Branding from the inside out

How do you create a corporate culture identity?

While your company’s verbal and visual identity are the most obvious representations of your brand, these elements are a mere sales pitch for the deeper identity of your corporate culture. Your authentic brand begins inside your company and is reflected in your collective goals, dreams, and actions.

That’s why Tailfeather helps clients establish and define their internal brand culture through mission, vision, and values statements, brand guidelines, and tone of voice development. These tools give leaders, investors, buyers, and employees a common vocabulary and a shared sense of purpose.  

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04   ―   Corporate Brand Identity

Mission, Vision, and Values

Mission, Vision, and Values statements (MVV) are foundational building blocks for every brand because they give the businesses focus, direction, and coherence for all marketing and brand communications. When you’ve defined your MVV and authentically integrated them into your company’s culture, you’ll be able to build strategic momentum toward your goals.

/ Mission Statement  -- Describes who your organization is today and how you differentiate yourself from others within your industry (aka “the why” behind the business).

/ Vision Statement -- Describes who your organization aspires to become in the future and is crucial for strategy and long-term planning.

/ Value Statement -- Defines the core tenants of your organization's operations and provides a guideline for decision making. 

A strong MVV that is continually reinforced creates a lived ethos within your company. It unites and inspires all employees and attracts potential recruits. Knowing that a company stands for something beyond the day-to-day business fosters loyalty internally from employees and externally from clients and customers.

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Mission, Vision & Values  ―

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Brand Guidelines — Representation by Design

A brand guideline is a reference document that contains all the specific assets of your verbal and visual brand identity. It guides how they should be used and where they should be applied and includes important core documents such as your mission, vision, and values statements and your brand story. This document is your brand bible and is critical to creating consistency for internal and external communications. 

What can be included in a brand guideline?

Verbal Identity

/ Proper Name Usage & Spelling
/ Official Brand Story
/ Mission, Vision, Values
/ Tone of Voice
/ Social Media Guideline
/ Brand Positioning
/ Brand Promise

Visual Identity

/ Logo Usage and Layout
/ Typography Guide
/ Color Guide
/ Presentation Template Design and Development (5-6 master slides)
/ Business Card Design
/ Letterhead and Invoice Design
/ Marque (ship) Guide
/ Grid System Guide
/ Iconography Guide
/ Photography Guide
/ One-Page and Two-Page fact sheet design
/ Quarterly Summary PDF design
/ Social Media Profile Design
/ Zoom Background Design
/ Email Signature Guide (not implementation)

Brand Guidelines  ―

Application — Find Your Why

Corporate culture assets:

/ Mission, vision, and values statements
/ Brand guides
/ Tone of voice
/ Content creation
/ Content strategy

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Application  ―

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Craft Your Purpose

Tailfeather has developed a practical workshop and creative process to challenge leadership teams to define or clarify their MVV. The process involves gathering extensive and informal input from stakeholders through interviews and workshops. Then, after a  collaborative and iterative writing process, we provide carefully crafted MVV options that ring true to your foundational purpose.

  • First, we’ll examine the outward-facing mission statements of your peer set.

  • Next, we’ll hold a workshop with key stakeholders to identify your company culture, key differentiators, and shared goals.

  • Finally, we’ll work through an iterative content creation process with you to produce a statement document that resonates as an authentic representation of your company’s mission, vision, and values.

  • We’ll deliver your final MVV with guidelines on how to integrate them and offer further consulting and production help to implement them at your company.

Our Purpose  ―

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