Overlay
Let's talk
Emotive Brand
Get in touch: [email protected] 510-496-8888

Hello!

Author: Carol Emert

Renaming Your Business? Here’s the Low-Down on Emotive Naming

Posted on by Carol Emert

The first time a shopping buddy suggested I visit Pottery Barn, I declined – imagining a rustic space filled with hippies and rust-colored earthenware.

Why would my friend recommend such a place? I wondered. Pottery Barn – as if!

Pottery Barn is lucky. It succeeded with a name that’s disconnected from both the functional and emotional truths of its brand. The experience of the brand – beautiful stores, upscale products – dominates brand perceptions. Nobody even thinks about the name bespeaking a cow shed with a kiln in the corner.

For companies considering a name change today, few, if any, will be able to withstand that big of a miss. Unless your business model includes 1,000 mall stores to imbue your name with meaning, it’s critically important to get it right.

CEOs Lead Renaming

Because a company’s name is its single most important brand expression, naming decisions fall largely on the shoulders of the CEO. The stakes are high, and yet naming is not an area where CEOs typically have much expertise.

Whether a new name is in order because the company is changing, the marketplace is changing, or an evolving product architecture requires a different container, it’s important that a new name actively support the CEO’s vision for organizational transformation – in whatever direction she or he is leading.

The Opportunity of Emotive Naming

Many CEOs lean toward functional names that clearly state what their company does in the world. That’s a logical approach – but it’s rarely possible anymore. The fact is that nearly all of the straightforward names have been taken for years.

It’s no wonder, then, that companies today are liberally borrowing words that might be only very distantly related to what they do, like Tesla, Goop, or Bluetooth. Or they’re making up words, like Etsy, Spotify, Magoosh, or Zynga.

What made-up names lack in functionality, they can sometimes more than make up for in emotional impact – something we at Emotive Brand consider central to effective branding.

The dearth of functional names might seem like a business challenge, but we believe emotive naming is a great opportunity.

Zynga sounds zingy and lively ­– feelings that the company’s mobile games might create in a player’s otherwise mundane day. Etsy is reminiscent of Betsy, an old-fashioned woman’s name from hand crafting days. If someone had an Aunt Etsy, she would almost certainly be a knitter. And it’s easy to imagine Eddie Redmayne playing a bespectacled bookseller named Warby Parker in a movie set in 1930s London.

Emotive Naming Creates Emotional Impact

The great thing about emotive naming is that names like these create a distinctive feeling that can actually be more impactful than an obvious name like Handicraftsite.com or Mobile Gaming Inc. or Millennial Glasses Online.

People don’t need to think about what emotive names mean. People intuitively feel what they mean.

Creating or choosing the right emotive name starts with knowing how a brand should make people feel – what we at Emotive Brand call a brand’s emotional impact.

Emotional impact is a crucial part of brand strategy development at Emotive Brand and the foundation of our creative efforts.

Understanding how a brand needs to make its target audiences feel informs visual identity and other design, including critical touchpoints like the website. It also informs the logo and, of course, it informs naming.

If your company would benefit from a name that creates emotional impact, reach out to Emotive Brand to learn about emotive naming.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in San Francisco.

How Brand Strategy Can Uplevel Your Company’s EQ

Posted on by Carol Emert

Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) may account for as much as 80% of peoples’ personal success – more than intellectual intelligence (IQ). At Emotive Brand, we believe EQ matters as much as smarts for brands too. So how does EQ apply to brands, and what can B2B CMOs do to uplevel their organizational emotional intelligence?

EQ has five components: self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, empathy, and social skills. All of these apply to businesses as well as people. And all of them can impact basic business strategy, from how to articulate your brand to who to hire and how to implement change.

Let’s look at how brand strategy can boost each component of an organization’s EQ.

Self-awareness

Just as with people, self-awareness for organizations is foundational to everything else. Before you can figure out where your business is heading and how to help it get there, a CMO needs to understand who this company fundamentally is.

This understanding doesn’t come only from inside; external perspective is necessary to identify gaps in the company’s self-perceptions. Brand consultants will often play the role of therapist – using insights and connecting dots to identify blind spots and facilitate self-understanding.

In the Immersion process that kicks off our brand engagements, we talk to a range of internal stakeholders, from company founders to change agents on the ground.

We build on the company’s own sense of itself by talking to clients and external partners, new hires, industry analysts, and by reading commentary and reviews on places like Glassdoor, Gartner, and the business press. This helps identify any blind spots or gaps between the company’s perceptions and aspirations and where the marketplace believes it is.

This work helps us understand a brand’s values, purpose, aspirations, capabilities, and behaviors – both aspirationally and realistically. And it helps us know how to bridge any perceptual gaps with customers, prospects, and partners.

While it may seem like company insiders should be the ultimate authorities on who and what the company is, we find that this inside-out perspective inevitably sheds new light on a business’s strengths and challenges.

Insights from this process both boost organizational EQ and form the foundations of a sharp, successful brand strategy.

Self-regulation

Self-awareness is necessary to inform brand strategy, but self-regulation is required to implement change. Brands need both the discipline and the organizational chops to see a strategy through from beginning to end.

A new brand strategy should be a lens for behaviors and decisions effecting clients, partners, employees, community – anyone your brand might touch. Making that happen starts at the top, but ultimately, everyone plays a role.

Leadership must fully embrace the strategy and talk the talk as well as walking the walk. It’s their job to make sure the strategy is understood and implemented from account service to product development to sales.

To support self-regulation, high-EQ organizations allocate the time, energy and budget their people need to effectively implement change. Otherwise, new ideas won’t gain traction and the status quo will win.

Motivation

Motivation is a component of emotional intelligence that’s critical to any organization’s success, and it’s also something leaders have a reasonable amount of control over. It’s just as easy to de-motivate people as to motivate them. So how does a company create a culture that’s motivated for change?

To be intrinsically motivated, people need to see alignment between their own values and goals and those of their organization. Brand consultants must understand both in order to articulate a strategy that’s compelling to all stakeholders – internal as well as external.

If employees are inspired by the company’s vision, purpose, and plan, they’ll work hard to make it happen. When they experience organizational behavior that accords with their values, they will pour their energy into their work. And if they are ambitious and see a way to grow in parallel with the company, they will be loyal through thick and thin.

If these ideas are clear, compelling, and delivered with respect, motivation is sure to follow.

Empathy

High-EQ businesses embody a sense of caring for all of their stakeholders, from customers to employees to the people in their communities. Empathy inspires the sense of trust that allows brands to build healthy, authentic relationships.

Empathetic organizations naturally tend to attract and hire people who care, but businesses can also foster a culture of empathy. Brand strategy can help by uncovering the met and unmet needs of a brand’s key stakeholders, and telling their stories in a way that others can relate to.

At Emotive Brand, we use a methodology called Emotive Branding to define the key emotions a brand should evoke to strengthen its most important relationships. Empathy is the heart of all of our brand strategy and design. By helping our clients cultivate empathy, they get the tools they need to matter more to people.

Social skills

A company’s social skills include its ability to build loyal, effective teams and to create strong bonds with its clients.

Social skills reflect all of the other components of EQ – self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, and empathy. In fact, creating strong bonds with others is a natural outgrowth of emotional intelligence.

Brand strategy helps a business develop its social skills by unearthing any emotional or functional barriers that stand in the way of stronger relationships and providing communications tools that build bonds.

Building emotional intelligence can help any business. Attaining new levels of self-awareness is a starting point for change. Self-regulation helps your organization implement new ideas and ways of working. Cultivating internal motivation, empathy, and social skills strengthens bonds with the people who matter most to your brand. Schedule a chat with Emotive Brand to learn more about building brand EQ.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Unrealized Business Value? Build It With Brand

Posted on by Carol Emert

Unrealized Business Value

If you’re feeling thwarted by business value that’s falling short of its potential, the answer may well lie in your brand. It’s true that brand lives under marketing, not finance. But a sharp, well-aimed brand strategy can address critical business results from lagging market capitalization to margins.

At Emotive Brand, we believe that brand isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you behave, how you serve each of your audiences, and, fundamentally, what you believe. That means your brand strategy is a foundation you can use to build value holistically, across your organization.

Here are three ways brand can build measurable business value:

Market Capitalization

Apple shares were trading below $1 when Steve Jobs rejoined the company in 1997. Today Apple has the highest market cap of any enterprise, clocking in around $867 billion, or $187 per share. Its brand value is the highest too – $184 billion, according to Interbrand.

To put that into perspective, Apple’s brand value is worth more than the entire book value of Coco-Cola Co., according to this tally.

One of the first things Jobs did upon rejoining Apple was to redefine the Apple brand and articulate it to the world.

In a staff meeting revealing the Think Different campaign, when Jobs had been back at Apple just a few weeks, he gave a talk that brilliantly explains the value of putting brand first.

This might be the most inspiring explanation of the power of brand we’ve seen, so do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing. Here are some key points:

“To me, marketing is about belief…. [and] the things Apple believed at its core are the same things Apple really stands for today…. Apple’s about something more than [making boxes…. Our] core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better… And those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”

Jobs’ clarity about his brand and its audience of passionate individuals helped guide Apple’s innovation and success. Those in turn have helped create the mega-brand value and world-leading market capitalization that Apple enjoys today.

Margin

Apple is also sitting on some $267 billion in cash, according to its latest quarterly earnings report. That illustrates another way brand can help build business value: profitability.

The gross profit margin on the iPhone X is reportedly 64%, up a healthy 5 percentage points from the 59% margin on its immediate predecessor, the iPhone 8. Overall, Apple’s corporate gross profit stands at a whopping 38%.

Of course, many factors impact corporate margins. But it’s clear that Apple’s brand appeal heightens its ability not only to charge a premium, but to launch new products that its fans line up to buy.

Recruiting

Brand appeal has just as much power in recruiting as it does in sales – if not more. It’s not lost on any job hunter how much a gold-plated brand stands out on a resume.

Of course, hiring the right people is essential to the success of any business, but a strong brand also has a direct impact on costs.

LinkedIn reports that a strong employer brand yields 50% more qualified applicants and reduces both hiring time and costs by half. Three quarters of job seekers say they consider the brand before applying.

A strong employer brand even correlates to a higher retention rate. That both saves recruiting and training costs and contributes to higher workforce productivity.

You can learn more by downloading our white paper, How Emotive Brands Drive Business Results.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Using Benchmarking Research to Track Growth and ROI

Posted on by Carol Emert

Many of our clients count on their brand strategy to be a springboard for growth. Whether they’re falling short of ambitious goals or have truly hit a wall, brand strategy can help create the shifts they need to move ahead.

But how do you measure success beyond hard numbers like revenue and inbound queries? How do you get insight into whether, how, and how much your brand strategy is fueling your growth – and what more it might be able to do?

Brand perceptions, after all, are a squishier metric than dollars. Right?

Benchmarking Research Demonstrates ROI

Not necessarily. Brand perceptions can be measured with great accuracy – you just have to make the investment in research. We’re big believers in benchmarking your brand before making any strategic shifts, and then using ongoing surveys to stay on top of your brand’s standing in the marketplace.

Benchmarking research can be one of your smartest growth strategy investments, with real ROI that you can track. Here’s how it can help.

Establish Which Problems Need Solving

Benchmarking research establishes your baseline while providing critical insights to inform your brand strategy. It helps you understand what associations people have with your brand; whether you are top of mind, nowhere on their minds, or somewhere in between; what they know about you and how much of that is actually correct.

Are you battling a lack of perception, misperceptions, or a combination? Or is apathy the main problem – a lack of resonance?

These insights should inform both your brand strategy and the way you go to market. (Read more about using quant for emotional insight here.) A lack of awareness may require a bigger media investment, a more resonant positioning, harder hitting messaging, or a combination of those things.

One thing is certain: You won’t really know unless you ask a statistically significant sample of your most desirable prospects.

Learn which Sales-Related Levers to Pull

Benchmarking research can also help you understand your audiences’ purchase priorities and how your brand is helping or hindering sales growth.

A good piece of quant can gauge the most important factors in purchase decisions, assess how your brand attributes – and competitors’ – align with those factors, and identify where you need to strengthen your story vis a vis your rivals.

Are there any elements of your brand story that are important to sales, but are being underplayed? Are there any misperceptions that are hurting you in the marketplace? Is there any valuable space your competition is owning where you could make inroads?

These are the type of levers you need to pull to jumpstart growth.

Keep Tabs on Your Brand and ROI

So you conducted your benchmarking research, put your new brand strategy in place, and have gone to market with well-crafted messaging. Most likely you’re seeing some sales lift. At this point, usually a few months in, you’ll want to assess the impact of your brand work with a new round of research.

This is where you get to see how well your hypotheses are bearing out. Is your new positioning creating more resonance vis a vis competitors? Are you correcting any misperceptions? Are you strengthening the attributes that correlate most closely to purchase? Have you boosted awareness, consideration, and preference among the audiences you value most?

With this information, you’ll be fully armed to continue growing your sales while building your brand. And you can watch the ROI increase as your numbers tick up.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Marketing Strategy That Fuels Growth

Posted on by Carol Emert

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]

More than ever, CMOs are being looked to as the primary growth drivers of their companies. But what if you seem to be doing everything right and growth is still falling short? You have a strong brand strategy in place, a good sales team, and your marketing strategy is being executed on time and on budget. What then?

Chances are good that, if you’re experiencing a disconnect like this, the problem lies in the connection between your brand and your target audience. You may be reaching them. But how successfully are you really connecting with them?

How can you identify the problem? And what can you do to nurture your target audience while giving your sales team the support they need to drive growth?

Marketing Strategy That Drives Growth

At Emotive Brand, we find that the diagnosis for this condition virtually always comes from the outside.

The area where insiders typically have the least insight is the hearts and minds of their target audiences, which are so easily obscured behind the company’s own view of where its value lies. Companies often also find it challenging to stay on top of new developments in communications when their core competencies lie elsewhere.

Cue your agency. It’s the agency’s job to:

  • Understand your brand, products, and services in a new and exciting way, through the eyes of the people who can make it grow.
  • Use customer, marketplace, brand, and contextual insights to define strategic shifts that will win them over.
  • Create the right message and present it creatively to get their attention and rekindle the connection.
  • Identify existing and emerging channels that will best support your message and resonate with your audiences.
  • Tie it all together in a marketing strategy that drives growth.

Rebooting Advertising and Marketing Strategy

We’ve been working with a Silicon Valley client whose technology is so smart it inspires us. This company has been in business 15 years. It has a crack product that’s unique in the market. The product should be selling itself.

But there’s a problem: the company has under-marketed both its brand and its product. Its sales are lackluster. We identified five primary marketing challenges:

  • Marketplace perceptions hadn’t kept up with the company, so potential customers had outdated ideas that needed to be overcome before they would even pay attention.
  • Its advertising and marketing communications were telling an old story that didn’t communicate the product differentiators and reinforced outdated perceptions.
  • Its communications style was out of date and disconnected from both the brand truths and its audiences.
  • The client was spending ad dollars against a broad target rather than an audience aligned to its sales target, wasting precious marketing dollars.

We dug into this project to understand the marketplace, the product, and the brand through the eyes of our client’s target audiences. And we transformed its marketing strategy with some fundamental shifts.

Aligning Marketing Strategy with Sales

First, we used creative and surprising ways to talk about the product in advertising. Solidly rooted in meaningful customer insights and up-to-date product truths, the creative is doing a great job at grabbing the attention of sales prospects. Fresh and resonant messaging and design are replacing apathy with interest and engagement.

We also employed account-based marketing (ABM), replacing the client’s broad advertising strategy with a personalized approach. We’re targeting the sales team’s hottest prospects, in the places where they are most likely to engage.

This more resonant, tailored messaging is reinvigorating the company’s sales as well as its brand, making it relevant again and helping nurture prospects who might have ignored a more general message.

If you need fresh ideas for connecting with your sales prospects instead of merely reaching them, Emotive Brand would like to connect with you.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

The Next Frontier for Employer Brands: Healthy Behavior Change

Posted on by Carol Emert

At Emotive Brand, we’ve seen a jump over the last year in clients seeking help with employee behavior change. Better brand behavior isn’t the focus. Instead, organizations are actually trying to help their people live happier and healthier work and personal lives.

It’s exciting to see companies living out their employer brands through a greater commitment to their people, and to see them authentically rewarded with more trust and loyalty.

Several trends have brought us to this point, starting with greater competitiveness in recruiting – especially in Silicon Valley, which seems to be innovating the employee-employer relationship as fast as technology these days.

Other factors include better neuroscientific insight into the mechanics of behavior change coupled with proven successes, especially in the area of health. And putting all of that theory into action are new digital tools that can monitor, measure, and support healthy habit formation over time.

From our vantage point at the intersection of brand and business, we’ve identified four best practices for successful behavior change.

1. Open the door with a powerful creative idea

You can chuck a new benefits program over the fence through an email and a new section on your HR page.  Or you can really engage employees through a strategic internal campaign wrapped in a powerful creative idea.

To get to an idea that works, you need to deeply understand your people. How they perceive the problem. Their barriers to adoption – both functional and emotional. What their ideal end state looks like. The language that resonates with them. The cultural context in which they live and work.

Connecting the dots between these data points will provide the emotional insight that informs your messaging. This insight and the resulting creative idea should create a siren’s call that’s so true and powerful, your people open up to it instinctively.

2. Make behavior change activity visible

Once you have peoples’ attention, they’ll be more drawn to a new program if they can see others participating. A sense of momentum triggers both FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and a genuine desire to be part of a collective action.

Think of the poor chump who is the first to give a standing ovation after a performance. Standing alone feels incredibly vulnerable – and foolish if nobody joins in. But once the standing O gains momentum and most people are doing it, the vulnerability shifts to the few people left sitting. A moment ago they were a regular part of the crowd. Now they appear either mean-spirited or clueless.

This principle, called social norming, is classically illustrated by this video of a lone Dancing Guy who convinces a whole hillside of picnickers to stand up and boogie.

For organizations, social norming points to the importance of seeding a new behavior change program with high-profile early adopters. Then make their activity visible, ideally both through external markers like a progress-tracking exhibition or swag, and digitally through workplace social networks, apps, or an intranet ticker showing an ever-growing number of participants.

3. Reward small actions and accomplishments

Gamification has exploded with the proliferation of apps promoting wholesome behaviors, from exercise to saving money to learning a language. Congratulatory badges and notifications have become expected bread crumbs down the path of behavior change.

Employers can leverage this trend by offering consistent, step-by-step rewards and incentives to get people started on a new behavior and then keep them on the path of progress. In addition to digital gamification, rewards can include personal recognition, financial incentives, and perks – whatever feels most true to the employer brand.

4. Break down big challenges

Sometimes behavior change is difficult because mastery requires an intimidating amount to learn or do. The sheer number of topics to master or actions to take can be paralyzing. Financial planning is one example. Losing 70 pounds through diet and exercise is another.

There are two ways to take the intimidation out of behavior change. One is to break down each step into pieces that feel doable. The second is to start with what’s easy. For example, someone might find it hard to create a financial plan that addresses all of their life goals. But starting with something that’s inherently rewarding, like saving toward a vacation, can open the door to a broader conversation.

If the process is then laid out in simple steps, ideally reinforced with a system of rewards, there’s a better chance of an employee getting all the way to the end.

A new frontier for employer brands

Behavior change is hard. Historically, it’s been a lonely endeavor. But we believe organizations can change all that by following our simple blueprint: Harness the power of your community. Break down big challenges into the doable. Offer motivating incentives. And deliver it all through inspiring communications.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Emotive Data: Designing Quantitative Research for Emotional Insight

Posted on by Carol Emert

Emotive Brand may not seem like a green eyeshade kind of place. After all, we’re in the business of creating emotional connections between brands and people. You may ask, “Why use quantitative research at all? Isn’t qualitative better for emotional insight?”

In fact, we find quantitative research very rich – and extremely useful for building our clients’ brands and businesses. Qualitative insight is important too, but whenever we can, we start with quant. It helps us move the needle on both functional and emotional measures. It also provides a baseline from which to measure change.

We recently completed a major quant project for a client in the education space. Our client had run a successful business for decades, but revenue growth was stalling as its primary audience matured. Executives came to Emotive Brand for both brand strategy and a growth strategy to jumpstart the business.

Here are some of the techniques we used to get emotional insight from the quant.

Quant Should Test Hypotheses

Every quant vendor has a standard methodology, but cookie cutter survey instruments yield cookie cutter findings. You have to know your client’s business and brand inside and out so you can enter the project with a strong set of hypotheses to test. That means the agency needs to be deeply involved in questionnaire development.

Working with our quant partner, we designed the questionnaire to include all the information needed to craft a growth strategy. We wanted to understand not only the brand and its competitors, but also the perceptions, attitudes, motivations, behaviors, and aspirations of each of five key target audiences toward the brand and the category.

We baked in other questions about the mechanics of the business to inform channel strategy and product development.

In the end, some of our hypotheses were right and some were wrong. But all of the findings were directly useful to helping us understand how to help our client grow.

Quant Should Elevate Emotional Insight

When we asked our target audiences why they engage in the category, their top answer was functional; they had to fulfill a professional requirement. But their second highest answer was rife with emotion; it empowered them fulfill their highest career aspirations.

Guess what we did with the first data point? We ignored it. You can’t build an emotive brand on a functional requirement. But the aspirational nature of the category became central to our brand strategy.

Next, we asked our target audiences to rank the attributes of the client brand from high to low. Their top choices were all functional; the client was doing a good job delivering the basics.

A few notches down the list, they ranked the brand’s ability to enable the same career aspirations that were identified as important for the category. BINGO. Connecting the dots on what drives these audiences was a key emotional  insight. It gave us a powerful territory in which to start positioning the brand.

Quant Connects the Dots on Growth Strategy

Finding these sorts of insights in quantitative analysis can be time consuming and eyeball wearing. But the fact is that it takes a human mind – specifically a human mind that is holding the hypotheses ­– to see meaningful connections.

It’s not a function that can be automated, at least not at this point.

One of the most important findings from our quant project was the identification of a new priority target audience. Looking at any one fact about this audience in isolation wouldn’t have bubbled it to the top as a priority. But looking across the data, we put together seven data points that, combined, told a compelling story of opportunity. Moving forward, this audience will be key to our client’s growth strategy.

That’s why we love quant. This one piece of research armed us with insights to help drive a new target strategy, brand strategy, primary and secondary messaging, as well as channel strategy and product development. Our client now has a baseline from which to measure the success of all of these efforts moving forward.

Done right, quantitative research can be great for the business and great for the brand.

For us, that’s something to get emotional about.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Loyalty and Productivity: Using Innovative Benefits to Build Employer Brands

Posted on by Carol Emert

A great employer brand story is important for recruiting and retaining employees – but it’s important to show workers the love and not just talk about it. Benefits are one of the best ways to demonstrate that a company values its employees’ well-being and not just their work. With a rising tide of innovative benefits, from in vitro fertilization to college tuition support to telemedicine, there’s more opportunity than ever to build a strong employer brand. HR leaders who innovate can boost their competitiveness while taking better care of their people.

At Emotive Brand, we’re lucky to work with visionary employers that have embraced HR innovation, as well as with benefits companies that are disrupting their categories to offer re-invented benefits of far greater value.

Innovative Benefits Win

In a 2017 survey of 2,000 U.S. workers, Fractl found that 88% would consider taking a job with lower pay for better health, dental, and vision insurance. The same number would consider jumping ship for more flexible hours.

Other than health, flexible work hours and PTO were the most popular benefits with employees, according to Fractl’s survey, published in the Harvard Business Review.

At Emotive Brand, we see two major trends behind the rise in innovative benefits.

Control is Out, Flexibility is In

The first trend is the rethinking of an old assumption that employees need to be controlled, rather than trusted, to make decisions that are right for them and their job. Undoubtedly, this is tied to the rise of knowledge workers who demand new ways of working and have agency to jump employers at will.

Unlimited PTO was a shocking idea when Netflix adopted it years ago for a Silicon Valley-based knowledge worker staff. Despite a lot of hoopla at the time, only 1% to 2% of companies offer it today.

More would be smart to do so.

Fractl found that two-thirds of employees would consider taking a job with lower pay if offered unlimited time off. And eliminating vacation liability saves companies almost $2,000 per year per employee, says the article, citing Project: Time Off.

Emotive Brand has offered unlimited PTO since our founding in 2009. When Emotive Brand was developing its first HR polices almost 10 years ago, setting arbitrary limits on PTO “just seemed so stupid,” says CEO and co-founding partner Bella Banbury. “It’s really about treating people as adults.”

It’s also about quid pro quo in the changing world of work. “I can’t expect someone to be available at 7 or 8 at night and to check their email after hours and then not let them go to their kid’s school play,” Banbury says.

Unlimited PTO fosters mutual respect between a company and employees. Everyone wins.

Technology Drives Innovation for HR Leaders

Technology, not surprisingly, is the second trend behind the rise in innovative benefits.

While consumers have gotten used to instant gratification via tech-based services like on-demand TV, “benefits still feel a step behind,” says Sean McBride, partnerships director at Emotive Brand client Lyra Health. “HR leaders want benefits that are tech-enabled, personalized, and as accessible and available as everything else.”

Technology is driving much higher levels of access and personalization, says McBride. His company, Lyra Health, is taking the hassle out of behavioral health care by making it easy for people to connect with treatments and practitioners tailored to their specific needs.

Employers have embraced Lyra’s model, which marries technology and hands-on clinical service for more effective care.

While many companies have at least considered next-generation benefits, McBride estimates that only about 5% “have really looked at benefits holistically, from smoking cessation to personal finance to behavioral health, making sure they all have the same ease of access and personalization.”

Currently, tech companies are the most progressive, one-upping each other with benefits like egg freezing and in vitro fertilization. Because the competition for top employees is so fierce, employer brand-building is a priority.

McBride estimates it will be another five to 10 years before today’s innovative benefits will be mainstream in corporate America. For now, it’s a real source of competitive differentiation.

“We’re definitely in an early adopter phase,” he says. “It takes time for large companies to innovate and for smaller companies to blossom and replace legacy providers.”

Innovative benefits can have compelling value. In the case of comprehensive behavioral health care, studies show that total medical costs go down on average 10% over four years, while productivity can increase by as much as 23%, says McBride.

Not surprisingly, employers benefit when their employees thrive, and both the employer brand and the business come out the better for it.

See Change for HR Leaders

A third beneficiary are the HR leaders who are used to hearing more gripes than kudos.

“When you’re used to complaints and now people are stopping you in the hallway for a hug because it’s changed a family’s life – I hear stories like that,” says McBride. “The emotional connection is really enhanced when it feels like a company is investing in employees as much as the employees are investing in the company.”

Emotive Brand can help companies strengthen their workforce loyalty and productivity by ensuring HR leaders have the right insights to build more meaningful connections with employees.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm.

Mastering the Art of Emotive Writing

Posted on by Carol Emert

Emotive branding works because it connects with people on a very real and personal level. But brands have multiple target audiences who are often very different from each other. They may be easily relatable, or they may not. So how does a brand speak in a way that truly resonates with each diverse audience? From an agency point of view, how do we at Emotive Brand approach emotive writing?

This question relates mostly to messaging – communications aimed at key stakeholders who are very different people with different relationships to the brand. A typical audience mix might include employees, investors and prospective customers with widely varying styles and needs, like Fortune 500 companies and SMBs, or Millennial and Boomer fashion shoppers.

In this post, we’re lifting the lid on Emotive Brand’s approach to emotive writing. All of our ideas are designed to maximize empathy with target audiences because – here’s Tip #1 – you can’t talk to them meaningfully if you don’t care. Effective writing requires that you get out of your own head and into a place of true, heart-felt empathy with the audience.

Emotive Writing Starts with Emotional Insight

To connect with each audience, you need to truly understand them – not just intellectually, but emotionally. What are their greatest fears and highest aspirations that relate to your brand? What are their met and unmet emotional needs in your category?

Audience interviews are ideal for getting the emotional juice flowing and helping brands start feeling into their audiences. When that’s not possible, interviews with clients who interact directly with each audience can be a good substitute. Often we talk to successful sales people who really connect with their customers and help solve their problems.

The key is to ask questions that get their emotions going. What makes their day truly great when they’re helping a potential customer? What’s the biggest difference they’ve ever made for a customer?

Then ask emotionally-geared questions about the customers: What are their greatest challenges and opportunities? Ask for stories about specific favorite customers to help put a face on the customer audience. Get a sense for their history, their career or life trajectory, their passions.

As interviewees start to emote, it’s time to flex your empathy muscle and feel in. Notice what language they use, their cadence of speech, the “feeling tone” of the experience. Record the interview, if possible, to remind yourself of the emotions at play when you sit down to write.

Feel Into the Emotional Impact on Your Target Audience

When feeling into your target audience, it’s useful to have a lens into the key emotion your brand wants to stimulate within them. Is the ideal end result of the brand interaction a feeling of support, relief, empowerment, enlightenment, freedom, abundance, joy or something else entirely?

At Emotive Brand, we identify an Emotional Impact for each of our brand’s key target audiences. It provides clarity and focus, so when we (or a client) are crafting communications for that audience, it’s easy to feel into that emotion and let the words flow.

Stimulate the Flow

Sometimes the act of sitting down to write and facing a blank page can be enervating – the opposite of emotive. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to stimulate your way into emotive gear.

If you are working towards creating joy in your target audience, listen to music that brings you joy.

If your brand has a clever edge, listen to a standup comedian or read an author who has a similar tone.

B2B audiences may be less represented in pop culture, but there are plenty of interviews and panel discussions online that can help a writer get into the right emotional space.

Art, music, film, lectures, fiction, non-fiction – any of these can get you in gear for heartfelt emotive writing.

Machine Learning Is the New, New Thing. But Can It Help CMOs Build Brands?

Posted on by Carol Emert

Can big data build brands better?

A few years ago, Big Data promised to radically transform the marketing landscape. CMOs were warned to master it or watch their brands get left behind. Artificial intelligence was the next new, new thing. Now the hot property is machine learning, the data-crunching tool that can find patterns in big data and make them actionable.

Each of these innovations is truly transformative — and each has limitations. As machine learning gathers steam, let’s look at what it means for brands. Which challenges can machine learning tackle which still depend on human intelligence?

What is machine learning?

Simply put, machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that uses high-powered algorithms to find patterns in huge datasets. By tracking the (mostly digital) behaviors of thousands or millions of anonymized individuals, machine learning can become predictive. For example, it can identify high net worth individuals and “rewind the tape” of their behaviors as they were climbing the ladder to financial success. It can then identify others who appear to be on the same ladder so marketers can start nurturing their loyalty on the way up.

CRM platforms are using machine learning to understand the messages that drive engagement, then tailor content to people with statistical similarities. They’re replacing guesswork with statistically sound, automated methods.

So there are exciting ways that machine learning can help CMOs make their marketing organizations work smarter. But what can’t it do?

Don’t leave the human part out of the data part

There are four areas directly impacting brands where we think human intelligence – not machine intelligence — is absolutely required. They are: empathy and other emotions, creativity, insight, and aspiration.

Without these four things, you wouldn’t have a brand; you’d have an incorporated collection of business processes. It will be years, if ever, that a machine can substitute for these functions. Here’s why:

Emotions and empathy

The value of your brand is directly tied to what it means to people – functionally, but also emotionally. Building your brand requires an understanding of how it makes people feel and then a strategy for optimizing that emotional bond. This requires the ability to empathize with your audiences, to feel what they feel.

No machine can empathize with the feelings people have toward your brand. And no machine can develop strategies for optimizing those feelings. Machines can be smart — but they can’t feel.

Creativity

It’s true that software can be used for some limited creative functions. The Associated Press uses a form of artificial intelligence called natural language processing to write quarterly earnings reports, for example. But this only works for content that is templated, with known variables swapping in and out of a rote structure.

Brands by definition are completely unique. Every brand should have a distinctive voice, look and point of view that, combined, create a unique brand experience. Every brand touchpoint should deliver a consistent story. And only a human being can create and curate content that consistently tells and emotes the story of a brand.

Insight

Insight is a human skill that relates to both empathy and creativity. It’s a way of taking information and emotional understanding and evolving them into something greater than the sum of their parts. A machine can compute a fact like 1+1=2. It can’t compute an insight in which 1+1, as interpreted by the human gut, heart and brain, can sometimes magically equal 3.

Brand articulation is built on unique insights about how a brand relates to its target audiences, its competition and its cultural context. No machine can come close.

Aspiration

Every brand means something today and should aspire to mean more tomorrow. Aspirations and new ideas for achieving them aren’t facts that can be predicted by a machine. They’re the product of human emotions and human intelligence, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and yearning to achieve more.

At Emotive Brand, we’re excited at the new efficiencies machine learning can bring to CMOs and their marketing organizations. And we’re gratified to continue using our collective empathy, creativity, insights and aspirations to help our clients build great brands.

Have a peak at a few client case studies to see how we’ve helped CMOs build brands and use big data.

Emotive Brand is a  brand strategy firm working with leaders of high-growth companies to help build stronger brands.