers strict service level agreements, and provides dedicated account managers for rapid issue resolution. Because the audience for the B2B company is going to be different, the attributes that you would use to define brand values examples like "absolute certainty" should be based on the business performance and the B2B trust that exists between two vendors.
When should I update the core principles of my business?
In general, core principles should not change very often, but the behaviors associated with some of the core principles will most likely continue to evolve and change over time. For example, a five-person startup may have defined the term "scrappy" as working late at night and sharing a single software account. A five-hundred-person company cannot operate in that manner from a legal or efficient perspective.
You will generally want to consider revising the foundational wording of your company only when the company makes a major change in its strategy, when the company makes an acquisition, or when the company's target audience shifts entirely. Otherwise, you should keep the foundational wording the same and simply continue to develop the behavior bridge by assessing each of your core principles at least once a year to ensure that they continue to make sense relative to your company's current headcount, available budget, and overall market share. If your company's behavior and wording no longer match, then you should do a thorough assessment of your core principles and make a comprehensive revision.