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Author: Carol Emert

Your Startup’s Growth Strategy Starts with Brand Strategy

Posted on by Carol Emert

You’re running a startup. When should you invest in brand strategy?

Put another way, when do you need to grow? When do you need to acquire new customers, build your culture and recruit the right people?

For a startup whose primary job is growth, brand strategy can be a critical tool. So the answer to the question about when you need brand strategy is: Not at the very beginning, but probably earlier than you think.

We recently branded a stealth-mode software startup whose CEO is a highly successful serial entrepreneur. He has worked with Emotive Brand several times. This time, he brought us in earlier than ever, because he has seen how brand strategy can power growth.

When his startup leaves stealth mode and launches into growth mode, as it is poised to do, it will be powered by the right customer insights, the right value proposition and the right messaging to succeed.

Too Early v. Too Late

That doesn’t mean you need brand strategy on Day One. Startups are right to get their products built and tested before worrying about anything else. If you don’t have a viable product, you have nothing to grow a brand or a company on. So early on, tunnel vision is good.

The next stage, the growth stage, is where brand strategy can have meaningful impact. Brand strategy can power your growth strategy by identifying who your best customers are and clarifying what you do better than anyone else to address the pain points they face every day.

Brand strategy defines your company’s unique brand experience, the voice with which you will speak to the marketplace and the messaging that will get you leads with the right people.

If your brand isn’t clear, your growth strategy will have a tough time defining both long-term goals and the short-term tactics for getting there.

Avoid Stalling Growth Before It Starts

We worked with a startup client a couple of years ago in exactly this position. The company had a great team and top-notch venture backing. It enjoyed a successful run with its initial friends-and-family customer set – but when the time came to implement its growth strategy, it hit a wall.

The company was trying to build its business with a tech-heavy product story rather than directly addressing the challenges it solved for its customers. Its venture firm sent the startup to us.

Three months after engaging Emotive Brand, the startup was ready to relaunch with a fresh story – and quickly started hitting its goals. The same startup has engaged us on a number of projects since, to keep its story relevant amid shifts in its competitive landscape.

As your startup prepares for growth mode, your team will be growing too. Brand strategy that clarifies who you are and what you believe can help internally as well as externally, helping you recruit the right people and build a strong internal culture.

Whether your startup is poised to grow internally, externally or both, brand strategy can make your growth strategy smarter, clearer and more successful.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm working with high-growth B2B companies.

Why It’s Frickin’ Hard for Organizations to Brand Themselves

Posted on by Carol Emert

The need for a branding agency is hard to determine sometimes.

Many of Emotive Brand’s clients come to us after failed attempts to develop their own brand strategy. Just last week, a client sent us some themes they’d identified in an internal brand survey, along with a frustrated note: “We’ve gotten this far. We’re stuck. Can you help?”

Why is it so hard for organizations to brand themselves from the inside? Aren’t the people who live and breathe a brand every day the most obvious choice to articulate it?

That’s a logical conclusion, and clients who have tried often feel frustrated that they couldn’t move the ball. Invariably they are smart, knowledgeable and passionate about their organization. So why do their efforts fall short?

We think there are three reasons:

1. Proximity

Insider status seems like the ideal place from which to observe a brand – and that’s true. Insiders are crucial keepers of their organization’s values and meaning. It’s important that their knowledge and passion inform their brand strategy. But the fact is that inside is too close in this case. A certain distance is needed to see the big picture.

If I’m standing against a wall, I see bricks. If I back up, I can see the entire building and if I take a helicopter, I can see its context – the creek that’s about to overflow, the neighbor whose buildings are getting closer and closer to its property line, the customers who love it and the ones who are looking for the building, but can’t find it.

Branding requires an aerial view to understand not only what the brand is about, but its competitive landscape and its audience. To understand a brand and a business, context is mandatory, and that generally means an unbiased third party – with a helicopter.

2. Influence

Related to proximity are two powerful influences: corporate culture and company insiders.

In any organization, certain truths are simply in the air, binding the organization together in a common viewpoint. But those unspoken truths are hard to see from the inside and even harder to evaluate objectively. And they’re almost impossible to buck, even if they are getting in an organization’s way.

An even greater influence are the viewpoints and beliefs of the CEO, founder and other leaders. By definition these people have strong ideas about what their company is about – and they are critical for informing a brand strategy. But only an outsider is well-positioned to evaluate these ideas objectively and perhaps rethink them, or even recommend setting them aside.

3. Insight

The marketers who undertake branding projects for their organizations are highly skilled in communications and management. But probably they don’t spend every waking moment honing their insight muscle.

Every great brand idea has insight at its core, but very few people know how to unearth or articulate insights. That’s where our client mentioned above got stuck – they had assembled the pieces, but couldn’t put them together into an idea that was simple and true and inspiring.

Invariably, the branding attempts we see from our clients are completely logical and accurate, but they fail to go beyond the obvious. The effort gets stuck at 1 + 1 = 2, whereas a great, insightful brand strategy will get you to 3.

Admittedly, a branding agency’s recommendation that you hire a branding agency is more than a little suspect.

But here’s a secret: Even Emotive Brand had a tough time articulating our own brand when we re-evaluated it a few years ago for a website refresh. In the end, we pulled it off – we are a branding firm, after all! – but we certainly feel for anyone who has gone through the exercise and had it fall short of their hopes.

Emotive Brand is a branding agency

Feel the “Good Burn” of a Strategy that Surprises

Posted on by Carol Emert

Get out of Your Comfort Zone

How do you feel about the brand strategies your agency is producing?

Good?

Comfortable?

If that’s the case, those strategies may not be doing as much for you as they can. Staying in your comfort zone strategically is about as impactful as staying in your comfort zone at the gym. If excellence is your aim, you’ll only get there by feeling the burn.

Of course, a bad strategy will make you uncomfortable too. So how do you know when a strategy is pushing your brand uncomfortably toward excellence?

Here Are Three Components of a Feel-The-Burn Strategy:

1. Information that Surprises

Every company has its own well-socialized story about who it is and what it’s about. Your branding agency needs to respect your story, but also needs to look outside — to broader trends in culture, technology and business; to your competitors; to your customers. It may go looking places you never expected.

At Emotive Brand, we recently discovered that a client’s key rival had withdrawn from an important segment of its market – essentially removing the client’s last direct competitor. As a result, we were able to push the bounds of its positioning and define our client as truly unique – something the client had neither known nor expected.

That’s what you call a good burn – and it comes from the agency being in the marketplace, pushing beyond the obvious and digging for the nuggets that truly differentiate.

2. Insights That Uncover New Opportunities

Information is great, but insights can be even more effective at differentiating your brand.

It’s your agency’s job to understand not just your customers’ obvious needs, but also the unmet needs they haven’t yet articulated.

A well-honed insight-finding instinct can both identify emerging opportunities and position you in a unique way to take advantage of them.

Such insights will inevitably be a surprise, and that may send you out of your comfort zone. Emerging opportunities naturally feel riskier than the tried-and-true. But they also provide an opportunity for greater reward. And that makes them a good burn.

3. Storytelling That Propels You Into Orbit

The factual story that your agency unearths is one thing; how it’s told is another chance for you to either push the bounds or settle for the merely comfortable.

Brand storytelling goes beyond the facts. It should convey the very energy and vitality of your organization. You should be able to feel the truth of it in your heart and your gut. It should make everyone around you feel proud and inspired. Your most valued employees should read it and start auto-deleting headhunter In-mails without a second thought.

And, yes, sometimes it’s uncomfortable to feel your feet lift off the ground and move toward a higher plane. A more predictable word choice, a more pedestrian idea might be easier. But just like at the gym, there will be a rich payoff for feeling the good burn of a truly elevating brand story.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm.