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

Hello!

Author: Chris Ames

What Is a Brand Idea?

Posted on by Chris Ames

How do people make business decisions? Whether you’re debating a specific word choice or overhauling an entire brand, there’s always a tension between the rational and emotional, the aesthetic and strategic. It’s easy to have a gut instinct over the things that inflame your curiosity, but what about the minuscule? As decision fatigue sets in, how do you ensure your choices are aligned, consistent, and ultimately laddering up to something greater than the sum of its parts?

This is where the concept of brand idea shines. A brand idea is an essence or embodiment of what you stand for. Think of it as a stake in the ground that is used to guide your look, feel, and voice. It gives an emotional dimension to your brand, demonstrates what it’s like to do business with you, and serves as a shorthand for how your brand shows up in the world.

A brand idea is not a tagline. It’s not necessarily something that people would ever see. It’s more of a guiding principle that people feel from your brand experience as a whole.

Examples of Brand Ideas

Let’s look at Starbucks. For years, their brand idea was to be the “third place” in your life. Popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, the third place is a social setting that’s separate from home and work. According to Oldenburg, third places are “anchors” of community life “where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces, and make new acquaintances.”

For Starbucks, “third place” works as a call to action for people to engage on a much deeper level than just getting properly caffeinated. Because as they say, life happens over coffee. And given that they have nearly 30,000 retail shops, the idea of serving as an anchor to community life is one they can legitimately occupy.

Decision-makers at Starbucks aren’t always going to agree on the latest holiday cup design, or exactly how much adult contemporary to include on their playlists, but if they are aligned at the highest brand level, every decision will be in service of a greater purpose. That top-level consistency is felt across the board, even if there are individual variations in look and feel.

When Brand Ideas Become Taglines

Obviously, Starbucks would never make “third place” an external message. People would be like, “Your coffee won third place in a coffee contest? I’ll pass, thanks.” But sometimes, brand ideas are so compelling and succinct that they become external taglines.

As brand consultant Will Burns says, “True brand ideas are insulted when you call them taglines. And for God’s sake, don’t call them ‘slogans’ or the brand may unfriend you on Facebook. The best taglines rationalize everything a company/organization has done and inspire everything it will do.”

Most of the time, taglines are simply rational facts communicated well to an audience. They want you to know a piece of information that is very specific. When we think about Nike’s “Just do it,” Apple’s “Think different,” or Kaiser Permanente’s “Thrive,” something much bigger is happening. No one is talking about product-level specifics, they are appealing to a higher state of emotion, purpose, and meaning. These are inspirational, aspirational brand ideas.

LEGO, a brand that has celebrated creativity since 1932, is sublime. Their idea, “Inspiring the builders of tomorrow,” is felt throughout every manifestation of their brand. The company’s retail outlets are designed spaces for family “building” events and kid-friendly exploration areas. LEGOLAND encourages kids to open their imaginations at construction sites that dot the theme parks. Even LEGO movies inspire and encourage the act of making.

GEICO’s “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” has seared itself onto the public’s subconscious, but it doesn’t really evoke an emotion or communicate anything about the types of people who use their product. We just imagine a vaguely Australian gecko and move on.

Beyond campaigns, beyond marketing jargon, a great brand idea establishes a common way of seeing. It’s a viewfinder for observing a brand’s unique place in the world, the industry, and most importantly, in people’s hearts.

So, what’s your brand idea?

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

If You Want People to Fill Out Surveys, Make Them Beautiful

Posted on by Chris Ames

Two true things about decision-making in business:

1) You should collect information from all the key stakeholders regarding their thoughts, feelings, hopes, and expectations.

2) People hate filling out surveys about their thoughts, feelings, hopes, and expectations.

In an ideal world, there would always be enough time to conduct qualitative data in-person through one-on-one interviews or focus groups. Everyone would feel heard and everyone would have a voice at the table, which would be perfectly reflected in the end product.

Unfortunately, we live in this world; the one where you’re already behind schedule, you’re speed-reading a few interviews from an outsourced transcription service, and none of the data is laddering up to something coherent. Especially for companies with thousands of employees, there needs to be a better way to design surveys that actually work to drive meaningful outcomes for your business.

Surveys Don’t Have to be Ugly

Last month, a small phenomenon took over our Slack channel: everyone started voluntarily posting their results from “Creative Types,” an interactive personality test designed by Adobe Create. The test’s goal is to “shine a light on the inner workings of different creative personality types in a way that might help us better understand ourselves, our creative process, and our potential.”

The setup is deceivingly simple. You’re asked a binary question such as, “When traveling, you always need a destination or direction.” Whichever option you choose, you’re rewarded with a corresponding animation that symbolically enacts your answer. If you respond that your creativity is more madness than method, you’ll see a bowling ball delightfully plow through a perfect field of dominos. The animations are gorgeous, the sound design is perfect, the questions are grounded enough to be applicable to work, and before you know it, you’ve finished the survey and are assigned one of eight personas: artist, thinker, adventurer, maker, producer, dreamer, innovator, or visionary. You get insight into yourself and, perhaps most importantly, Adobe gets insight into the types of people using their products.

This doesn’t feel like taking a survey, it feels like playing a game. And I think that’s the real key. Gathering data doesn’t have to be like taking the SATs – it can engage our sense of curiosity, our sense of humor, and our child-like sense of wanting to take things apart to see how they’re made.

Edward Tufte, famed statistician and author of books like “Envisioning Information” and “Beautiful Evidence” once said, “The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly – to develop strategies of seeing and showing.”

The answers we provide to the quiz are important, but the interstitial animations give us a new window for seeing that response. That moment of surprise fuels us to answer the next question. In the standard survey setup – answering a straight-forward question on a sliding scale of 1 to 5 – there is hardly any motivation to keep going. It feels more like homework, as opposed to truly reflecting on how and why we work the way we do.

Reality check: does every company have the time and resources necessary to turn their surveys into interactive multimedia experiences? Of course not. But there are a few lessons we can glean from Adobe Creative to make surveying your employees or customers much more fruitful.

Questions that balance the abstract with the actionable. Yes, you need to ask questions about roadmaps, product-market fit, and user experience. But sometimes, engaging someone’s curiosity with a slightly off-kilter question will get you a more honest answer. For instance, when updates are ready to install, do you hit restart now or remind me tomorrow?

A gorgeous, smooth interface that keeps people interested. Companies like Typeform and SurveyMonkey are building beautiful polls that combine the right mix of aesthetics and insights. If you don’t give people a little spark to keep them interested, they are not going to engage with your questions. As architect Buckminster Fuller said, “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

An end result that drives engagement. Whether it’s an illustrated avatar that people can’t help but share or an employee platform for driving behavior change like Culture Amp, the end of the quiz shouldn’t be the end of the journey for either party. The survey-taker should gain insight into themselves and the survey-giver should have easy tools for acting on those insights.

From Myers Briggs to Buzzfeed quizzes, there are thousands of ways of gathering information. Regardless of your method, make it memorable, make it beautiful, and make it easy to drive growth for your business.

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

Image credit

Blurring the Line Between Physical and Digital

Posted on by Chris Ames

What’s better: shopping online or in-person? Short answer: yes. We’re in a new type of era where the spheres between online and off are blurry, interconnected, and strengthen one another. We’re all trying to meet the consumer where they are. If they can interact in both spaces indiscriminately, shouldn’t your brand?

“Phygital” is the concept of using technology to bridge the digital world with the physical world with the purpose of providing a unique interactive experience for the user. While the buzzword is relatively new (and awful), many of the technologies required to fuse a digital and physical experience have been around since the 90s.

Augmented Reality, now talked about as a “new” immersive experience, dates back to the Virtual Fixtures system developed at the U.S. Air Force’s Armstrong Laboratory in 1992. As early as 2015, a Microsoft Digital Trends report found that nearly 50% of consumers were more likely to engage with digital experiences that offered seamless integration with their physical world – signaling a shift in how consumers expect the physical and digital worlds to blend. The real trick has been combining this preexisting technology with an experience that people actually want to have.

According to the IAB Spain 2018 e-commerce study, at least seven out of every ten internet users buy online. Despite this near-ubiquity, 22% of users still miss the physical interaction, so they will end up browsing online and then make their purchase in a brick-and-mortar retailer.

This is why, despite reports of Amazon killing off independent bookstores, they have grown for a second straight year. This is also why many people go into a bookstore to see, touch, and read part of a book – then buy it online.

Phygital marries both the online and offline environments by trying to take the best aspects from each space to create a much more complete and satisfying customer experience. The user browses and buys, but they also feel. And that’s the real kicker.

As beautifully outlined by Jose Maria Machuca for we are marketing, phygital takes the best components from the digital retail experience like immediacy, immersion, and interaction to satisfy a consumer that is demanding, hyper-connected, and is looking to meet their needs through multiple platforms.

  • Immediacy: works to ensure things happen at an exact moment in time
  • Immersion: the user is part of the experience.
  • Interaction: generation of communication which is needed to activate the more physical and emotional part of the purchasing process.

“Consumers today are looking for a holistic and seamless experience that is curated specifically for them and not mass produced,” says Harshavardhan Chauhan, Head of Marketing at DLF Shopping Malls. “Hence, there is a need to build a 360-degree approach where the online medium plays an important role in initiating a captivating conversation that is further enhanced through differentiated and personalized offers and finally leads to a seamless offline experience.”

Humble Hardware Store Goes High-Tech

So, what does this look like in the real world? One example is Lowe’s OSHbots, an autonomous retail service robot designed to amplify the shopping experience for customers. Customers can tell the bot what they’re looking for or just hold up an item for it to scan, and then the 5-foot-tall robot navigates you there. The bot also helps store employees with tasks like inventory scanning and the ability to speak in English, Spanish, and five different Asian languages. The robots don’t replace the workers, they merely free them up from menial tasks to assist with things technology can’t replicate like empathy, storytelling, and forming a personal connection.

A Grocery Store with No Check Out, No Lines

Amazon Go is another example of a brick-and-mortar moving with the agility of an online shop. In these supermarkets, a customer scans a code with their smartphone, picks up the products they desire, and then leaves the store without passing through the traditional checkout line. Instead, they’ll get an electronic receipt detailing the amount Amazon will charge to their account. So, instead of wasting your labor force on scanning barcodes, they can be walking around, making recommendations, or demoing new products.

If Amazon already has a service where you can drone groceries straight to your house, why invest in brick-and-mortar? Because the future isn’t a straight line, speed isn’t everything, and the goal of technology should be finding more ways to bring us together, not isolate us in frictionless cells.

The Future of Fashion

Rebecca Minkoff is using technology in some of its retail stores to transform their customers’ experience. Shoppers can choose the items they want to try on by using touchscreens placed throughout the store. When they’re ready, they’ll get a message on their phone with the fitting room number, where they’ll find all the items they requested. But what happens if they need a bigger size? Every fitting room has a screen where they can request another size without having to look for it on the floor on their own or have to ask a Sales Associate to bring it. Customers leave happy – and also leave behind a trail of super valuable data: everything they like and what they are pairing it with.

Smart Businesses Can’t Run on Dumb Terminals

Even if you can’t afford to build a robot for your business, you can at least start to swap out the legacy technology keeping you in the dark ages. Smart terminal systems like Poynt, Clover, and Square are changing the game by turning the traditional point-of-sales into a digital platform for connecting with their customers, downloading apps, and growing their digital business. What was once a simple cash machine can drive customer loyalty or even keep your taxes in order.

What opportunities in your customer journey could be enhanced by the immediacy of a digital experience? What aspects of your online strategy could be bolstered by the interaction and emotional connection of a physical experience? How can we leverage technology to free people up to do what they do best: be people?

Phygital won’t replace brick-and-mortar. It’s about creating more efficient and ultimately more human interactions.

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

A Mid-Year Check-Up Across Business, Brand, and Culture

Posted on by Chris Ames

The half-way point of the year is always ripe for reflection. We all survived Q1, the budget isn’t completely spent yet, and with any luck, we’ll live to see Q3. It’s a perfect time to kick the tires of your business, brand, and culture. What’s working? What’s failing? How can you fail better? How can you push things forward and end the year on a meteoric rise instead of a trickle?

Let’s run a brief diagnostic check.

1. How is your brand positioning? Are you top of mind? Is it clear, competitive, differentiated? Maybe your sales have declined, your targeted audience has shifted, or your product roadmap has evolved. Either way, positioning your business correctly helps separate your brand from its competitors. It’s one of the best return on investments for driving growth, fostering alignment, and situating your business and brand to thrive in even the most crowded landscapes.

2. Do your people have the tools they need? At its best, brand language is a tool people know how to wield with gusto. Your elevator pitch, your boilerplate, your corporate narrative – these are ways of clearly defining the purpose of your company and your unique role in bringing it to life. Anyone who’s been to a cocktail party knows the feeling of getting trapped in a sprawling 20-minute conversation from simply asking, “So, what do you do?” Get your story straight, concise, and attention-grabbing.

3. How are you expressing those insights externally? If you’ve got your story down, it would be a crime to keep it locked up. Blogs, podcasts, and thought leadership not only crystalize your vision, but they also build a community around your content. Readers can be coworkers, prospective clients, future employees, event organizers, or even the lowest of the low, other blog writers! It sounds simple, but brands with something to say should say something.

4. What’s the look and feel of those big ideas? A weird thing about business is that often the most important tools – pitch decks, sales playbooks, and conference presentations – are the ugliest. Forget stock photography. Instead, spend some design love on the tools that you will be using over and over to grow your business and tell your story.

5. How do all of these design elements ladder up? If your sales team is routinely Frankenstein-ing their own decks, if you’ve acquired multiple products that shift how people perceive you, or if you’re simply ready to ditch that chat bubble logo that stands for “community and conversation,” it might be time for a rebrand. Your visual identity is how the world understands you. Why leave any room for misunderstanding?

6. Do you have the right culture and values to bring these elements to life? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: culture is everything. It’s the foundation, the spark, the catalyst, the magic that turns a job into a calling.

7. Are you attracting and retaining the right talent to deliver on your mission? Top talent is a lot like falling in love. Great partners tend to seek you out when you’re living your best life, as opposed to desperately posting online. When your brand is strategically aligned and beautifully designed, you become a magnet for brilliant minds. In a way, everything you do for your brand ends up improving your employer brand, because who doesn’t want to be involved in something great?

8. Are you getting out there in the real world? In 2019, it’s never been easier to hide behind the computer. We cannot stress enough the value of physical events in the real world: conferences, experiential product launches, even inviting companies for lunch-and-learns. Get your brand in front of real people, because that’s where insights happen. You need to see the excitement in people’s faces when you solve a problem they care about. And you need to be gut-checked by people outside your bubble with good bs detectors.

9. Are you giving people time to think beyond daily cycles? Here’s a slightly counter idea: productive people need time to get bored. When you have alignment at the top and everything is firing like it’s supposed to, the best gift you can give creatives is freedom – because that’s how innovation happens. It’s Google’s 20 percent rule. Clarity of purpose leads to clarity of action. Give your employees the general direction they need to delight you with a left-turn.

10. Are you building a brand that you actually want to engage with? It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s like that Toni Morrison quote. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” There is so much sameness out there. Ditch the crowd and build the crazy company you wish you could have looked up to when you first started. Are you passionate, fired-up, energized about what you’re building and the story you’re telling? Because that’s the fuel that keeps you going in times of uncertainty. You can’t control the market, but you can control your brand and the feelings it evokes.

When it comes to the strength of your business, brand, and culture, there are one million things to worry about. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. If any of these topics are illuminating your “check engine” light, we’d love to chat with you.

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

The Myth of Likability and Other Lessons from Font

Posted on by Chris Ames

Last month, we were visited by the good folks at Dalton Maag, an independent font foundry with offices in London and São Paulo, Brazil. They make type for branding, retail, and corporate clients that perform beautifully across print and digital environments.

After running us through some of their work, including an amazing demonstration of variable fonts – responsive type that can store multiple variations of a type family into a single font file – we got into a discussion on the differences between three components of evaluating type: legibility, readability, and likability. And what we discovered illuminated a new way to approach creative decision-making in general.

Legibility

First off, the legibility of a typeface is a product of its design and relates to the ability to distinguish one glyph from another when reading. Factors contributing to a typeface’s legibility include the following:

  • X-height – The height of the lowercase in proportion to the caps. Traditionally, the taller the x-height, the more legible the typeface tends to be.
  • Character width – The easiest type designs to read are those that have an “average” overall width. Very condensed or extended designs are less legible, especially for smaller settings such as text, subheads, and credits.
  • Weight – Extremely light or heavy weights are more difficult to read, so if legibility is your goal, stick to something in the middle.
  • Design traits – The overall shapes and design traits of a typeface. If too quirky or fussy, it will reduce legibility.
  • Stroke contrast – The ration of thick to thin strokes.
  • Counters – Enclosed or semi-enclosed negative shapes.
  • Serifs, or lack thereof – While serifs are generally believed to enhance legibility, this is not always the case, as we’ll discuss later.

Readability

Readability, on the other hand, is related to how the type is arranged, or typeset, and therefore is controlled by the designer. The factors affecting type’s readability are more familiar to the average reader: type size, type case, line spacing, line length, color, and contrast.

For those outside the design world like myself, having a language and measuring system for evaluating type was an epiphany. Something that I assumed was completely subjective had an entire mathematical rubric behind it. If I could learn to see like a type designer, maybe I could change the way I make decisions.

Likability

So when we got to the topic of likability, based on the above information, I naturally assumed we would be crunching the numbers to land on the objectively best font.

In running a test for accessibility, Arial 14-point is actually not as accessible as some other fonts, explained Eleni Beveratou, Creative Director at Dalton Maag. Yet because Arial 14 point is what the test group was used to read in their daily life, they actually rated it as more likable and perceived it as more legible. In the end, the biggest contributing factor to likability is simply what you’re most familiar with.

“The likeability of a typeface has a major impact on whether someone will engage with a piece of content or not, despite research proving some typefaces more legible than others,” continued Eleni. “It is important to create inclusive and accessible reading experiences for all, regardless of reading ability or visual acuity. Inclusive isn’t synonymous with boring or monotonous; many typefaces can be inclusive while maintaining a distinct and fresh expression. This is the challenge that we need to embrace.”

In other words, what you read most, you read best. Despite all of the research, despite all of the proof points, despite our supposed obsession with trailblazers and disruptors, people tend to like what they’ve seen before.

Untrain Your Likability Reflex

Perhaps that seems obvious, but it’s a subtle sea change in how we should approach decision-making. Think back to your last team meeting, pitch, or even lunch order. How often when you say, “I like that” are you actually saying, “I’ve seen that before”? How often, when you reject an idea, are you rejecting its actual content vs. the implied fear of change?

For a minute, let’s briefly wander into the minefield of American politics. Think about how the word likability is used. Who gets to be likable? Who invented it? Whose intelligence gets to be described as inspiring and whose is off-putting, cold, inauthentic?

High-achieving women, sociologist Marianne Cooper wrote in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, are judged differently than men because “their very success – and specifically, the behaviors that created that success – violates our expectations about how women are supposed to behave.” When women act competitively or assertively, rather than warm and nurturing, Cooper writes, they “elicit pushback from others for being insufficiently feminine and too masculine.” As a society, she says, “we are deeply uncomfortable with powerful women. In fact, we don’t often really like them.”

The Curse of Familiarity

In design, politics, and life in general, we are all vulnerable to our own biases. For those in charge of a brand, their job is often to maintain an image. Familiarity is a gift! It’s the easiest way to get approval with the least amount of friction and risk. But the curse of familiarity is stagnation. If you’re only ever making decisions based on what you like, you’ll never grow.

Remember the cycle of Facebook redesigns in the 2000s? Each new aspect – the Mini-Feed, poking, the Graffiti Wall, Open Graph, Newsfeed, Timeline – spurred dozens of petition groups with thousands of members demanding its removal. And then when they did? You guessed it: dozens of petition groups with thousands of members demanding its reinstatement. As satirized in the comedy series Jake and Amir, “Garbage becomes perfect over time as you get used to the garbage and forget what made it so bad. Like, you don’t get the internet.”

Change Is Hard

Reading the world, just like font, requires a set of criteria beyond likability. Familiarity is a detriment to making ground-breaking work. Next time you’re evaluating creative or presented with an opportunity for change, don’t be afraid to embrace the unknown. It might just become your new favorite type.

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

Make It Sexy: The Big Impact of Branding “Boring” Things

Posted on by Chris Ames

Branding and advertising are infamous for making us covet things we don’t actually need. The super sleek sheen of a Tesla or an iPhone or a bra designed by NASA’s top scientists are alluring, but at the end of the day, they are merely luxuries. The question of getting people to need something they want is sales 101. But more and more, branding agencies are tackling the inverse.

How do you get people to want the things they need? Is there a space for surprise and delight in the most boring, pedestrian motions of daily life: applying a bandage, brushing our teeth, wiping our bums? Welcome to the world of utilitarian branding.

Utilitarian Branding

In our work with clients, we constantly espouse that nothing sells itself. No matter how brilliant your app is, if it isn’t differentiated in a meaningful way, it will get lost in an increasingly crowded market. Why don’t they get it?

Later at the supermarket, while staring at the endless wall of variously-plied toilet paper, I totally get it. Everyone draws their own line in the sand around the things they deem to be purely functional. I don’t want toilet paper, it’s just a basic thing I need to keep existing. As such, I’ve probably purchased a different brand every trip, based on price, stock, or some arbitrary impulse about the cartoon mascot. The big issue – and market opportunity – is that the basics are often invisible to customers. You’re not competing against another brand, you’re competing against indifference. All it takes is a little branding love to transform a random purchase into a deliberate, ongoing relationship.

Who Gives a Crap

Australian brand Who Gives a Crap might be the platonic ideal of millennial branding. Take a thing no one enjoys shopping for – toilet paper and tissues – give it gorgeous design, ship it directly to people, and donate 50% of the profits to build toilets in the developing world. If you had crowdfunding launch, subscription service, purpose-driven, or irreverent copy on your card, you just hit bingo. In my entire life, never once did I imagine someone complimenting me on my toilet paper. But through great branding, they’ve managed to bring some delight to the crappiest part of your day.

Welly and Tru-Color Bandages

The best branding addresses a pain point, and the good folks at Welly understand this better than anybody. Co-founded by Eric Ryan, the same mind behind Method and Olly, comes vibrant, delightful, and stackable first aid kits. The tin kits include bravery bandages for those who love an adventure, single-use antibiotic ointments, and other first aid essentials like medical scissors and tweezers. Like Who Gives a Crap before them, they are taking something dull and infusing it with an abundance of life.

Beyond creating customer loyalty, utilitarian branding can have a profound effect on our identities and the way we move around the world. Earlier this year, 45-year-old Dominque Apollon had an emotional reaction to the most “boring” act possible: putting on a bandage.

“Ever wonder why bandages were only available in one skin-tone shade?” asks wellness brand Tru-Color. “We did, because there’s beauty in individuality, no matter the skin-tone.”

For years, various apps, products, and solutions have promised to transform our lives on a massive scale. The truth is, sometimes the most transformative moments in our day come from the smallest corners.

“I definitely didn’t expect the complex emotions that would swirl as I watched it just … blend in,” writes Apollon. “A seemingly trivial exercise I’ve repeated 1000x on my body with ‘regular’ ones since childhood. This felt like belonging. Like feeling valued. Sadness for my younger self and millions of kids of color.”

In the eyes of Apollon, this “purely functional” product has a purpose far beyond the utilitarian.

Put Utilitarian Branding to Good Use

There are countless of other examples. Virgin America turned the drudgery of the airplane safety video into a viral pop song. Shhhowercap manages to turn the least sexy object alive into a bona fide power statement. Quip adds an elegance and futurism to toothbrushes normally reserved for astronauts.

All of these are brilliant in their own way, but when I think about the most impactful opportunities for the future, it’s applying these lessons to underutilized resources. How many more people would interact with say, the DMV, a public health clinic, or a library if they looked and operated with the speed of the other brands in our lives?

The UK went to big lengths to redesign its postal service, as well as the products and experiences it offers. For some, that slightly improves a boring errand. For others, that could be the difference between getting a passport, opening up your first bank account, or getting a driver’s license. In other words, freedom and autonomy.

We will always be attracted to the biggest, shiniest inventions in tech. But if you really want to make an impact on people’s lives, start small.

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

Who Thrives at a Brand Strategy and Design Agency?

Posted on by Chris Ames

What type of person thrives at a brand strategy and design agency? Looking around our office, we have people from advertising, journalism, psychology, economics, sociology, sales, graphic design, media – and like any successful venture, a few restless English majors.

Is there a through-line? In our line of work, we privilege business acumen, technical fluency, big idea thinking, writing prowess, collaborative mindsets, passion, curiosity, empathy, and an obsession for the details. We get just as excited by an experiential brand launch as an exquisitely organized messaging matrix.

With our clients, we identify the full range of levers – rational and emotional, strategic and aesthetic – to create an impact across business, brand, and culture. It’s a holistic approach to solving business challenges that requires a little bit of everything.

In a roundtable interview with the Emotive Brand team, we’re attempting to connect the dots by asking: What initially drew you to branding? And what does your unique background bring to the table?

Kyla Grant, Director of Operations

To be perfectly honest, when I started with Emotive Brand, I had no idea what branding meant. I thought I knew, but little did I understand that what I had in my mind was the tip of the iceberg, the small sliver of what branding meant. It’s so much more than the superficial logo, it’s the heart and soul of what a company is. My background is pretty varied, but my strength lies is operationalizing things, in figuring out how to bring an idea, a concept, a strategy to life. My mind lives in the gaps of understanding that I look to fill in order to bring everyone along, without any missteps.

Carol Emert, Strategist

I’m naturally into meaning-making through insight, and branding lets me make a living at what would otherwise be a very passionate avocation. Brands sit at the very root of meaning for organizations, which means that they are absolutely critical for organizational well-being. Just as individual people seek meaning in our personal lives, it’s important for both organizations and for the people who are passionate about them to understand the organization’s meaning and its purpose. Then we can really live it.

Bella Banbury, Founding Partner

I started my career in sports marketing and was always fascinated by which brands were attracted to a specific athlete or sport, and those that were successful in lodging their brand into our hearts and minds often without us even knowing it. I loved brands that were creative and clever in their approach. Fast forward to today, we now sit on the front end of crafting those strategies. As an aside, I don’t think there is anything specific about my background that influences our work other than I am curious about how brands influence and shape our culture. I’ve always worked on the agency side and I never ever take clients for granted or forget this is a service industry.

Robert Saywitz, Design Director

I would say that branding sort of found me rather than me searching it out. When I was in art school, “branding” wasn’t the ubiquitous term it is today, and I found myself in a Visual Identity course where we were tasked with creating brand identity systems, a logo being at the center of it all. My background in drawing and painting, especially my sense of craft – draftsmanship, attention to detail, and visual storytelling – suddenly brought my design ability, and design thinking, to a higher and ultimately much more personal level when faced with the challenges of creating logos and expanding their story into a brand landscape. It wasn’t until working in New York did all of this crystalize into the more tangible world of branding but similar to my first epiphany in school, everything still begins with crafting an iconic logo and expands outward from there.

Jon Schleuning, Strategist

I grew up in Oregon and ran cross-country in high school. The early Nike campaigns struck a chord. There is no finish line. The sense of being part of something instead of just buying a shoe.

Thomas Hutchings, Creative Director

I am actually interested in the subversive side of what branding is: mass consumerism, the ability to use subliminal tactics to make people buy or feel something or just to provoke a reaction. To me, I actually have an ability to manipulate through something not everyone can do. I think in the early days, I was always fascinated by advertising, then somewhere along the way, I learned that I can use design with branding to make a more prolonged effect. Advertising is the 100m sprint, branding is a marathon. I may not always know what is right for the greater design world, but I know what’s right for the brand or understand it as a personality to know what’s right.

Chris Ames, Creative Strategist

I think that thing that I both love and hate about branding is the power of narrative to inform, sway, misdirect, or charm. Those who study the Humanities are often told that their skills will not translate to a “real job” after college. And then when you enter the job market, you find that most companies biggest problems – building a healthy and inclusive culture, telling a cohesive story, articulating their purpose, cutting through the noise – are humanistic disciplines. I try to bring a sense of empathy to this process and constantly remind myself that the best branding puts real people at the center, not glorified technology or embarrassing jargon.

The Only Prerequisite Is Curiosity

Regardless of background, it seems the unifying principle of brand strategy and design is a deep curiosity for how things look, feel, and influence the world around us. At its best, branding is an investigation into meaning. It’s engaging with the unseen and overlooked aspects of business, products, and experience. If you’re interested creative problem-solving, design-thinking, or the intricacies of brand strategy, don’t hesitate to contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd.

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

The Super Tough Brands of Fragile Masculinity

Posted on by Chris Ames

Last week, the world was given two small wonders: War Paint, a hyper-aggressive makeup brand exclusively for men, and Liquid Death, canned water designed to look like beer. Two “wellness” brands aimed at men, cloaked in the visual language of skulls, tattoos, and violence.

What can these two bizarre companies teach us about the role of gender in branding? And is breaking down male stigma in the wellness space simply a design problem?

Branding … For Him!

Let’s start with War Paint. Their 13-second ad features a heavily tattooed man using various products, flexing his pecs, and adorning himself with a skull ring. Notably missing from this peacocking is how the actual makeup looks on the guy’s face. But that’s not the point of this ad. The point is to disrupt your expectations of makeup and remind you, to a cartoonish degree, that this is for herculean men.

Everything about this brand – the militaristic association of its name, the tattoo parlor visual language, the chant of its tagline “makeup for men, designed by men, for men” – is attempting to shift perception. And in theory, that’s a good thing. For decades, many men have felt uncomfortable with the fact that they have human bodies that require basic care, like moisturizer or water. If War Paint is working toward a future in which men can boldly engage in self-care, that’s progress, right?

Unfortunately, everything about their execution is decidedly backward. Online, many people were off-put by their singular expression of what it means to be a man, and we’re hoping to see a larger spectrum of masculinity represented.

In a tweet attempting to clarify its positioning, War Paint wrote: “If females can have products just for women, why can’t men? Our aim is to allow makeup to be gender neutral and to do that we must have male-specific brands also.”

As Vox writer Cheryl Wischover responded in her piece, “Achieving the goal of increased gender neutrality by making stuff for the underserved ‘males’ demographic struck many as counterintuitive or even nonsensical. The truth is that it probably is still hard for some men to walk into a Sephora and buy makeup. But selling makeup with muscles and war is not going to take away that stigma any time soon.”

The Shape of Water

Let’s shift to Liquid Death, the punk rock canned water aiming to “murder your thirst.” In a way, this feels like a thought exercise for aspiring salespeople. Take the most basic thing possible – water – and make it irresistible. Former Netflix Creative Director Mike Cessario has done just that, raising a new seed round of $1.6 million for his new company. In total, he’s raised $2.25 million for, and I can’t stress this enough, water in a tallboy can. Backers include Biz Stone of Twitter and founders of Dollar Shave Club and Away.

According to Cessario, he’s not solely marketing to the heavily male punk and death metal crowd indicated by the skull logo; he’s targeting the “straight-edgers”– those who eschew drugs and alcohol in a scene often known for both – and doing so under the guise of eco-friendliness because a single, shiny nickel from every $1.83, 16.9oz. can sold will support cleaning up plastics from the ocean.

It would be a shame to deny Liquid Death’s sense of humor. They produced a truly bonkers video called, “Hey Kids, Murder Your Thirst,” which wouldn’t look out of place on Adult Swim. Similar to War Paint, they are aggressively (and joyfully) disrupting the status quo of their category. But here’s the thing: this whole brand narrative is still supported by outdated modes of masculinity. Healthy habits – drinking water, taking care of yourself – shouldn’t need to be draped in distortion and blood to appeal to men.

Why Is Self-Care Gendered?

Ideally, self-care has no gender. Over-indexing on masculinity to make something appeal to men doesn’t encourage actual perception shifts. Quite the opposite, it teaches men to only respond to the violent, the blunt, the obtuse.

As Erika Nicole Kendall noted in her essay, “Marketing has the ability to convey powerful messaging, drive consumer behavior, and legitimize messages we frequently see and hear about ourselves. It simultaneously guides our aspirations and affirms how we see ourselves. When the marketing used to sell wellness brands to the public validates questionable ideas about gender – and, for that matter, race – we should collectively cringe.”

War Paint and Liquid Death are hardly the first, and they won’t be the last. There’s Dude Wipes, which are baby wipes, but for dudes. There’s Man Salt Muscle Soak, which are bath salts, but for men. You’ll never guess who the target audience for the candle company Man Cans is. (Hint: it’s men.)

Perception Shifts

Those who work in branding have a real opportunity to shift perception – if they approach this challenge from a place of curiosity and empathy. What does it mean to be a man in 2019? Whatever we want it to mean. It can be intersectional, non-binary, and yes, masculine, if the aperture of that masculinity is open enough to allow for other identities to exist. Wearing makeup, drinking water, lighting a candle, or taking a bath shouldn’t rattle your identity. If it does, you’ve got bigger problems than branding.

Hair loss company Keeps and wellness brand ForHims are steps in the right direction. Through diverse photography and minimalist design, they are expanding masculinity by focusing on what it means to be human, not just male. There’s still an edginess and personality to their copy, but it refrains from veering into the overtly macho.

“We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted,” goes the ForHims’ about page. “Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves. We call bullshit. The people who depend on you and care about you want you to. To do the most good, you must be well.”

In the productivity-economy, caring about yourself can feel radical. The role of good branding makes those magic moments as accessible, inclusive, and frequent as possible.

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

Image credit

#100DayProject: From Ancient Symbols to Brand Design

Posted on by Chris Ames

This year, the design team at Emotive Brand is participating in the #100DayProject. Today, we sit down with Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard to discuss symbols, simplicity, and how to be brave in your creative decision-making.

What is the #100DayProject?

The 100DayProject is a free art project started by Lindsay Thomson that takes place online. Every spring, thousands of people all around the world commit to 100 days of exploring their creativity. The idea is that you pick a theme or a project and rev on that 100 times. This year, our focus is on how ancient symbols inform contemporary brand design.

In the beginning, you tend to go for the most obvious choices, but by day 19, you find yourself really having to flex your creativity. It forces you to think from different perspectives and be thoughtful about your approach to rendering something in a unique way.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw294x1FRh-/

How did the team land on symbols?

We threw around a couple of ideas, but something about exploring symbols seemed to capture everyone’s imagination early on. Three or four years ago, I created a site called the State of Symbols, which is a designer-friendly repository for symbols. #100DayProject is a great way to build off that work and the fact that there are so many symbols with thousands of years of history fits the 100-day format nicely.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwvO_m7FI66/

What excites you most about this project?

I think my favorite aspect is being able to research each symbol and the creative process of meditating on how to render it in a new way. With the State of Symbols, I was mainly recreating existing symbols. This project is much more about breathing new life into these ancient shapes and allowing yourself the time to reflect on the core idea in an illustrative way. That requires learning the history, what it means, and seeding it in your mind as a concrete thing.

Designer Keyoni Scott is helping create the animations, and he described the process “almost like doing crosswords or those daily mind games. It’s a good way to keep the creative mind sharp and fun to just create something daily. Nine times out of ten, I learn something that I didn’t know before and I think that’s amazing.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwaTqzVBdVj/

What reference materials are you using in your research?

We’ve been using “Shepherd’s Glossary of Graphic Signs and Symbols,” which is an amazing collection of everything from punctuation to railway iconography to maritime navigation symbols. Also, Carl G. Liungman’s “Dictionary of Symbols” and I. J. Gelb’s “A Study of Writing.”

To me, there’s something about these print collections that are a little more legitimate than wandering for images online. You can find interesting things online, but it can be hard to tell if the person is just making stuff up without the original source. As Design Director Robert Saywitz said, “Projects like these allow you to explore different mediums beyond just the computer and brings inspiration to the forefront rather than waiting for it to arrive.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv-CgR-FBvI/

What have you learned from the process thus far?

For one, just how many Venus stars there are. From far east Chinese symbols all the way to the Celtic, thousands of people throughout history have been looking at this planet and rendering it in different ways. Whether it’s a five-pointed or eight-pointed star, there’s something kind of beautiful about everyone drawing inspiration from the same thing.

Another thing is how symbols change over time. We tend to think about meaning being fixed, but certain figures like the pentagram have changed meaning roughly every 1000 years – from the morning and evening star in Palestine to the contemporary Wiccan symbol for the elements and spirit.

Lastly, the pace of the project is a challenge of its own. It needs to go out every single day whether it’s perfect or not, which forces me to be brave about decision making. Sometimes, that means bringing something to life through simplicity. For instance, the North African Berber tribe symbol for “bird” is built out five simple squares, but through the use of animation, it suddenly looks like it’s in flight.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwDa19Eh7ZC/

What lessons can you apply to your design practice and the work we do for brands?

People have been trying to communicate the same ideas for 40,000 years. At its heart, symbols display concepts – and that’s what we do as a brand studio. We get the core concept of a company, distill it down to a simple form – the simpler the better – and we bridge the gap between a visual symbol and a series of beliefs, values, or products. As Senior Designer Beth Abrahamson said, “Symbols and their histories are inherently tied to branding, as most logos are variations of symbols that have been around for centuries and have been reinterpreted many times. Symbols are part of our vocabulary as designers and it’s super important to know where the primary forms come from and what they mean.”

Oftentimes, a company’s symbol has grown so strong that it creates a life of its own and can be simplified down to a basic geometric shape. Look at Google: the open circle form makes this shape accepting, something that has an inward motion that is exaggerated with the horizontal rule created to the right. Regardless of color, scale, or representation, it communicates the friendly nature that Google has come to embody.

Whenever I’m starting a new identity or branding project, I always try to see if there’s anything that communicates the message through the symbol itself. Sometimes, I’ll bring a symbol into Illustrator and start taking it down to its components. It’s critical to do that kind of research, because you don’t want to pick a symbol that’s highly offensive in a certain culture, or references something that’s counter to a company’s mission. Designers have a responsibility to know their history, produce great work, and keep these symbols alive.

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

Culture Is Everything: A Roundtable with Emotive Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Atmosphere. Vibe. Energy. Mood. That certain je ne sais quoi. It’s often difficult to describe a company’s culture, but you can feel it the second you walk in the door. Rajeev Bhardwaj described work culture as “an intangible ecosystem that makes some places great to work and other places toxic.” BambooHR says it’s “like a set of miniature societies within a larger society, and their cultures are expressions of the work they perform, the values they adopt, and the collective behaviors of the people who work for them.”

Culture can bring strategy to life, ignite business success, and contribute to some truly raucous holiday parties. The wonderful and terrifying thing about culture is that you can’t really control it. Executives can shape, model, or guide behavior, but true culture is defined from the employee out. Today, we’re having a roundtable discussion about culture: its definition, its importance, and its influence on our work.

Bella Banbury, Founding Partner

I think about culture as the connective tissue that keeps employees connected to each other and their work. It is vital. Nothing functions well without it, people start pulling in different directions, pain points are elevated, people start focusing on the wrong things and losing sight of what matters. Everyone loses. Culture is unique to the set of people involved and the environment you work in. You have to recognize that people are different, need different things, perform in different ways, contribute in different ways. Let it grow and change based on the unique set of circumstances that are present. Make time for it. Water it.

Saja Chodosh, Strategist

I think of work culture as the personality of a workplace. When you bring a bunch of diverse, unique people together to work around common goals – what bubbles up? How does “the team” operate, think, work, and live as one? Work culture means a lot to me. I want to work for a company where I feel like who I am meshes with and drives the greater personality, goals, and aspirations of the company as a whole. I think culture is influenced by small behaviors, ways of interaction, little moments, that add up to something big. The culture at Emotive Brand is vivacious, always moving, passionate, bold. We are a team that blends hard work, strong viewpoints, and personal integrity with a sense of ever-flowing empathy, generosity, and collaboration. The occasional tequila bonding, too.

Keyoni Scott, Designer

Culture is incredibly important because I think it’s the lifeline you look to when things are stressful. When things are intense, culture is a reminder of why you’re working so hard. It can uplift your day and keep you focused. I’ve never been in a cubicle job, thankfully, but one of the things I love about Emotive Brand is that you’re invited to be yourself. Your voice is heard and I don’t feel afraid to be myself. You’re given space to try, to mess up, and to solve the problem at hand.

Jonathan Haggard, Senior Designer

I think the Bay Area, in general, can have a very demanding work culture. Unfortunately, many companies intentionally provide a culture of excessive work and dependence. I think there needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach the relationship between people and work. In order to win the war on talent, employers should be willing to embrace remote work, flexible time tables, and promote quality over quantity. So much of traditional work culture is about projecting a façade of productivity for eight-plus hours. I would much rather engage in a culture that cultivates a vibe of doing your best work, and when you’re done, be encouraged to live a full life outside of the office. You end up getting better work in the long run.

Shannon Caulfield, Project Manager

For me, culture is one of the most crucial things about running a business. You build the right culture by hiring people you believe can further promote a company’s vision and mission, and finding people whose values are aligned. But an aligned culture doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same – there’s so much value in diversity of thought. You get to learn so much every day by surrounding yourself with people from different backgrounds and walks of life. It leads to much more creative solutions. We have a very close-knit and collaborative culture at Emotive Brand. Everyone is always willing to lend a helping hand, regardless of what role you have here. You know when you come to work, you’re not alone.

Monica Colver, Studio Manager

Cultivating a healthy work culture is important so that employees feel engaged, appreciated, and motivated to do their best work possible. Instilling a sense of community in the workplace is vital because work is where we spend the majority of our waking hours, so we might as well improve our quality of life by improving our relationships with our colleagues. The culture at Emotive Brand takes that sentiment to heart. We are a close-knit team, and as the Studio Manager, I am always seeking out new ways to facilitate connection within our team: organizing trips to museums, group hikes, rallying the team for spontaneous happy hours, as well as simply making a point of learning about everyone’s interests and personal projects.

Beth Abrahamson, Senior Designer

A positive work culture is not only essential to employee happiness, but can improve relationships with clients and the quality of the work itself. There is real value in intentionally creating space to get to know the people you work with every day. Bella and Tracy are major proponents of bringing your whole self to work, and encourage all of us to share our personal interests and passions, which ultimately creates a more vibrant and dynamic culture at Emotive Brand.

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