Plus, Why You Need a Statement Alongside Your Mission and Vision
Your food business needs a core values statement alongside its mission and vision statements because it helps outline clear expectations for your leadership and employees to emulate while working toward the food brand’s overall mission. You never want your employees to feel aimless.
A core values statement clearly defines your food brand’s company culture, and while that can be hard to pin down if you think about how your top performers act while at work, identifying core values they all share should come relatively quickly.
As your food brand’s executives outline the business’s core values, remember your values statement should be 3 things:
Simple and easy to remember, yet specific
Guiding in terms of behavior, yet attainable
Non-negotiable
To help jump-start your food brand’s core values statement, here is a list of common brand values:
Integrity
Boldness
Honesty
Trust
Accountability
Commitment to Customers
Passion
Fun
Humility
Continuous Learning
Ownership
Constant Improvement
Leadership
Diversity
Innovation
Quality
Teamwork
Simplicity
If your food brand has concrete core values, it’ll become known as a great place to work.
Examples of companies with great values statements
Google
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
Fast is better than slow.
Democracy on the web works.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
You can make money without doing evil.
There’s always more information out there.
The need for information crosses all borders.
You can be serious without a suit.
Great just isn’t good enough.
Google’s core values are listed out clearly and concisely. There’s no room for interpretation. And while these values speak to the company’s culture, they also have impact. The language used here is motivating, which is why brands need guiding statements. The underlying motivation and passion-infused into values statements are why having a values statement alongside mission and vision statements is critical. Motivation and passion are guiding emotions, hence why your food brand needs them in their guiding statements.
Starbucks
With our partners, our coffee and our customers at our core, we live these values:
Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome.
Acting with courage, challenging the status quo and finding new ways to grow our company and each other.
Being present, connecting with transparency, dignity and respect.
Delivering our very best in all we do, holding ourselves accountable for results.
We are performance-driven, through the lens of humanity.
Starbuck’s values statement aligns so well with its mission “To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” 5 values, well listed out and connecting to each aspect of the mission statement. For each person, “everyone is welcome” is what starts off the values statement. Having values in order of the mission statement makes it easy for readers — employees, or consumers like you and me — to grasp why and where these values fit into the everyday workings of Starbucks. Next, they move on to “neighborhood” in point 2, followed by more general values that can speak to all aspects of their business.
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about guiding statements for your food brand, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.