Check your core values, and, an anniversary
Antonym turned one yesterday. You don’t know this, but I stared at that sentence for about twenty minutes. It’s wild. We made it official by (officially) joining Instagram. Follow us if you like. We have big plans for that space.
My gratitude for our visionary clients and collaborators is untranslatable via blog. Thank you for igniting our first year with blazing creativity.
Today I’m coming at you with core values. One of the reasons I founded Antonym was to offer brands an intentional, strategic process to ground their copywriting and messaging. Through this critical lens, we interrogate its stated purpose and collaboratively determine its tone and voice. Too many brands do not do this work. It shows.
Throughout this current and urgent encore of the Black Lives Matter movement, the sheer mass of brands that do not operate in alignment with their core values has been laid bare. Brands people love. Brands people will no longer support because of how egregiously they professed one value system and lived another.
Did you, too, witness how easy it was for audiences to see through empty statements of solidarity and rise up with receipts proving the barrenness of their proclamations?
Core values: you have no messaging strategy without them. They are your gut check against every piece of copywriting and identity strategy your brand requires, from your positioning statement to a tweet.
They are not what your brand hopes to achieve, but rather, your brand’s core compass, defining what it stands for, who it advocates for, and how it intends to make people’s lives better. You need at least three, no more than five. Each value backed by deliberate language expressing why it is a non-negotiable element of your brand's moral code. Company-wide buy-in is essential because as the adage actually goes, one bad apple spoils the entire barrel.
At Antonym, our most revelatory moments with clients are when we excavate their core values. We devise their brand identity strategy around those values and illustrate how much richer their vision, mission, and marketing copy becomes when it is relentlessly reinforced by these ideals. If you need a plan for aligning your values with action, we create that, as well. We do this work with a strategic, diverse team to ensure the people affected by your values are in the room when you’re making them.
If you’re interested in our signature core values package, reach out, and we'll make a plan.
