We now focus on Values: Values for customers, for shareholders, for partners and for chapter begins with a brief discussion of brand, follows by relating the brand to core values, and shows how core values are instrumental in a retailer ideating a compelling concept, developing a meaningful mission statement, and creating a compelling customer experience out of that mission | Your corporate values, which derive from your personal strengths and values, are the intangible but absolutely necessary qualities that ultimately affect the most important ongoing decisions and operations of your company. You have to look deep inside yourself to understand your core values and to develop your core purpose from them. After you do, you will have gone a long way toward creating an enduring brand. Core values and business or company purpose apply whether you launch a new venture or you embark on a new growth strategy for an existing venture. Core values lead to guiding principles, which determine the mission statement and ultimately every aspect of the brand. Strong core values make it unlikely that a retailer will overlook the many components that make up the retail brand and create the customer experience. Core values eventually express themselves in every detail in the implementation and operation of every store, whether the company has one store or thousands or some number in between. As adidas and Starbucks illustrate, a company grounded in strong values has a solid frame of reference from which to evaluate operational and branding decisions and a better likelihood of consistently implementing the brand values in each retail store. As the ice cream store illustrates, even a single failure to connect values to the brand position can have serious detrimental consequences. Thus quality control and consistency become major issues for every chain, and for every new retail concept that seeks to grow. The proof of the core values is the willingness of the retailer to put the considerable effort and time required to provide that quality control in every retail setting. Protecting and projecting the brand is much easier with strong core values. They are the very heart of your enterprise. If you believe, as I do, that growth is an organic and dynamic process, then core values represent the seeds of an organization. From a tiny seed—the right seed—a mighty oak will grow.
