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Author: Chris Ames

Your Verbal Identity Has Never Been More Important

Posted on by Chris Ames

If I’m doing my job right, this first sentence should jump right out and ring the little bell in your heart. Margaret Atwood once said, “A word after a word after a word is power,” and how brands utilize that power is often the difference between cutting through the clutter or simply adding to it. So, how can you wield communication tools to supercharge your business, crystallize your strategy, and foster conversations that create deeper, more meaningful connections? The answer lies in your verbal identity.

Words in a Sea of Pictures

Here’s something people love to say: show don’t tell. We’re visual creatures. We crave stimulation. I’m bored already, aren’t you? Verbal identity has traditionally taken a backseat to visual identity due to the mono-directional nature of conventional advertising. That is: brands talk to people, mainly through pictures. But with the rise of social media, smart speakers, chatbots, and other environments where there are no images whatsoever, that visual-led monolog has shifted entirely. People talk to brands — and they expect brands to talk back in impactful, human ways. As copywriter Kady Potter says, “This ability to engage in an ongoing dialogue with customers provides an opportunity for companies to more firmly cement their products and services into the consumer consciousness, but doing so successfully requires a consistent, well-defined approach to the use of language.”

What Is a Verbal Identity?

As simply as possible: it’s thinking about what you say, how you say it, and where you’re saying it as a unified system. Or another way: the articulation of your brand through the use of distinct, intentional language. At first blush, this sounds pretty obvious. A brand should speak with “one voice.” But when you start to think about the number of use cases (web copy, ad copy, whitepapers, social posts, even internal communication tools like Slack or Zoom), and how context shifts the tone and reception of each touchpoint, things get messy real fast. Just like humans, that “one voice” must adjust with modulations and variances to read the room while still being authentically ourselves. As with visual systems, verbal identities are pre-structured through phrases, ideas, and tones.

Why Do You Need a Verbal Identity?

This is sort of like asking, “Why shouldn’t you change your company logo every single day?” Through all the static of our modern era, brands need consistency, clarity, and strength of message to separate the signal from the noise. As our pals over at Siegel + Gale say, a strong verbal identity “cuts down on confusion, increases familiarity, drives loyalty and preference among consumers, shareholders, among people who might work for that company, across a whole host of audiences.” Moreover, as Branding For The People say, it:

  • Infuses your brand’s personality in messaging, including voice, attitude, sense of humor, and more into your actual content and copy.
  • Aims to distinguish your brand from competitors.
  • Creates a consistent personality and voice of the brand across all communication channels.

What Are the Components of a Verbal Identity?

Okay, so how do we begin to up-level “copy” into a system of language that drives unmistakable value for your business and brand? Let’s dive into the component parts.

Naming: A brand name is the shortest unit of storytelling you have. A brilliant name provides a glimpse into what a brand stands for and gives audiences a preview of the experience to come. It must be original, memorable, relevant — and here’s the real kicker — available. As our partner and naming expert, Anthony Shore says, “That’s what words do. They create a frame of reference, setting the stage for how your company is differentiated and how it should be perceived.”

Tagline: While not as fashionable as they once were, taglines are still an extremely economical use of language. As the good people at Prophet say, taglines can be deftly utilized to “showcase your reason for being, reposition your company, create a whole new category, or stand out and inspire loyalty.”

Architecture & Nomenclature: Thankfully, not everyone is naming or re-naming their company every day. But almost all organizations, especially those in growth mode, run into the Sisyphean challenge of managing product, service, or feature naming. This is only exacerbated by today’s climate of mergers, acquisitions, and rapid innovation, where portfolios across categories have become complex and inconsistent, ultimately creating a confusing customer experience. Architecture & nomenclature creates order and hierarchy around offerings so people know what they’re getting and how it works together as a whole.

Brand Voice: This is your brand’s personality, come to life. How would you describe the way your brand communicates directly in its content, copy, and overall language? Are you genuinely off-kilter and irreverent, like Skittles? Are you vaguely visionary but also heavily workshopped to the point of never being able to offend anybody, like every tech company ever? Think about the unique turn of phrases and attitudes you showcase when communicating.

Brand Tone: Not to be confused with voice, your brand tone is constantly changing. Just look at Starbucks’ creative theory: you can see on a nifty slider how their copywriting shifts. Adjust your tone based on the audience you’re targeting (devs are different than sales), the emotion you’re hoping to evoke (pain points are different than moments of delight), and the medium you’re delivering the message through (whitepapers are different than TikTok).

Brand Narrative: This is the story of who you are, what you do, who you do it for, what you stand for, and why it matters. It showcases not only the philosophy of your business but also the voice and personality of your brand. It should read like a manifesto and hit like a gut punch.

Brand Grammar: There’s a reason some companies call their workers partners instead of employees. There’s a reason some companies call it emotional well-being instead of an employee assistance program. The words we choose, and why we choose them, are charged with meaning. Especially in sensitive political climates, revisiting your language is crucial. As Focus Labs reminds us, “Your customers are in a new story. If you want them to also be a part of yours, you have to tell a new one.” This cascades from vital topics like gender-neutral language all the way down to your nitty-gritty philosophy on acronyms, capitalizations, and emojis.

Content Strategy: Here’s your plan of attack. Where are we going to be speaking, who are we speaking to, and how often are we going to be bothering them? (Pro tip: less is more.)

Messaging Matrix: Remember, messaging themes aren’t copy — they guide copy. As a high-level communication tool, it’s a way of ensuring flexible, cohesive expressions rather than static, repetitive ones. Delivered as a table, this matrix spans the context/challenge, idea/claim, value/benefit, and proof points for each message — all of which can be adapted for different internal and external audiences. If you hand this to a copywriter on their first day, they should be able to start producing smart stuff for you. You know, after a coffee, at least.


Copywriting & Campaign Development: And finally, mercifully, copywriting. This is where most people’s minds jump straight to: big sexy words on a homepage, baby. But if your language isn’t distilled by the strategic framework of your verbal identity, the words will be hollow. Please, as someone who has written 10,000 puns on data, I’m begging you: never, ever confuse surface-level wit for bone-deep value. Real copy solves problems, makes connections, and is derived from a system that means it’s much more than right — it’s right for you and you alone.

Anything But Ordinary

What happens when this all comes together? You have a name, a descriptor, a structure, a voice and how to use it, a story and what it stands for, a language and where to employ it, and modular, easy-to-understand guides for generating copy that is specific, accurate, trenchant, delightful, hard to ignore and impossible to mistake for anyone else.

When David Walsh, professional gambler and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art, finally hired a Director of Communications, he said, “This is probably the start of our drift to the middle. Make mistakes if you have to, fail if you can, but just stop us becoming ordinary.”

I’ve always loved that. And that’s basically the assignment here, folks. Words are the most powerful currency we have. Use them with conviction, with purpose, and with intention to create a verbal identity that is anything but ordinary.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency based in Oakland, California.

From Strategy to Storytelling: Realizing the Bay Area of 2070

Posted on by Chris Ames

In our line of work, we’re constantly thinking about the future. What’s the vision? What’s the ceiling? How does it scale? But seldom do we get the opportunity to engage with the future on a deeply human level. How will the Bay Area — this complex region we call home — actually look, feel, move, and grow over the next 50 years?

In the Spring of 2020, SPUR, a non-profit public policy organization based in San Francisco, had just completed their Regional Strategy research. The body of work was a 50-year horizon project that proposed ideas and actions on everything from revamping our transportation system to protecting our shorelines in an effort to ensure the Bay Area is a region in which all people thrive.

While the ideas inside the strategy were bold, imaginative, and urgent — the form itself wasn’t telling that story. The question became: how do we transform this vital body of work from a data-driven piece of research people understand in their minds, to an emotional piece of storytelling people feel in their hearts? Together with Art+Action, an artistic coalition for civic participation known best for their incredible work on the 2020 Census, we developed a creative approach for SPUR.

For us as an agency, the strategy behind this project was bigger than just hitting our marks. We sought to realize something near and dear to our hearts: a place that holds many of our families, friends, many of our clients, and all of our hopes and dreams for the future. The big idea behind the work was that the future is not an abstract idea, it is a place we must plan for and build, together, from the ground up. The word “growth,” so often regulated to the world of tech and bottom-lines, could be a force for good, for all of humanity. We could reclaim that innovative spirit and infuse it with something more intentional, diverse, and representative. Because it is often the small, incremental shifts that launch us furthest into the future.

The result was transforming their regional strategy into a hand-drawn cityscape that users navigate from the bottom of the page upwards. This reinforced our core ideas of grassroots action, the seismic power of incremental shifts, and the necessity of altering our perspective to clearly see what’s possible.

“It was fun to help craft this world literally from the ground up, from rough thumbnail sketches and taping sheets of pencil drawings together on my studio floor to ultimately drawing vector-based digital landscapes,” says Robert Saywitz, Design Director at Emotive Brand and lead illustrator on the project. “While it may have been my hand that held the pen to help bring this world to the page, this was truly a massive collaborative effort in so many ways — more like working with a multi-faceted crew to write, create, and produce a film than a traditional branding design project.”

Leveraging Art+Action’s relationships with artists, animators, and activists who have ties to the myriad communities of the region, we embedded spot illustrations throughout the cityscape to help alchemize the strategy further, including work from: Michah Bazant, Antonio Benjamin from Creativity Explored, Nina Janina Charuza, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Nimah Gobir, Ryan Floyd Johnson, Krystal Lauk, Innosanto Nagara, and Leah Nichols.

“Art can move people emotionally — and to action,” says Amy Kisch, Art+Action Co-Founder + Artistic Director, “so we felt it vital that Bay Area creatives express the human side of SPUR’s vision of the region’s future in 2070. Their creative response illustrates an inclusive, prosperous, and healthy region where everyone belongs.”

“There are deeply embedded mindsets, decades-long policies, and almost mythic lifestyle expectations in the Bay Area, which must be reexamined if we want to initiate audacious changes — and we must,” says Amy Schoening, Art+Action Co-Founder + Artistic Director. “This series invites audiences to learn more about SPUR’s vital research through the lens of interconnectedness and equity because ultimately, our individual actions have significant collective consequences.”

Part of what made this project unique was thinking outside of the traditional client-agency relationship. With an aggressive deadline and dozens of stakeholders, we adopted a more agile approach. Instead of forcing the client or our creative partners into our studio methodology, we met them where they were, established a shared vision of the future, leaned into rapid prototyping, and privileged momentum over hierarchy.

“SPUR’s work is both complex and specific,” says Karen Steen, Communications Director at SPUR. “Representing our ideas required many rounds of iteration and a flexible approach to communication and feedback — and it worked. It’s rare to have an emotional response to public policy. But what we’re hearing is that the project conjures a lot of feeling for people.”

As an Oakland-based agency, this project represents the very best of our intentions: represent our region with pride, create memorable brand experiences that last, collaborate without ego, celebrate diverse creators, and make it fast, with feeling, for the future.

Click here to experience the Bay Area of 2070, read more about SPUR, Art+Action, or reach out to build something amazing together.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Branding Project: Do You Actually Want Something Bold?



Posted on by Chris Ames

Make it Bold

There is a four-letter word that gets said during every branding project. No, not that one. The word is “bold” and no one knows what it actually means.

Perhaps it’s the word’s own sense of daring and fearlessness that has allowed it to march undaunted into every creative brief and client meeting, even when it is not requested. Enterprise software companies want to be bold. Insurance adjuster services want to be bold. Startups and law firms and logistic companies want to be bold. But do they really?

What it Is and What it Isn’t

Here’s what bold is: it’s uncomfortable. It’s the tallest leaf of grass daring someone to cut it. It will garner you some attention, sure, but it will also get you in trouble. It’s a willing and gleeful rejection of sameness at all costs.

Here is what bold is not: it’s not easy to get approved. It’s not a minor tweak that fears to disrupt existing perceptions. It’s not a new color and stock photo with the same logo.

When a client says, “We want something bold,” nine times out of ten it actually means, “I’m absolutely terrified of change.” Here’s the thing. As much fun as it is to put the blame on the client – and it is very fun – they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. Be safe, be careful, don’t damage the brand.

The magic trick of a great agency is not coming up with a bold idea – it’s finessing the right visual applications and strategic frameworks for that bold idea to survive the cutting room floor. Some of that work simply comes down to educating your client on the branding process in general – what are these assets, what do they mean, how do we activate them?

Keeping Bold Ideas Alive

But the real heavy lifting for getting bold work through the guillotine unscathed starts in the design pitch deck. How do you present ideas? How much narrative, context, and scene-setting do you provide? Do you present the work on a sliding scale of safe to bold? Is it possible to rig the system by reordering the work to trick the client into the “right” choice? (Almost never.)

As far as I can tell, the only surefire way to keep a bold idea alive is to never put the onus of imagination on someone else. If you leave something up to someone else’s imagination, you’re letting them draw the constraints of what’s possible. The client’s version of what’s possible will always be smaller – that’s why they hired you in the first place.

Our design presentation decks are incredibly extensive. Every concept is supported by a narrative, an animated schematic that shows the influences that led to the design, and an ever-growing myriad of creative apps that span print, digital, product, social media, motion, and of course, swag. Even if the assignment is for a short-term execution, our concepts still show how the brand could potentially evolve the design over the next few years.

It’s a herculean amount of work and the inherent risk is that it goes to waste. But in taking the imaginative leap for the client, you inevitably end up further than if you let them define the starting line. If you’re a brand, the goal should be to hire an agency that will elevate your thinking and respectfully challenge what you think is absolute. That kind of agile relationship can lead into some, dare I say, bold territory.

Stay Nervous

Agencies can only do so much. If you really want to disrupt something (and seemingly everyone in Silicon Valley does), then your copy and design should make you nervous. If you’re working with a great agency, that nervousness will be tempered by a process of education and foresight.

Bold doesn’t have to mean reckless. It doesn’t have to mean shock value or clickbait or artificial flavoring. Bold is simply embracing the fact that there’s immense value in meaningful differentiation. Chances are you’re already comfortable using the word. Now it’s time to truly embrace the spirit.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Unwrap a Moment of Zen: Happy Holidays from Emotive Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Whew, what a year. We’ve laughed. We’ve cried. We’ve stared at our own faces during Zoom calls while pretending to follow along. This holiday season, we wanted to give you something that’s been in short supply: a little bit of peace. From all of us here at Emotive Brand, we’re officially giving you permission to turn off your video, mute your anxiety, have a laugh, and (try to) enjoy the holidays.

If you’re ready for a different kind of cloud service, click here to clear your mind.

#MerryMeditation 

Navigating Between Good and Bad Failure

Posted on by Chris Ames

Silicon Valley loves the idea of failure. In the world of tech startups, messing up is practically a religion. People wield that Samuel Beckett quote – try again, fail again, fail better – like it’s a Louisville Slugger.

As Adrian Daub writes, “People take jobs and lose them, and go on to a new job. People create products that no one likes, and go on to create another product. People back companies that get investigated by the SEC, and go on to back other companies. In Silicon Valley, it seems, there is no such thing as a negative experience.”

But the thing is, not all types of failures are treated equal. A wholesale embrace of failure misses the point. From our point of view, there’s a big difference between good failure and bad failure.

Good Failure: Ideas and Experiments

As a brand strategy and design agency, we work in the business of ideas – and ideas fail all the time. That’s kind of the point. For us, failure is a necessary means of growth. We experiment with ideas, not always as perfect options, but to gauge, measure, provoke, challenge, and enlighten. Often, our favorite ideas don’t ring true right away for the client. But the bumpy road of hiccups, near-misses, and tangents only makes the end product that much stronger.

These types of errors – pushing a visual identity too far, leading with language that’s too bold – never feel like true failures, because they are all in greater service of the work. Each failure helps define the parameters a little more. It’s our job to push the imagination and expectations of a client. As it goes, you can always reign something in. The worst thing we could hear is, “This feels a little too safe.”

In brainstorms, in pitch meetings, and in workshops you need bad ideas to help shape what’s truly good. It’s almost like negative architecture or sculpture. Sometimes you build by taking away everything that doesn’t fit.

As Steve Portigal says in his great talk, “In design and in brainstorming, deliberately seeking out bad ideas is a powerful way to unlock creativity. Generating bad ideas can reveal our assumptions about the difference between bad and good, and often seemingly bad ideas turn out to be good ones.”

Establishing a culture where you feel free to fail is key. When you’re in generation mode, you need a loose enough space for jokes, puns, bad taglines, jingles, and wacky suggestions – because often the right idea is hiding just behind your strangest impulse. It’s the classic “no idea is a bad idea” maxim. Under the right conditions, it’s absolutely true.

Bad Failure: People and Processes

Where things fall apart is when people and processes fail: toxic cultures, breakdowns in communication, not looping in the right stakeholders, not operating with enough information about your target audience, your timeline, your budget. There is nothing charming or creative about a broken project schedule, unless your goal is to create stress. On paper, these are the easiest failures to avoid – and yet they are the most devastating.

When an idea fails, you head back to the drawing board. But as Dean Brenner points out, company-wide communication failures disrupt businesses on a fundamental level. It leads to a “lack of focus, failure of purpose, lack of innovation, drop in morale, and eventually, a loss of credibility.”

Contained Chaos

The best situation is when there is a clearly articulated and defined space for failure. Think of it as contained chaos, lightening in bottle. Here is the time for us to experiment and fail – and here is the system of consolidated feedback that will keep on us on track and aligned. How different would your ideation process be if instead of being asked to present one perfect PowerPoint presentation, your assignment was to come up with 10 experiments, knowing that you had adequate time to refine?

As author Michael Chabon says, “Because I believe in failure; only failure rings true. Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the finds; to learn from our mistakes.”

Here’s to good failure, bad ideas, and all the mistakes in-between.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Kick the Door Down with Your Brand Manifesto

Posted on by Chris Ames

Building a successful brand can feel like building a ship in a bottle. There are so many delicate and interlocking pieces to monitor and keep safe within a defined system. It’s a process that rewards research, meticulousness, measuring twice, and cutting once.

Yet in nearly every project I’ve been part of, there comes a time when the kid’s gloves come off. People get restless, get sick of being extra careful, and want to kick the door down with their idea. Maybe everything feels technically right, but nothing is resonating in an impactful way. The fact is, when it’s time to go to market, brands can’t afford to be a ship in a bottle. Eventually, they have to break out and stand for something – even if that means being vulnerable and inviting waves of criticism. Invariably, someone says, “We need a manifesto.”

What is a Brand Manifesto?

If a vision and mission steer your organization in the right direction, a brand manifesto is the incandescent energy source propelling you forward. It’s inspired, creative, motivating, an appeal to pathos. It infuses the emotional “why?” into a brand. Why do you matter? Why should we care?

As Chris Langathianos writes, “The manifesto is a versatile tool designed to clearly articulate what the brand stands for – what is it that gets its employees out of bed every morning and motivates them every day to deliver on the brand’s vision. It is explicitly not about a brand’s product or service, but rather speaks to the heart of why they sell it in the first place.”

It’s Apple saying, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” It’s Nike saying, “If greatness doesn’t come knocking at your door, maybe you should go knock on its door.” The brand manifesto is a cultural cornerstone for the brand that resonates in a personal way. It should lay the groundwork for why employees should work hard to deliver upon the brand’s value proposition and create an exceptional customer experience.

In Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk “How great leaders inspire action,” he suggests that if your brand truly wants to inspire an audience to follow you, your core message should focus on your organization’s purpose. “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it,” he says. “If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.”

Internal vs. External Manifestos

Traditionally, a brand manifesto starts as an internally-facing document. But more and more, companies are using manifestos as external glimpses into the cultural mindset of the organization. Not only does this help potential customers connect with their values and beliefs, but it also attracts top talent to join a purposeful, inspired company. Think of it as manifesto marketing.

And it makes sense! If you’re able to distill everything your brand stands for into one concise, emotionally resonate paragraph, why wouldn’t you leverage that? Through advertising, communications, and packaging, brands are tapping into the values of their target personas and letting them know they stand for something real.

How to Write a Manifesto

How should a manifesto look and feel? I love this abstract checklist from Mark Di Somma, where he says it should have:

  • The anger of a placard
  • The commitment of a doctrine
  • The beauty of a story
  • The hope and excitement of a vivid dream
  • The sense of a philosophy
  • The call to action of a direct response ad

Obviously, every company is different with its own unique way of expressing itself. But in general, brand manifestos speak in a collective voice, an active tone, and are prompted by a burning desire to change the status quo. If you need help getting started, an easy fill-in-the-blank exercise is, “We are A, we believe in B, and that’s why we C.”

This is something that should be able to be read aloud with verve. The implicit danger here, of course, is sounding too hyperbolic, too chest-beating, too self-important. Why is a software company talking like they are about to storm the beaches of Normandy?

The key is to ground your manifesto in the reality of what you do – then examine the highest-level emotional impact of why that matters. What does the world look like if you realize your company’s vision and mission? It’s still ownable, it’s still you – it’s just the best, most impactful version of you possible.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Bridging the False Divide Between B2B and B2C

Posted on by Chris Ames

Business is made of people trying to sell each other things. That’s it. And yet, there is still this massive gulf between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). You feel it immediately in the design and language used. You don’t need a branding vocabulary to know when you’re seeing a B2B ad, because it will probably feature code, a weird bar chart, and copy like, “Adding code coverage with Slather to Zendesk’s iOS SDK build.”

Here’s what I want to know: high-level B2B decision-makers are still people – people with hearts, minds, and feelings who make decisions based on emotion outside the office. In an era where the lines between online and offline, work and non-work have never been blurrier, does it really make sense to treat B2B and B2C so differently? Or are we entering a new era of business relationships where hard data and soft emotion can coexist happily?

Here’s how I most often see things delineated.

B2B: All Work, No Play?

In B2B, we’re told to focus on the logic of the product and its features. Supposedly, there is little-to-no emotion involved in the purchasing decision. It’s all about understanding your buyers and how they operate within the confines of their organization. In this space, we care more about people using the product than the product itself. As a result, design tends to be “good enough.” The most effective messages explain how the product or service saves time, money, and resources.

B2B typically sells intangible technology, software, and services, which makes forming an emotional connection that much more difficult. Then there’s the question of time. An average B2B transaction can take anywhere from 2-24 months depending on the product or service being sold and the number of decisions to be made within the buying process. The nature of content marketing within a B2B strategy is to not only focus on outreach and backlinks, but to focus on getting exposure on relevant sites that will educate people on the product or service offering. As such, B2B campaigns typically have industry-specific keywords that require fluency in insider baseball.

An example in market right now? Webex.


We get a little visual intrigue with “Webex” and “exceptional” bleeding together, a little humor in the numbers-heavy approach, but mostly a design that I would describe as “meat and potatoes.” A cynic would say this took 2 minutes to make. Those on the inside know this is probably the end result of 3 months of grueling compromise and workshopping. Either way, this is the world of B2B. You could imagine this joylessly slapped on the side of a bus.

B2C: All Heart, No Brain?

In B2C, we’re told to focus on the emotional benefits of the product. Consumers are different in that they demand a variety of distribution channels for convenience – web, social, print, in-store, subscription, droned directly to me, etc. Consumers are less likely to be interested in a lengthy marketing message and want to get right to the heart. The most effective messages focus on the positive end-state and the benefits that your product or service will bring them.

Most of the time, B2C has the advantage of selling tangible products you can actually hold in your hands. The campaigns focus more on sales and revenue figures per month, with sales occurring in shorter sessions, typically single or multi-session visits within days and weeks. An average B2C transaction can occur anywhere from mere seconds – from Instagram to in-the-cart – or a few weeks, with the number of decision-makers typically being less then 2 individuals and the buying process being much more straightforward. As such, B2C campaigns focus on keywords that can be considered, how you say, actual words people use.

An example in market right now? Away.

Is this an ad, or is this one of your beautiful, successful friends at the Cannes Film Festival? That’s kind of the point. Seamlessly blended into your Instagram feed, the top 90% of this image is focused on the emotional benefit of their product. It’s only as your thumb scrolls to the bottom do we realize we are being sold a suitcase. Critics would say there isn’t enough information, but never underestimate the power of FOMO.

Where Are the Intersections Between B2B and B2C?

So, those are our rules. But like all rules, they are meant to be broken.

B2C might look like they are all gloss and polish, but they use an insane amount of big data to craft their “effortless” aesthetic. Think it’s a coincidence that your Instagram feed, your favorite podcasts, and your Facebook ads are all pointing you in the same direction? Taking a page straight out of the B2B world, what B2C brands really care about is understanding their buyers and how they operate in their environment.

Even something seemingly pure, like a Netflix show, is fueled by big data. Through the rich amount of user data stored and analyzed by the company, Netflix found that movies from David Fincher are not only popular but also being watched from beginning to end. In addition, it observed that films featuring Kevin Spacey (pre-scandal, of course) were performing well. Finally, the British version of House of Cards is popular among fans. Combining these three insights unearthed by big data – Fincher, Spacey, and the British version of House of Cards – Netflix created the American version, pushed it to relevant target audiences, and snagged a 9/10 rating on IMDb.

For B2C, that feels a lot like ABM and big data-fueled demand gen. Even if you’re selling a consumer product, you have to bob and weave like a technology growth company to survive in the digital economy.

By the same token, the most successful B2B brands right now have never felt more boundary-pushing. Mailchimp, Squarespace, Zoom, Asana, and Dropbox look beautiful, sound human, and are leading with an emotional impact that prioritizes benefits over product-level detail. Even tech giants like Salesforce have adorable (if not slightly infantile) animal mascots that wouldn’t look out of place in the next Pixar film.

The Takeaway: The Best of B2B and B2C

Keeping the aesthetics of their traditionally superior design, B2C companies need to operate with the data-and-analytics backbone of their B2B counterparts. Companies that use it to their advantage, from recruiting to customer retention to selling, will be the ones that thrive. Regardless of industry or sector, B2C brands can reinvent themselves by turning massive amounts of data into insights and executing swiftly against them.

Leaning into the emotional draw of B2C to build meaningful differentiation, B2B brands have much more creative rope than they think. There is space for outside-the-box thinking, clever subject lines, and gorgeous design – as long as you continue to solve problems for your buyers. As Hubspot says, “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of B2B brands maintaining a human element.”

Forget the false divide. Let’s combine the brains of B2B with the heart of B2C to create a new standard of commerce for all.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

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The Latest, Greatest Thing in Digital Is Print

Posted on by Chris Ames

Print Is Dead, Long Live Print

Every year, we hear print is dead. And every year, it proves us dead wrong. The fact is, digital transformation has its upper limits. There are some analog experiences – like the genuine discovery and delight of wandering through a great bookstore – that technology is currently incapable of replicating. Between 2009 and 2015, what’s known as the Amazon-fueled “retail apocalypse,” independent bookstores grew by 35 percent.

Perhaps it’s the tenacity and resilience of print that has led many companies to start publishing their own magazines. Uber, Airbnb, Casper, Away, Dollar Shave Club, Lenovo, Redbull, and Amtrak all have their own physical publications. So, what’s driving this trend? And does it make sense for your brand to devote the time and energy it takes to create a magazine?

The Digital Dark Age

As permanent and omnipresent all of our technology feels, it’s worth remembering it can all vanish overnight. Last week, to little fanfare, Myspace announced that it lost 12 years of music – an estimated 53 million files – amid a data migration problem. As writer Damon Krukowski notes, some historians fear that we are in the midst of a digital dark age, “a period of history that will be largely blank due to lost information – like a giant broken link when the future tries to look back at our time.” Physical media, of course, has the benefit of being physical.

Beyond standing the test of time, magazines have been working out the same problems we’re dealing with now: establishing a brand identity, producing engaging copy, designing striking visuals, educating your audience, bringing in advertising dollars, and attracting new subscribers to mailing lists. These are transferable skills that could shape how you approach your blog, how you build your email list, and how you partner with advertisers. If you can get it right on the page, chances are you can get it right on the web.

Expanding the Potential and Personality of Your Brand

In many branding meetings, I’ve heard clients say something to the effect of, “We wish we could do this, but it falls slightly outside the parameters of our brand.” The real power of a magazine is the creative permission it has to push those boundaries. Mel, the magazine from Dollar Shave Club, isn’t about razor production. It talks about sex, relationships, health, money, work, and topics of masculinity that speaks to their target audience. In expanding the way their customers think about themselves, they are also transforming how people think about Dollar Shave Club and forming a stronger emotional connection that leads to greater brand loyalty and awareness.

For a brand, a magazine is like a free pass to explore the most aspirational outer limits of your category. Casper makes mattresses, but Woolly is about comfort and wellness. Redbull makes energy drinks, but The Red Bulletin tells stories of inspirational people and their achievements from around the world. The process of creating a magazine can meet some of the most underserved needs for a brand:

  • Having a safe space to experiment with your brand
  • The never-ending hunt for fresh content
  • The demand for crisp, authentic photography that isn’t stock
  • Having engaging customer stories to share on social channels
  • Creating emotional buy-in for employees to see the impact of their work
  • Building new channels for partners and advertisers
  • Expanding your audience

As Jen Rubio, President and Chief Brand Officer at Away says, the worst-case scenario for her magazine is that it becomes a “great travel blog.” The best case is that it becomes a “stand-alone media division that’s generating revenue, generating profit for the company.”

No Half-Measures

Critical to any print publication is the matter of distribution. Do you already have a model built into your offering? Airbnb, for instance, has a combination of physical locations with people that are seeking information about their surroundings. That’s a perfect fit. The key is locating a moment in your customer’s journey where they are hungry for more information – and finding out how to deliver it before they ask.

Remember, the only thing worse than not making a magazine is making a bad one. Don’t skimp out. This isn’t a way to repurpose old content or cloak ads as stories. This is a strategic asset for brands that are deeply curious about the world outside their product.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

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When Your Values Aren’t Really Values

Posted on by Chris Ames

Beware of Generic Values

In the inboxes and Slack channels at Emotive Brand, there is a video that often gets shared before we embark on a brand video. It’s called “This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve,” and it’s a hilarious satire of when you try to make your brand stand for everything, it ends up standing for nothing. “Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement,” the narrator says, in a salt-of-the-earth grumble, “are all words we chose from a list.”

Company values not only shape the external identity of your organization, they act as an internal compass for your current and prospective employees. When done properly, values can be the engine of a thriving work culture, attracting and retaining top talent. On the other hand, when a list of generic, vaguely positive words are selected from a hat, your culture greatly suffers.

If Everyone Is Innovating, No One Is

A research group at MIT conducted a survey of more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database. Eighty-five percent of the S&P 500 companies have a section—sometimes even two—dedicated to what they call “corporate culture.” Above all else, the most common value is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%).

“When we try to correlate the frequency and prominence of these values to measures of short and long-term performance,” the study says, “we fail to find any significant correlation. Thus, advertised values do not seem to be very important, possibly because it is easy to claim them, so everybody does.”

So, what does this all add up to? In short, there are two types of values for a company: universal and particular. Both are important in building a thriving company culture, but in terms of what you advertise and how you use these tools, the approaches differ widely.

The Universal and the Particular

Universal values are the table stakes to get a prospective employee in the door. Is there really anyone that doesn’t want to work at a place that values equality, respect, honesty, teamwork, or innovation? How you deliver and bring these values to life is incredibly important, but it’s something that can be elaborated on in an employee handbook, workshop, or leadership training.

At the end of the day, the only place that universal values really need to live is in the actions of your people. Your website is some of the most valuable real estate for your brand. Writing the word “INNOVATION” in all caps is not going to persuade a senior engineer to apply for a job. Do you know what will? Your technology portfolio.

In contrast, particular values are the principles that could only be held by your company. They should be written in a tone and manner that feels authentic to who you are. Here’s how Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO of Airbnb, explained it in a lecture at Stanford.

“Integrity, honesty — those aren’t core values. Those are values that everyone should have. But there has to be like three, five, six things that are unique to you. And you can probably think about this in your own life. What is different about you, that every single other person, if you could only tell them three or four things, that you would want them to know about you?”

So, let’s look at Airbnb and see if it passes the test. Here is the first value from their career page:

Be a Host. Care for others and make them feel like they belong. Encourage others to participate to their fullest. Listen, communicate openly, and set clear expectations.

First of all, notice the language. Being a host, of course, is integral to Airbnb’s platform. It embodies a sense of empathy while, most importantly, being particular to the company. It’s not that no other company in the world could value these things—caring, belonging, encouraging others—it’s that no other company in the world could have written it exactly this way. Think of how easy it would have been for them to just write the word integrity. Instead, they drilled down into the emotive core of their service and discovered something real.

Core Values Act as a Lighthouse

That’s the beautiful thing about well-written, emotive values. Once they are set, they act as a lighthouse for recruiting like-minded people. As Jim Collins writes, “you cannot ‘set’ organizational values, you can only discover them. Executives often ask me, ‘How do we get people to share our core values?’ You don’t. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren’t predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere.”

So, next time you sit down to write or refresh your company’s values, please resist the urge to paint with broad strokes. Ask yourself, what do we truly believe in? What do we do better than anyone else? What are the real, grounded ways that we are impacting the world? What changes are we looking to make and how do we want to get there? Paradoxically, the more specific you get, the wider net you’ll cast. Or as James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”

If you’re looking to make your brand values act as a guiding light for recruiting and retaining top talent, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Feeling the Holiday Spirit: Introducing Emotive Feels

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotion Is Everything

For brands to make an impact on the outside world, they must explore inner worlds. In our line of work, emotion is everything. The most successful brands are those that evoke feeling—that ignite new ways of thinking about the world and our unique place in it

At Emotive Brand, naturally, we’re obsessed with emotion. We believe every company can perform better if its brand connects with people on an emotional level. A brand that’s emotive triggers feelings, inspires action, earns loyalty, and lifts spirits. In the overcrowded business world, your brand must resonate rationally and emotionally. Never overlook the mind, but always aim for the heart.

Emotional Impact

As part of our methodology, we’ve identified 301 positive emotions that a brand could possibly elicit in their target audience. These range from expected—supported, enabled, secure—to unconventional—nostalgic, vibrant, zealous. We call this set of feelings an Emotional Impact, and it acts as a compass for guiding creative and strategic decisions.

Emotional Impact is a tool we use in workshops, it’s on our business cards, and all 301 emotions even hang as separate tiles on our office wall. This year for our holiday card, we were thinking of another, more expressive way to bring this methodology to life.

Introducing Emotive Feels

And so, we created Emotive Feels—an interactive dictionary all about emotion. For each entry, we paired graphic design and animation with quotes from our team and influential thinkers. More than just defining the feeling, we’re seeking to enact it through motion and emotion.

“Visualizing the set of 301 positive emotions has always been very important to us,” said Creative Director Thomas Hutchings. “We are always looking for new ways to do this and find new ways for people to engage with this emotion-first philosophy. This site adds to this quest. It’s fun, engaging, and meaningful. It’s always been important to us to make sure this comes through. A methodology should never be laborious and self-serving.”

To be a truly emotive brand requires more than creating one-off emotional ads. It’s about forging valuable emotional connections at every touchpoint: your logo, your website, even the tone of voice your employees use on customer calls. When brands behave this way, they connect more meaningfully with their audiences. This means people are more likely to remain loyal and engaged, and ultimately feel bonded to the promise of the brand in the long term.

“The Emotive Feels site is such a great opportunity for our studio to showcase a unique aspect that separates us from other agencies,” says Designer Keyoni Scott. “The creation of the site makes our methodology tangible so it can always live on the web and be a tool to help anyone learn about the ways we help brands thrive. We’re always striving to evoke feeling through design.”

“The big buzzword in design is ‘empathy,’” says Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard. Everyone wants to design with empathy for their end-user in mind, which is great, but the conversation usually stops there. In order to effectively design for your customers, it’s best to understand them on a visceral and emotional level. At this level, you are able to affect their perceptions using the principles of design to build a brand or product that amplifies certain emotional responses.”

On Emotive Feels, you’ll find inspirational words from poets, designers, editors, strategists, musicians, artists, and historians. You’ll see shapes shift, bend, twist, morph, spin, snake, and dance. And when you’re done, we hope you leave feeling differently than when you arrived.

“Emotional Impact has always been embedded in our design process, so this project was a fun opportunity to create something visually engaging around our methodology and have it live beyond our office walls,” said Design Director Robert Saywitz. “I think it’s also vital to constantly exercise that creative muscle by carving out the time to create internal projects such as these, where imagination really leads the charge and allows everyone to be involved for a true team effort.”

From our hearts to yours, we hope the holidays are merry and bright.

The blog will return after the holiday break in January 2020.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.