top of page
Search

Brand values and brand promise, Case: Patagonia

Compass
Your Values are Your Compass

Hello again for another branding topic. As we have mentioned before, brands should be seen like human beings; they have to have a character and should be built on brand values.

In our last blog, "Do you have a clear brand vision?" we tried to figure out how a clear destination image and clear focus are crucial in your brand-building process. Again, according to ancient Chinese scripts of Guiguzi (Wang) for creating a strategy, if you do not clear your mind, your path will be disorganized and foggy too.

In this article, I would like to focus further on Brand values, Brand promise, and Patagonia as a Case. Brand Core as Miltenburg described in her book "Brand the Change" (Miltenburg, 2017, 72).

The Brand Core consists of 5 items:

1) Brand Essence

2) Brand Vision

3) Brand Mission

4) Brand Values

5) Brand Promises

In our last blog, we dealt with the brand Essence (your reason to be here), Brand Vision and Mission in detail; now I would like to focus on the brand values. As always, I would like to base the theory on a case. This time our case will be Patagonia. But as I have dealt with the Patagonia brand, I saw how much the brand has done for its brand purpose; therefore, this will be only a start, but more for Patagonia will come in the coming weeks.

4) Brand Values

Brand Values are the compass or guiding principles for your brand. Like a person's values are integrated into their lives through culture or family, and although they may change when we grow, they build the main pillar of our personality.

Patagonia Brand Values

Patagonia core values
Patagonia Core Brand Values

Companies like Patagonia also explicitly share their values openly. This helps them to make clearer choices in the future. To select appropriate shareholders or partners. An organization's values create a distinct personality and company culture.

"We started with our products, using materials that caused less harm to the environment. We gave away 1% of sales each year. We became a certified B Corp and a California benefit corporation, writing our values into our corporate charter so they would be preserved. More recently, in 2018, we changed the company’s purpose to: We’re in business to save our home planet (Letter from the Founder)."

In Patagonia's case, they are Patagonia Values:

1) Quality: Building the best Product: In terms of repairability, function, and durability.  Reducing ecological impact to enable the use of many generations.

2)  Integrity: Cause no unnecessary harm: They accept that their industry is creating harm and damage from store lighting to textile dying, so they would like to reduce their harm and share their knowledge with others.

3) Environmentalism: Use business to solve problems: They dedicate their %1 sales to the activism project and are a leader in this category (Patagonia Activism).

4)  Justice: Be just, equitable, and antiracist as a company and in their community. They tried to embrace the work necessary to create equity and reorder the priorities of an economic system that values short-term expansion over human well-being and thriving communities. 

Not bound by convention (Finding always new ways to do their business).

For that, they guarantee they make, take responsibility for their impact, support grassroots activism, support the worn wear, and give their profits to the planet.

Sometimes the founders own the values of the company, but if you can make these values explicit to everyone in the organization, then it will be easier to make the right decisions for everyone, even if the leader is not actively participating in the organization anymore. In the case of Patagonia, the success of the company is still based on the values of its founder, Yvon Chouinard.

 In 2002, he founded 1% for the Planet, and Patagonia became the first business to commit 1% of its annual sales to the environment. Today, the 1% for the Planet network consists of over 4,700 businesses and individuals that contribute to environmental nonprofits in over 110 countries. To date, 1% for the Planet has directed over $672 million to these grassroots organizations working toward a better world. (Patagonia Letter from the founder 2024).

Protecting the values:

In order to make your values the pillar of your company, you have to find a way to protect them, as we mentioned in Tony's case. Here’s how Patagonia found its way:

"100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature. The funding will come from Patagonia: Each year, the money we make after reinvesting in the business will be distributed as a dividend to help fight the crisis (Patagonia, Ownership).

Following your values in every step

Usually, organisations underestimate the value principle, and then there will be a gap between what they say and what they do. Unfortunately, that will hurt your trustworthiness. To prevent this, you have to pay attention even to the tiny details.


Tony's Chocolonely shopping bag and NGO Tiny Miracles
Tony's Shopping Bag and Partnerships with Tiny Miracles Organizations

As in the case of Tony's Chocolonely, I have mentioned that even for their shopping bags, they sourced from fair trade organizations and has its bags made by the NGO Tiny Miracles:

This is actually how you should design your communication strategy: live with your values. Especially, your values should be internalized by your team members and employees. You should always reconsider your HR policies, supply chain relationships, partnerships, and all of the communication strategies. They should be aligned with your values and what you stand for (Miltenburg, 2018, s. 71).

Defining your values: Defining your real values that will be embraced by all your team members and guiding your actions is a very crucial part of your branding strategy. For that, Miltenburg recommends a Sincerity test for your values. For that, you have to sit with your team and craft your own tailor-made definitions that everybody believes. She called that Bullshit Radar (Miltenburg, s. 194). As an example, you can see the IDEO values. The successful design company by Tim Brown embraced these values and published it on their ``The Little Book of IDEO. This company was a success story during 2014 and was mentioned many times in Harvard Business Review articles. (Miltenburg, p 70; Fisher et all., 2014).

Be optimistic: believing that something is possible somehow makes it so.

Collaborate: The most powerful asset we have in our arsenal is the world `` we. ``

Embrace ambiguity: Get comfortable with discomfort.

Learn from failure: Ask forgiveness, not for permission

Make others successful: Going out of your way to make others successful.

As we mentioned before, living according to your values will guide you in the future for your behaviours, choices for your brand, and selecting your shareholders for the future. If your actions or communications misalign with your values, then before other third parties and the customers, you have to question yourself other wise your brand will be less trustworthy (Miltenburg, 2017).

To find the right values for your brand, you ask several questions :

 How do you view yourself and others?

Your sense of morality? Like honesty, justice, etc.

What drives you in your business, what you do? Ambition, Excellence, Craftsmanship, etc.

As an example, the IDEO design company created for its client Narvar a Value board at their office. So the team members should always have them in front of their eyes.

The last thing will be the brand promises.

5)        Brand Promises:

What are you promising with your offerings (movements, actions, products, etc.) to your customers, followers, members? What are you adding to their lives? What problems are you going to solve for them? These are your brand promises. In order to succeed and also be selected and preferred by your audience, you have to differentiate yourself from other competitors (Miltenburg, 2018, s. 73).

Again, Miltenburg found a very creative way to specify the brand promises. The tool she uses for that is The Ladder (Miltenburg, s. 184).  With that approach, you answer what your functional promise is and also think about your impact on three different levels:

1) A functional promise,

2) An emotional promise (your added value),

3) A societal promise (the targeted impact on society); all of these will summarize your grand vision.

As an example, Miltenburg gave this company, Mama. Code, a coding school for children aged 3–11 created by three moms from London working in digital industries. They reached us through 35 classes a week across the city, in schools and community venues. During the pandemic, they moved their classes online with the partnership charity Nova New Opportunities. Now they have reached over 1,400 children in our virtual classrooms and reached a global audience to bring equality through digital capabilities with coding programs like Python for boys and girls between the ages of 3-11 through playful activities using Minecraft, etc.

Here we can see the best combination for functional promise: to teach children a programming language. The emotional promise is the fun and enthusiasm for the children while they are learning the programming language, and the societal promise is that through their virtual classes, they reach children even in the Philippines to prepare them equally for the future.

Or like our MUJI case at the beginning, their brand promise of mindfulness and creativity reflects in their product and philosophy of  ``Eat well, sleep well, walk more and clean often”. MUJI offers society a more comfortable and sustainable way, in harmony with our environment. Where simplicity and beauty balanced each other in a peaceful environment.

Again, this was a company that fulfilled all its promises on 3 different levels. Functional with high-quality basic products, emotional: bringing serenity, focus, simplicity, and peace in your daily life, societal: adding all its shareholders to its company strategy.

In our next blog, we would like to focus more on the Case of Patagonia and share with you some insights on how they built a successful and purposeful brand.

Azra Bayraktar

June 2026, Vienna

References

Fisher, Colin & Amabile, Teresa & Pillemer, Julianna. (2014). IDEO’s culture of helping. Harvard Business Review. 54-61.

Miltenburg, Anne: ``The Brand Change``, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2017, ISBN: 978-90-63947-8-4.

Patagonia letter from the founder: https://www.patagonia.com/ownership/

Patagonia letter from the founder 2024: "A letter from our founder, Yvon Chouinard, November 2024," https://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/stories/a-letter-from-our-founder

Wang: Mastering Human Nature and Strategy: A Modern Interpretation of Guiguzi (The Four Great Mysterious Books of Ancient China), 2026, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8257015960

Weller, Alex: The success of Patagonia, Brand the Change, “https://youtu.be/rzazYHbcT44


Comments

bottom of page