Most brand values are useless. They sit on a website's About page, they get recited in onboarding decks, and they mean nothing to anyone — including the company that wrote them. "Integrity. Innovation. People-first." Could belong to a software company, an accounting firm, or a laundromat. If you're trying to understand what real brand values examples look like — ones that actually shape decisions, repel the wrong customers, and attract the right ones — you're in the right place. This article breaks down 20 brand values examples from real companies, explains what makes each one work or fail, and shows you how to write values that actually do something.
What Makes a Good Brand Value?
A brand value isn't a word. "Integrity" is not a brand value. It's an aspiration that every organization claims and almost none define. A real brand value has three qualities.
It's specific enough to fail. A value you'd never violate isn't a value — it's decoration. "We ship fast even when it's uncomfortable" is a value. "Excellence" is not.
It excludes someone. Good brand values push certain customers, partners, or employees away. If your value appeals to everyone, it differentiates no one.
It drives a decision. You should be able to describe a real business decision — hiring, pricing, product, partnership — where this value was the deciding factor.
The difference between strong and hollow brand values examples usually comes down to this: strong ones create friction. They cost something. Weak ones cost nothing and therefore mean nothing.
Brand Values Examples from Well-Known Companies
1. Patagonia — "We're in business to save our home planet"
This isn't a value statement — it's a mission that functions as a value because it constrains every decision. Patagonia ran "Don't Buy This Jacket" ads on Black Friday. They sued the US government over land use. They transferred company ownership to a climate trust. The value costs something real, which is exactly what makes it credible. When a brand values statement can be tested against actual behavior and holds up, it works.
2. REI — "We close on Black Friday"
REI launched #OptOutside in 2015, closing stores on the biggest retail day of the year and paying employees to go outside instead. It wasn't a campaign. It was a value expressed as a decision. Their stated value is "authenticity and a love of outdoor life" — but the Black Friday choice is what made it real. This is a textbook case of a brand values example where the action is the proof.
3. Netflix — "Adequate performance gets a generous severance"
Netflix's culture deck, now legendary, states: "We only want people who are excellent at their job here." That sounds harsh. But it's followed by specifics — they fire managers who build empires, they don't value process for its own sake, they promote people who make better decisions with less information. The value is specificity. Most brands list "talent" as a value. Netflix defined what talent costs.
4. Basecamp — "We don't do urgent"
Basecamp — now 37signals — has published their values publicly for years. One of the most distinctive: they don't treat everything as urgent, they don't reward overwork, they work normal hours. This directly contradicts startup culture norms. It repels a specific type of investor, employee, and customer — and that's the point. Their brand values examples are notable because they're contrarian. Contrarian values are almost always more honest than consensus ones.
5. Apple — "We believe in saying no to thousands of things"
Steve Jobs said this explicitly. Apple's product philosophy — fewer products done better — is a value operationalized. It explains why the original iMac shipped with no floppy drive (1998), why the first iPhone had no third-party apps at launch, why the MacBook Air shipped with one port. The value is restraint. Not as an aesthetic choice — as a constraint that shapes decisions. Look at any Apple product and you can trace the value backward.
6. Everlane — "Radical Transparency"
Everlane built their entire positioning on showing customers the actual cost breakdown of every product — materials, labor, transport, markup. The value was: we'll show you what things actually cost. It worked. Then came reports of union-busting, layoffs handled poorly, and internal culture problems that contradicted the stated transparency. The lesson here is the dark side of brand values examples: a specific, public value is a promise. Break it and the damage is proportional to how loudly you stated it.
7. Mailchimp — "We're not corporate"
Mailchimp's brand voice guide has been widely shared because it captures something real: they actively avoid corporate tone, they use humor, they write like humans. One of their published values is "keep it real" — and they built a content style guide that operationalizes it. The value shows up in copy, design, error messages, marketing. It's not a poster in a hallway. It's a filter for every piece of communication.
8. Harley-Davidson — "Freedom for the soul"
Harley doesn't sell motorcycles in their marketing. They sell rebellion, identity, and belonging to a tribe that rejects conformity. Their brand values examples center on freedom, authenticity, and community — but expressed through imagery, customer events (HOG rallies), and a product that is objectively impractical compared to alternatives. The value isn't rational. It's tribal. And that's exactly what makes it sticky.
Brand Values Examples from Smaller Brands
9. Cards Against Humanity — "We make things we'd want to play"
CAH has never chased mainstream appeal. They've turned down licensing deals, sent boxes of literal bull manure to customers (as a stunt), donated profits to progressive causes without corporate hedging. The underlying value: we do what we find funny and interesting, not what maximizes reach. Small brands can hold harder positions than large ones. This is one of the most honest brand values examples in consumer goods.
10. Notion (early stage) — "We build for builders"
Before Notion became ubiquitous, their community was defined by people who built complex personal systems — writers, developers, project managers who wanted to shape their own tools. The value wasn't stated prominently, but it showed up in product decisions: everything was a building block, nothing was overly opinionated out of the box. The brand values example here is implicit rather than explicit — visible in the product, not the About page.
11. Bellroy — "We design to reduce"
Bellroy makes slim wallets and bags. Their stated purpose is to help people "carry with more intention" — which is a value about reduction, not addition. They don't make a product for every use case. They make the best version of a few products. Their brand values examples are grounded in craft and constraint. For small brands in physical products, a value built around doing less but better is one of the most defensible positions available.
12. Duolingo — "Learning should be free"
Duolingo kept their core product free even as competitors charged. Their stated value — education should be accessible regardless of income — isn't just PR. It shaped their monetization model (ads and a premium tier that doesn't gate core content). The value created friction with their business model, and they held it anyway. That tension is what gives a value credibility.
12 More Brand Values Examples Worth Noting
Zappos: "Deliver WOW through service" — operationalized by allowing agents to spend hours on a single call with no script
Buffer: "Default to transparency" — published employee salaries publicly
Ben & Jerry's: "We oppose systemic oppression" — took public positions on Black Lives Matter, climate, and GMOs before it was expected
Warby Parker: "Do good" — buy a pair, give a pair program baked into the business model, not added on
Lush: "We fight animal testing" — left major retail platforms over tracking cookie policies, framing it as an extension of their anti-surveillance value
Spotify: "We invest in creators" — built tools, advances, and direct deals that shift industry norms on artist compensation
In-N-Out Burger: "Quality you can taste" — they print Bible verses on packaging, refuse to franchise internationally, and have had the same menu for decades
Trader Joe's: "We are a national chain of neighborhood grocery stores" — anti-scale as a value, operationalized through local product sourcing and no loyalty programs
Patagonia Provisions: "Food should heal the planet" — a sub-brand that only stocks regenerative agriculture products, regardless of margin
Liquid Death: "Murder your thirst" — built an entire brand on the value that hydration shouldn't be boring, using metal aesthetic to sell canned water
Arc'teryx: "Design driven by purpose" — refuses to put logos prominently on products, values function over brand display
Aesop: "We don't advertise" — spent their formative years with zero paid media, investing entirely in store design and word of mouth as the expression of their value around considered consumption
How to Write Brand Values That Actually Work
Most brand values exercises start in the wrong place. They ask: "What do we value?" The answer is always the same — integrity, quality, customers, people. Everyone values these things. The question that produces real brand values is different.
What would we refuse to do even if it made us more money? Start here. The refusals are the real values.
What decisions have we made that confused outsiders but felt obvious internally? Those decisions reveal embedded values you haven't named yet.
What kind of customer do we actively not want? Values define who you're for by defining who you're not for.
What would we do the same even if no one was watching and there was no PR benefit? Strip out the performative. What remains is real.
What have we held under pressure? Values get tested. Look for moments when the business case argued one way and you went the other.
Once you have raw material, write each value as a sentence — not a word. "Transparency" means nothing. "We share our pricing, our process, and our failures publicly" means something. The sentence should contain a verb and a specificity that makes someone nod and someone else wince. If it makes everyone nod, rewrite it.
Then test each value against three scenarios: a hiring decision, a product decision, and a customer complaint. If the value doesn't help you navigate at least two of the three, it's decorative. If it helps with all three, you have something real. This process — excavating actual decisions to surface real values — is exactly what the <a href="https://brandkernel.io/glossary/brand-kernel">brand kernel</a> approach is designed to do. Rather than writing values from scratch, you extract them from how you've already operated.
Common Mistakes in Brand Values
Mistake 1: Writing aspirations instead of truths
"We value innovation" usually means "we wish we were more innovative." Brand values should describe how you actually operate, not how you wish you operated. Writing aspirational values creates internal confusion — employees see the gap between stated and lived values and lose trust in leadership.
Mistake 2: Listing too many
Eight values is not a set of values. It's a mood board. Most companies can hold three to five real values in operational practice. Beyond that, no one remembers them, no one uses them, and they become wallpaper. Prioritize. If you can't choose between two values, you don't have two values — you have one value you haven't named properly yet.
Mistake 3: Writing values in a workshop and never testing them
Values written in a one-day offsite with a facilitator and sticky notes almost always fail. They capture the conversation in the room, not the behavior in the building. The <a href="https://brandkernel.io/glossary/brand-positioning">brand positioning</a> layer of a company includes its values — but those values have to be excavated from actual history, not invented in an afternoon.
Mistake 4: Confusing values with benefits
"We save you time" is not a value. It's a benefit. Values describe how you operate. Benefits describe what customers get. Conflating the two produces brand values examples that read like sales copy — and nobody believes them. Keep these separate. Your <a href="https://brandkernel.io/glossary/brand-voice">brand voice</a>, your positioning, and your values are distinct layers of your brand identity. Mixing them produces noise.
Mistake 5: Treating values as marketing copy
Brand values aren't for your customers first — they're for your team. They're decision filters. If your values are written to impress potential customers rather than guide internal decisions, they'll fail at both jobs. The Everlane example above shows what happens when a public-facing values statement runs ahead of internal culture. Write your values for the people building the company. Customers will see the evidence.
The Difference Between Values That Stick and Values That Don't
The brand values examples that actually work — Patagonia, Netflix, REI, Basecamp, Cards Against Humanity — share one quality: they've been tested. Not once, but repeatedly, under real pressure. The value survived because someone in the room made a call that honored it even when it was costly. Values that don't stick were never tested, or were abandoned the first time they created friction.
This is why writing brand values from scratch rarely works. The values aren't in your head — they're in your history. In the hires you've made and rejected. In the deals you've turned down. In the product features you've refused to build. In the customers you've fired. The excavation process — systematically reviewing those decisions to find the patterns — is how real values get documented. That's what the <a href="https://brandkernel.io/glossary/brand-kernel">brand kernel</a> process is built to do: surface what's already true, not invent what sounds good.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some good brand values examples for small businesses?
Small businesses often have clearer values than large ones — because the founder's actual convictions are still embedded in daily decisions. Strong brand values examples for small businesses tend to be specific and uncomfortable: "We only work with clients who have a real product" or "We don't take rush fees because we plan properly" or "We publish our prices publicly." The key is specificity. A small business that says "we value quality" is invisible. One that says "we turn down 40% of projects because the brief isn't ready" has a value you can feel.
How many brand values should a company have?
Three to five is the practical range. Any fewer and you haven't done the work. Any more and you won't remember them — which means they won't guide decisions. If you find yourself with eight values, look for the two or three that are doing real work and demote the rest to operating principles. The test: can everyone on your team name them without looking? If not, you have too many.
What's the difference between brand values and brand mission?
Your mission is where you're going — the change you're trying to make in the world. Your values are how you operate while getting there. They're constraints on the path. A mission can evolve as you grow. Core values, if they're real, don't change much — because they're not aspirational, they're descriptive. Some companies conflate them, but keeping them separate makes both sharper. Patagonia's mission is environmental — their values include transparency, anti-consumerism, and craft. Different layers, different functions.
How do I know if my brand values are actually working?
Three tests. First, the decision test: in the last 90 days, can you point to three decisions where a stated value was the deciding factor? If not, they're not operational. Second, the conflict test: have your values ever cost you something — a customer, a deal, a hire? Values that have never created friction probably aren't real. Third, the employee test: ask three people who've been at your company less than six months to describe the company's values in their own words. If the answers are consistent with what you've written — without them having memorized your About page — the values are living in the culture.
What to Do Next
Writing brand values is the wrong starting point. Excavating them is the right one. The brand values examples in this article — from Patagonia to Bellroy to Basecamp — weren't invented in a workshop. They were discovered by companies willing to look honestly at their own behavior, find the patterns, and name them precisely. That process takes time, the right questions, and someone willing to push back when you reach for the easy answer.
BrandKernel documents your brand across 250 fields through 3-4 hours of structured dialogue — including your values layer, your voice, your positioning, and your worldview. The output is yours: a documented brand kernel you own and can use as an AI system prompt, a briefing document, or a hiring filter. Cohort 1 is $150. <a href="https://brandkernel.io/reserve">Reserve your spot here.</a>