Brand Values Template: Define What Your Brand Stands For

What’s Included in the Download

How to Define Brand Values: The Values Challenge Explained Step by Step

When You Need Brand Values

The Values Challenge helps you bring different perspectives together to establish a shared set of values for your brand.

What You’ll Get from the Values Challenge

• Three prioritized brand values instead of a long list.
• A brand core that captures your brand’s personality in a nutshell.
• A foundation for design, tone of voice, culture, and brand experience.

Common Mistakes

• Too many values: The more terms you choose, the less memorable they become.
• Confusing basic expectations with brand values: Being “professional” or “reliable,” for example, is generally expected.
• Turning the exercise into a wish list: A value must already reflect your brand and have the potential to develop credibly over time.

How to Define Brand Values: Step-by-Step Guide

Use this exercise in a workshop with your team or clients. You can work directly with the template or transfer the content to a whiteboard. You’ll need sticky notes and voting dots in two different colors.

1. Choose Your Categories

First, prepare your whiteboard or select the appropriate template. If you’ve already conducted customer interviews, distinguish between external and internal perspectives. Add insights from the interviews to the board before the workshop.

If you don’t have an external perspective, use the categories Anchor, Differentiator, and Future instead.

The Anchor represents characteristics that consistently define your brand today. The Differentiator covers characteristics that set your brand apart from competitors. The Future focuses on values you want your brand to embody more strongly going forward.

2. Collect Ideas

Each participant starts by collecting relevant words and writing them on individual sticky notes or directly in the template.

Next, everyone presents their ideas, and the group collects them on the whiteboard.

Important: Use just one word or idea per sticky note. This ensures everyone knows exactly what they’re voting on later.

At this stage, challenge generic terms. Conducting a competitor analysis beforehand helps you identify values that many brands in your category already claim.

3. Vote on the Ideas

Each participant receives three voting dots in one color for the brand values and one dot in a second color for the brand core.

The three dots can be assigned to their own ideas, those of other participants, or suggestions from customers.

For the single dot, participants answer one question: If only one characteristic could define your brand, which would it be?

Next, sort the terms according to the votes they received. This creates two rankings: one for the brand values and one for the brand core.

4. Select Your Values and Brand Core

Use the rankings as the starting point for a group discussion. Discuss the terms with the most votes, overlapping ideas, and ties.

The goal is to agree on three brand values and one brand core.

Next, define what each term means in practice. After all, a value like “bold” is only useful when everyone understands what being bold means for your brand and why it matters.

Brand Values Examples for Your Workshop

Generic values such as “reliable,” “professional,” or “high-quality” are often basic expectations. While important, they rarely help differentiate a brand.

If you’re struggling to find the right words during your workshop, the PDF also includes a set of brand values cards with specific terms to inspire your team.

Example: Values Challenge for a Software Company

This example features a B2B software company undergoing a rebranding. The brand values are developed using the three categories Anchor, Differentiator, and Future.

Ideas Are Collected and Presented

Participants Vote on Brand Values and Brand Core

Ideas Are Ranked and Discussed

The Result: Three Brand Values and One Brand Core

Download the Brand Values Template

Get the Brand Values Template, including step-by-step instructions and links to the Miro and FigJam boards. Everything you need to run the Values Challenge in your next brand strategy workshop.

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