Every brand has values now. Look at any "About Us" page and you'll probably find the same five words rearranged in a different order: integrity, passion, innovation, community, sustainability. Pick any three, add a lowercase sans-serif font, and you've got yourself a manifesto.

But would you still hold that value if it cost you the sale? That's the line between a value and a veneer. A value is something you'll always defend, even when it's inconvenient, whereas a veneer is something you say because it tested well in a Tuesday afternoon stakeholder workshop. Both can look identical in a Powerpoint presentation, but only one survives a bad quarter.

Brand purpose is usually where this starts

In most brand strategy frameworks, stated values aren’t freestanding, they’re presented as a part of a broader purpose: the brand’s reason for existing beyond making money. This means that testing the values on their own isn’t enough; your brand purpose that your values are supposedly derived from has to hold up too. That’s worth establishing before looking at what the evidence actually says about purpose done well versus purpose done badly.

The purpose paradox

Brand purpose has had a bad press for a while now, but the evidence is interesting: Peter Field's analysis for the IPA, comparing 47 purpose-led case studies against 333 non-purpose ones from the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank, found well-executed purpose campaigns drive tangible business effects.

Strong purpose campaigns average 2.1 large business effects against 1.6 for standard campaigns, and strengthened trust in 35% of cases, commitment in 43%, and fame in 39%. 57% of the purpose cases studied performed strongly, and 41% of well-executed brand purpose campaigns drove market share growth, compared to 26% of standard campaigns.

So brand purpose works

Except (and this is the bit that is often overlooked), Field also found that badly executed brand purpose campaigns perform worse than brands that didn't bother with purpose at all. Not neutral - worse. Implying that a half-hearted value is worse than no value.

That should terrify anyone bolting a brand purpose statement onto a campaign brief just because a competitor has one.

Your audience is already onto you

Here’s an uncomfortable reality for anyone hoping people won't notice the gap between the brand deck and the boardroom.

A while back, YouGov examined how much people trust brand sustainability claims. Just over 10% were inclined to take brand claims at face value, while over 45%, the single biggest group, (a segment YouGov rather brilliantly named "Justify My Love"), wants to believe brands but doesn't trust the label to prove it.

The underlying idea - that most of your audience is primed to doubt you by default - is unlikely to have reversed since this research took place. To translate that into plain English, we’re saying that nearly half the country wants your values to be real, but is actively looking for proof they aren't. That's not a hostile audience; that's a hopeful one, but braced for disappointment.

Why System1's data makes the case for genuine over generic

This is where it gets interesting for anyone who makes the actual ads. Like us.

We are fan followers of System1's testing methodology, which scores creative on the emotional response it generates, and by their figures less than 20% of ads tested achieve the three-to-five-star rating associated with strong long-term brand building. Their research points to happiness specifically as the emotion most closely tied to long-term market share growth. We don't think that's a coincidence, and we don't think you can fake your way to a five-star ad with a value you don't actually hold.

Real feeling is difficult to synthesise. Orlando Wood's IPA-published work with System1, Lemon, then Look Out, makes a related argument from a different angle: that advertising has been quietly losing the character, humour and distinctiveness that builds brands over the long term in favour of safer, flatter, more forgettable work.

Safe and flat is usually what you get when nobody in the building actually believes what they're being asked to say. Or when the brand values and purpose statement the creative work has to jump from has been created in the C-suite on a Friday afternoon and has never seen a real customer to test it with.

So, veneer or value?

Try this test - it costs nothing and takes five minutes.

Take your brand's stated values and ask, for each one: has this ever made us do something we didn't want to do? Has it ever cost us a client, a deadline, a margin point?

If the honest answer is no, then you don't have a value, you have a decoration. And decorations don't survive being asked to justify their love.