Emotive Brand, Author at Emotive Brand

An Emotive Founding Story

Posted on November 4, 2024November 18, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Emotive Brand was born out of a belief that the brands that make you feel are the ones that move you to action. This founding tenet arose from real, hands-on experience.

In 2009, Tracy Lloyd and Bella Banbury had the guts and heart to not only start an agency, but ignite a movement to change how brands communicate. What those early days lacked in glamor, they made up for in joy–and grit.

Emotive Brand’s first home was more warehouse than studio, complete with broken glass, no heat, and a single bathroom that was also somehow the kitchen. Yet executives from some of the world’s most iconic brands not only loved their time there, they kept coming back for the kind of collaboration that leaves you feeling lighter, brighter, and ready to take on the world.

Tracy and Bella’s fundamental premise was that if you could define the emotion you want people to experience, clearly express why your brand matters, and evoke those feelings at every touchpoint, you could generate a flywheel of enduring connection and impact.

This strategy was never limited to crafting clients’ brands. The Emotive team lived and breathed the philosophy, with consideration for every client interaction–from a mid-meeting tequila shot to greeting clients at the ferry with Blue Bottle coffee in hand. Bella explains, “When people came to our office, we wanted that to be the best part of their day. We wanted it to be an experience beyond what they could imagine. It was this balance of incredible preparation, polish–”

“And, you know, personalization for each client,” Tracy interjects, with the easy rhythm and warm spark that defines their partnership, best-friendship, and Emotive Brand.

Tracy continues, “Let’s be real, though—emotion is not what brings most clients to our door. They come to us for solutions to complex, mission-critical business problems. But to dismiss emotion as fluff is an often fatal mistake for brands. After all, regardless of what you’re selling, every buyer on the planet is human. And feelings happen to be a very powerful element in breaking through and connecting with humans to motivate decision-making.”

From day one, they left the status quo—where logic overshadowed emotion—far behind. The ripple effect of Tracy and Bella’s connection and conviction extended outward, attracting a crew of whip smart strategists, designers, and innovators who were just as passionate about balancing head and heart.

Over 15+ years, each individual has contributed new insight, originality, and inspiration. Together, Tracy, Bella, and team discovered–again and again–the enormous power of emotion to move people, advance ideas, and grow businesses. Never complacent, Emotive has continuously shaped and refined their approach, learning which strategic and creative components catch fire and which fizzle out.

Tracy and Bella’s vision for a different kind of agency became a reality and, thanks to the resilience of Emotive’s purpose and people, it has endured. There were stretches of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, when the agency learned to adapt and respond to changing client needs. And when COVID chaos descended, they found new paths to connection no matter the distance.

Through it all, they refused to compromise. Emotive has helped industry heavyweights and disruptive upstarts find their footing and seize opportunity, whether that’s rebranding after an acquisition or shaking things up in a market shift. Holding steady at the center of the work is a unique focus on what Tracy and Bella call “Good Growth”—growth that’s transformative, sustainable, and most importantly, human.

As founders and friends, they’ve built a remarkable legacy of powerful brands through exceptionally collaborative partnership, with impact that expands what’s possible for clients’ businesses and people.

The movement they kicked off in 2009 continues to expand and unfurl, more resonant than ever. With the rise of emotionally intelligent leaders who center purpose and seek to catalyze change, Emotive Brand is poised to help bridge meaningful emotional connection and measurable business success like never before.

Guiding their teams and clients into the future, the two are as united, committed, and inspired as ever. Playing to each other’s strengths and bringing out the best in the talent, leaders, and brands drawn into their orbit. Thankful for all they’ve learned and achieved, and everyone who contributed along the way. As they look ahead, Tracy and Bella know–and feel–that the best is yet to come.

“Tracy is fearless and so unique—she becomes the CEO Whisperer, with a way of telling them what everybody else is too scared to say. She can deliver truth to people who are often shielded from it. She does it from a place of strength and a foundation of having done the work, but once she breaks through, trust is earned and the relationship is locked in. Amazing.”
–Bella

“Bella is the glue that keeps it all together at Emotive Brand. From the day she put on the CEO hat, she made shit happen. We all know there would be no Emotive Brand without her because she figures out the hard stuff, enabling every single one of us to deliver easier and faster. She’s operationalized how we work so we can do better work for our clients. As her partner in crime and co-founder, I feel like with her beside me, there’s nothing we can’t do together.”
–Tracy

Fin.

Market Insights That Come from the Heart

Posted on May 11, 2023November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Asking different questions can reveal new insights about your market.

No matter what your company sells, the markets where you operate change constantly. One day the sun is (metaphorically) shining, and the next day a tanker gets stuck in a canal, there’s a virus outbreak, a prominent bank fails, a fragile aging musician opens fire on a twelve-pack of beer, or some other event happens to change our collective outlook.

Reading the tea leaves of market dynamics is both art and science. There is no shortage of brilliant people putting advanced technology to work to uncover patterns and make predictions for all types of scenarios. At Emotive Brand, we believe that in addition to market analytics, there are emotional insights that you and your team can gather that can help you paint a fuller picture of how your world is shifting and the role your brand can play in keeping your business in front of these changes.

Emotion Is Critical to Your Peripheral Vision

In their book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company, Wharton professors George Day and Paul Schoemaker wrote, “You must ask the right questions to identify what you don’t know so you can explore the edge of your business… You must identify new sources of information or new ways of scanning to unveil important but hidden parts of the periphery.”

Emotions, while harder to quantify, offer critical insights into your market opportunity. From the macro to the micro levels, emotional information can explain the synaptic connections between what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in your business. While emotions don’t answer everything, they do provide a critical layer of context that makes market behaviors seem less arbitrary and a little more “human.” And as you get more attuned to how the emotional landscape contributes to or detracts from your success, you gain the confidence to speed up decisions, make better bets, and deploy your brand in the best ways possible.

Below are a few lenses you look through to develop market insights that will expand your peripheral vision as a business:

Macro Forces

The economic outlook, employment and wage trends, the regulatory environment, political and cultural currents, public health issues, environmental issues, social trends, and other top headlines—these primary ingredients create the bouillabaisse of market dynamics. But how often do you look at these macro forces as waves of emotion moving through the population? Looking at the feelings generated by the headlines that impact your market gives you insights into opportunities for the role your brand needs to play in the world. And having this conversation with your team every week keeps your brand in tune with the world.

The Category

There’s a baseline, meat-and-potatoes narrative that defines the category where you compete. Many of our clients in the enterprise technology space discover that they default to telling a category story, which in general is pretty generic. Differentiation comes down to products and features—your “what” and “how”—rather than the articulation of “why” your company exists. Categories drive sameness for the sake of making easy comparisons, and the safe players tend to hold to the center. Emotion gives you a fulcrum to break out of the box, or better, expand it, to see and understand what you see as possible. And when people connect with your vision for how you can change the world, there’s a high likelihood they’ll be rooting for your success.

The Competition

As your competition grows more sophisticated, they will look to claim a specific emotional territory. Branding in consumer packaged goods is where you find true expertise in using emotion to claim specific turf. How else can you choose from the 27 different toothpaste brands on the shelf? For longer sales cycles, once someone is in the consideration phase, it all comes down to the emotional cues your brand delivers that elevate the decision-making from rational analysis to the emotional moment of commitment. By understanding the emotional space your competition is trying to own and ensuring your emotional space is better defined, more compelling, hyper-relevant, and executed with originality, you’ll gain the upper hand as you compete for the same customers.

Your Customers

Do you look at your customer as the person with the budget and purchasing authority? Or, as someone driven by human desires and motivations? Seeing customers as people you can make successful allows you to engage with them on a deeper level. You tap into their ambitions and their fears. You ask different questions that give you insight into how they want to succeed, instantly deepening the relationship. And when you think of the customers you have today as the leaders of tomorrow, it pays to invest in building their loyalty early. When a brand builds deep, meaningful connections with customers, you earn the permission to innovate in new ways and lead your customers to new destinations. The trust you build inspires them to come along for future journeys.

Users or Consumers

B2B. B2C. B2B2C. B2H. We like this last acronym because we believe the best brands are Business to Human. The humans could be the people buying and consuming your product. Or they could be your partners, channels, or resellers you depend on to bring your brand to different audiences. No matter where you sit in the value chain, the question to ask is, what emotions do users or consumers count on you to help them feel? The mechanics are different when selling hand soap versus a SaaS platform, but it still comes down to delivering an experience that communicates emotion across the entire value chain. Creating emotional bonds with people turns them into true advocates and evangelists. Having a great product is key to connecting with consumers. But having an emotionally-driven brand accelerates your ability to increase market share, galvanize a tribe, or lead a movement.

Your Company

Your company is a system of functions that work together to deliver a product, service, or offering. But how connected is your company to the emotions that your brand stands for? Do people proudly wear your swag? Do they consistently engage customers and partners in ways that convey a clear set of emotions? When your company is clear about the feelings behind your experiences, you can stand out in any market. Because it’s the companies who own the emotional experience inside and out who claim a stake in the ground and are genuinely different. And according to the people working inside them, truly better.

By looking at each aspect of how you go to market through the lens of emotion, odds are you’ll uncover some white space you haven’t considered and some insights that can sharpen what you’re already doing well. And if you ever need a partner exploring emotion-driven market insights, that’s what Emotive Brand does every day.

Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Posted on November 23, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Challenger Creative

This post is the last in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read a general primer to challenger brands or a deep dive into B2B challengers right here.

Previously, we chatted about the power of adopting a challenger mindset, how to compete against your category, and what the B2B world can learn from B2C disruptors. In these examples, most of the strategies were internal. It was a question of knowing how to recognize the pressure for change, creating a shared vision, having the capacity to execute, and building out a realistic work plan.

But still, the question remains: what does this actually look like in the real world? Today, we’re going to dive into some examples of challenger brands that use design to disrupt. While there’s no one definition for challenger creative, you tend to know it when you see. Most recently, it’s an aesthetic that incorporates clean branding, catchy names displayed in modern fonts, bright pops of color, and sleek packaging. It’s unapologetically bold, playful, and unafraid to subvert the expectations of the form. It’s a design that knows how to transform positives into negatives and creates a lasting impression.

Thanks for the Warm-Up

Sometimes you’re fighting against the market, and sometimes you’re fighting against people’s perceptions. From a marketing and viewership point of view, the relationship between the Olympics and the Paralympics is a contentious one. As we all know, the Olympics airs first, and garners much more attention and ad-budget. So, how do you respond when everyone thinks of your offer as secondary?

With a bold commercial that repositions the Olympics as merely the “warm-up,” this commercial asserts that the Paralympics is where Super Humans do battle. Even the way the commercial starts—leading the viewer from the firework show to a tunnel underground—demonstrates that this is an alternate, grittier world we are entering. It sets the tone for the whole games. Anyone can run on two feet—come see a real show.

The Perks of Being a Couch Potato

In a world of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Overstock, is there anything gutsier than trying to sell furniture online? Burrow, a sofa startup, is up to the challenge. Incorporating gorgeous photography, cheeky copy, and a deep understanding of millennial behavior, they have created a campaign that is capturing attention. Their tagline, “Good for Nothing,” is a perfect self-deprecating turn of phrase that speaks to their sense of humor and willingness to disrupt the status quo.

“‘Good for Nothing’ positions Burrow as the sofa brand that’s serious about leisure,” says Red Antler Co-founder and Strategy Chief Emily Heyward. “And the goal of our out-of-home campaign in New York is to remind everyone who’s rushing by and commuting in the busiest city in the world that it’s OK to go home tonight and do absolutely nothing. Hopefully on a comfortable Burrow sofa.”

Repairing the Male Ego

Challenging giant corporations is one thing, but using design to challenge stigma and vulnerability is another. Hims, a personal wellness brand, is fueled by one challenger belief—men are allowed to want to take care of themselves. The question is, does the market agree? Well, by March of 2018, Hims had already sold roughly $10 million in product and reached $200 million in valuation. (They only launched in November 2017.) So, that’s a big yes.

“These brands have an aesthetic that appeals to millennials,” said Allen Adamson, Brand Consultant and Co-founder of Metaforce. “It’s smart design without being ostentatious or too snooty. All these products are stylish, and they don’t necessarily pick up on the cues of the category. They pick up on the design language that surrounds young people today.”

Hims’ product line reads like a short list of things that should be difficult to market to those who are uncomfortable talking about it—hair loss, erectile dysfunction, skincare, and vitamins. Instead of shying away from stigma or taboos, they’ve turned it into a massive business opportunity.

Bird Is the Word

E-scooters are a controversial business, but don’t expect Bird’s founder, Travis VanderZaden, to back down from a challenge. Bird was named Inc’s business of the year, and with good reason. In 14 months, they have expanded to 120 cities and notched a $2 billion evaluation.

The design of Bird feels both professional and whimsical at the same time. The black and white look of the scooter is sleek and clean, but the animated landing video on their website looks like something out of Pixar, full of color and imagination. They seem to capture the childlike freedom of riding a scooter and the Uber-like vision of transforming how a city runs. Their design leaves them poised to take on anyone, whether that’s fellow e-scooter brands, ride-sharing, or even automobile makers.

“He told me the idea of adult scooters and explained how riders would just leave them on the sidewalk, and I was incredulous. I thought he was crazy,” says David Sacks, an early PayPal executive who invested in the company’s seed round. “Once I went to Santa Monica, I realized it was magical,” he says, after he scootered to his destination, without waiting for a cab or sitting in traffic. “I started thinking about how big this idea could become and realized that it’s transformational. You could have millions of these, and start displacing car trips for commuters—and eventually redesign cities.”

Time to Face the Challenge

Now that we’ve covered strategy, mindset, and design, it’s time to adopt a challenger mindset for your own brand. Every year it gets harder and harder for brands to stand out from the pack. Meaning, there’s never been a better time to be bold, fired-up, and willing to take a risk to differentiate yourself.

To learn more about how your brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on November 15, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Continuing the Challenge

This post is the second in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read part one, “Challenger Brands: A Primer,” right here.

Previously, we spoke about adopting a challenger mindset. It’s one defined by ambition, agility, and a willingness to take risks. Most importantly, we noted how businesses are no longer competing against each other – they are competing against the category they are in and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

At a glance, these personality traits naturally lend themselves to the B2C world. Ask anyone to rattle off a few challenger brands and you’ll invariably get the same answers: Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb—and it makes sense. When you’re trying to rewire people’s preconceived notions, B2C is, by definition, the shortest path to the customer.

But it is by no means the only path. The worlds of B2B and B2B2C are being transformed by challenger brands. Just look at ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Slack, or even Salesforce. If you can’t see it on the surface, it’s most likely occurring behind the scenes in their business strategy.

B2B Challengers

Founder of 500 Startups, Dave McClure, notes that

“The next bubble is not in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply. Rather, the real bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep up awake at night.”

Many legacy B2B companies end up following a similar lifecycle. They start off small and hungry, build a legacy off of their early innovations, ride the wave for as long as possible, then go out and acquire innovation when they start to stagnate. The daily churn of operating a business makes it very difficult to ignite the same innovation that got you started. So, you import. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it’s a strategy that ultimately puts your future in the hands of other creators.

Homegrown Innovation

Regardless of size, if B2B brands want to truly adopt a challenger mindset, they need to take active steps to continually foster their own innovation. Famously, Google has a 20% rule. Implemented by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, it’s designed to give employees one full day per week to work on a Google-related passion project of their choosing or creation. It’s the same strategy that created Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google News, AdSense, and many others.

The point being, words like agile and innovative don’t have to be words that are only synonymous with startups. B2B companies can instill a challenger’s sense of agility through the behaviors and culture they nurture. If you’re wondering how a B2B brand knows if it should adopt a challenger mindset, there’s a wonderful diagram created by Michael Hay, a business leader with fifteen years at IKEA, that can help. Outlining four essentials for driving a successful change of strategy, it acts as a checklist for recognizing and delivering change.

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

At the end of the day, there are many lessons that B2B brands can steal from the challenger world. Are you leading with a strong story that unequivocally answers the question, “Why do you do what you do?” More than meet a singular need, are you meeting the needs of today and tomorrow better than anyone else? Are you talking with lead adopters at the front of the innovation curve and making them evangelists for your brand?

Perhaps the most important lesson that B2B brands can glean is in how they hire. As Adam Morgan writes,

“Employees at challenger brands require different qualities. They need to be mission-driven. They need to know why they get out of bed and go to work every morning and they need to be passionate about the problems the company is trying to solve. Being a maverick is also of far greater importance at a challenger, the opposite of at a larger organization where dissent is considered a flaw. Employees need to ask the provocative questions and not just take risks themselves, but also to be tolerant of risks that others might take.”

To learn more about how your B2B brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

To finish reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part Three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

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

Challenger Brands: A Primer

Posted on November 7, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Are you up to the challenge?

Starting today, we’re launching a three-part series on challenger brands—who they are, how they behave, and why your brand could benefit from adopting their disruptive mindset. As this is the first blog in the series, let’s start with the basics. The beginning, as they say, is always a good place to start.

What is a challenger brand?

“A challenger brand is defined, primarily, by a mindset—it has business ambitions bigger than its conventional resources, and is prepared to do something bold, usually against the existing conventions or codes of the category, to break through.” —The Challenger Project, by eatbigfish.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “challenger brand,” you’ve certainly experienced its narrative cousin: the underdog story. It’s David and Goliath. It’s Rocky. That oft-romanticized vision of a plucky innovator running a business out of their garage and taking down the big guys. Think of Ben & Jerry’s vs. Haagen-Daz, Sam Adams vs. Budweiser, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Category is the new challenge

While in the beginning being a challenger brand often meant slaying one particular dragon—Pepsi vs. Coke—modern challenger brands are more focused on what they are disrupting instead of who. It’s not about me versus you; it’s about me versus the category, the industry, and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

From Airbnb to Blue Apron to Warby Parker, challenger brands are redefining the ways we travel, eat, shop, and more. As Adam Morgan says, “Being a challenger brand today is less about business enmity, and more about an often mission-driven desire to progress the category.”

Criteria for challenger brands

To be clear, there are no rules set in stone about what makes a challenger brand. By definition, it’s a fluid position. You might start out a challenger and be so successful at taking out the competition that you become the next target on top of the hill. It’s a Shakespearean cycle of ascension and dethronement that leaves only the most innovative companies standing.

“A challenger brand can take many forms; it’s more of a mindset than a specific set of rules,” says Kohlben Vodden, founder of StoryScience. “These brands tell stories that by proxy make us feel empowered. They tell us real success lies in breaking away from the pressure of social norms, challenging authority, and being disagreeable. These brands represent character strengths that we humans universally hold up as positive and admirable qualities—bravery, perseverance, fairness.”

In essence, to be a challenger your brand needs to:

Be somewhere in the middle of the market. You’re not first, but you’re not last. You have enough experience and validity to get in the ring and start punching above your weight.
Have an insatiable hunger and big ambitions that go beyond hitting your numbers. You and your employees need to share a fundamental belief that you are unlike any other company on the planet.
Understand what it takes to close the gap between good and great. When you talk about something as aspirational as a company’s vision for the future, you should never limit yourself to making something merely good. This isn’t a task to work on; it’s a shared vision to work toward.

Culture is the lifeblood of challenger brands

All things considered, this is as much about emotion and personality as it is about strategic priorities. If there’s a straight line through challenger brands, it’s the infectious culture they cultivate and maintain through the ups and downs. And how do you shape culture? Through your mission, vision, beliefs, and behaviors. “Clarity around what a business believes in, and what change it’s trying to bring about, acts as both inspiration and filter for the kinds of disruption it will pursue,” says Mark Barden. “Without that clarity, disruption becomes chaos pretty quickly.”

To continue reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part two—Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers & Part three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

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

How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Posted on October 27, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Since the dawn of man, every entrepreneur believes they have the magical product that is going to change the game, revolutionize the market, blaze the trail, and yes, make the world a better place. It’s the type of hyperbolic startup language we’ve come to quickly identify and dismiss because we know at the end of the day, venture capitalists don’t really back products—they back winning business models.

So, how do you skip the tech jargon and get straight to a hair-on-fire business model? There may be no better litmus test than that of the elusive “product-market fit.” Coined by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he defined it simply as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Product-Market Fit Is Startup Nirvana

Sounds easy enough, but the little description belies its massive business implications. This is the sought-after point at which you have identified the best target industries, buyers, and use cases for your product. Sales and marketing strategies become easily repeatable and, more importantly, scalable. It’s the great chasm between the “10x” investment return companies and the ones you’ve never heard of.

These days, most startups don’t fail because of the strength of their idea. It’s because they burn through cash without carefully planning for the crucial moment when customers actually want what they are selling. Achieving product-market fit is nirvana, and there are no shortcuts to nirvana. Fortunately, thousands of companies have gone before us, and there’s something to learn from their trials and tribulations.

Research, Personas, and Segmentation

Everything, and we mean everything, begins with an effort to understand the market landscape and key pain points. In researching the various industry verticals and potential buyers, you are on the hunt for your target customers. After all, they ultimately decide how well a product meets their needs.

Call us old fashioned, but we’ve long believed that the best way of conducting market research is actually talking to your potential customers face-to-face. Sure, you’ll get more data if you use online surveys, but the quality of that data will always be diluted. Especially at the beginning of your journey, you need to hear how a real, emotive conversation about your product evolves in real time. If you put in the work, your customers will tell you exactly what would make their lives substantially better.

We’ve talked before about the importance of using research to develop personas and market segmentation. As a reminder, segmentation is the partitioning of the full market into digestible parts—hopefully with customers that share similar behaviors and needs. Defining the attributes and characteristics of various target users is a great way to make sure everyone on the product team understands exactly who they are designing, building, and sweating for.

These personas aren’t set in stone—they should be revised as you learn more and more. After forming and reiterating on these personas, the next step is understanding their underserved needs. If you can address customer pain that is not adequately being soothed, you’ve stumbled upon pay dirt. In terms of market opportunity, pain is gain. All of this information is driving toward the creation of your value proposition, or how your product will meet customer needs better than the alternatives.

Prototyping, Iterating, Optimizing

Equipped with this information, you should be ready to create what’s sometimes called a minimum viable product. With the help of prototyping tools such as inVision, it’s never been easier to show your customers an interactive, high-fidelity version of your product—without actually having to build the whole thing.

This is a safe space for experimentation, feedback, and a low-risk way to glean deeper insights. The biggest disservice you could do to your product team is asking leading or closed questions that trigger a yes or no response. Engage your sense of curiosity and ask open-ended questions to encourage insightful responses. Only then will you be able to identify genuine patterns and refine the initial prototype into something that is delightful and addresses customer concerns.

Take It to Market

As any creator knows, you can get stuck in the spin-cycle of revision forever. The only real way to validate your hypotheses is by eventually taking your product to market. That’s when the lessons come fast, hard, and uncensored. Suddenly, you’ll have access to conversion funnel metrics, marketing economics, product engagement levels, utilization rates, and lost customer churn.

It will feel like trying to repair a bicycle while currently riding it downhill—but rest easy knowing that you don’t have to fix everything at once. It’s just about optimizing what you can control to make your sales process repeatable and scalable in your established vertical.

Things to Remember

Seek insights from your employees, especially those out in the field. Your operations team sees all the problems with the product and hears all the complaints from your customers. Set yourself up for success early by creating a frictionless process to get those insights to senior management.
There will never be one way to determine product-market fit. You need to embrace the mentality of a scientist by testing, tinkering, and questioning every data point. Use A/B testing with messaging, try different price points, and push everything as far as your conversion rates will allow.
There are so many useful tools out there, like how to calculate your total addressable market size. David Skok, the venture capitalist at Matrix Partners, wrote a great blog on this topic as well. It includes a list of the key questions you need to be asking yourself along each step of the product-market fit process. In addition, it has a calculator template to see how you can score your product-market fit.
Trying to be everything to everyone will result in you being nothing to everyone. Especially for startups, who are often working with a limited budget, it’s always better to have a narrow focus to start. Then, you can go dive deep in that one vertical, making you the clear industry expert in your domain.

To learn more about how to find the right product-market fit, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

How to Tune-Up Your Bullshit Detector 

Posted on October 20, 2022November 4, 2024 by Emotive Brand

In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, “Bullshit is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some way, infused with bullshit.”

As a brand strategy and design agency, we live in the intersection between people and brands. This is perhaps one of the most fertile, organic spaces for bullshit to thrive. The speed of technology has created a sizable gap between those who know what they’re talking about and those who don’t. Our job, to the best of our abilities, is to eradicate the nonsense, the fluff, the jargon, the overpromising and under-delivering.

The truth is, brands have real meaning in our lives and there is some art in strengthening that connection. The inherent tension here is wanting to create something useful, authentic, and emotionally resonate in a space that is and always will be about profit. Some say that’s impossible. Others say that challenge is the very thing that motivates them to produce better work.

Two Ads, Two Approaches in Authenticity

A micro case study: Last month, I attended Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” event that features storytelling, animation, music, and just like a real magazine, ad-breaks. It’s a tough space for sponsored content; these commercials are sandwiched in-between authentic and beautifully produced journalistic pieces.

The first ad-break was for Google’s project, BikeAround, which pairs a stationary bike with Google Street View to take dementia patients on a virtual ride down memory lane. Patients input a street address of a place that means something to them—a childhood home, for instance—and then use the pedals and handles to “bike around” their old neighborhoods. By combining mental and physical stimulation, scientists think this can affect memory management in a profound way. When the ad was over, there was huge applause and even a few teary-eyed audience members.

The second ad-break was for CHANEL, a fast-paced, noir fever dream that beamed messages like, “Seize beauty, all the time, everywhere you go, in a Venetian church, in a boutique of white camellias, in a baroque angel, because it is a vital necessity” straight into our dull, unperfumed brains. When it was over, several people laughed and one person booed.

Is Honesty Just Another Gimmick?

Both Google and CHANEL are trying to sell us something, yet one ad was happily digested and the other spit back. The difference in tone and subject matter here is stark, but it isn’t always as easy to detect. Sure, Google looks like the victor here, but soon after, they were in the news for updating the privacy language for Nest. We all braced for the usual legalese of a terms and conditions manifesto, but were stunned to see a surprisingly transparent document. The text was breathable, there was white space, there was even tasteful, edge-to-edge photography. Do we buy it? Or is this another marketing ploy in the nefarious long-game to pool our data?

The Mirage of Digital Transformation

The first wave of Bay Area entrepreneurship was largely about pitching a vision of digital transformation that was so luminous, so hyperbolic, you couldn’t help but buy in. It’s that classic scene from Silicon Valley, where over a minute-long montage, startup founders pledge to “make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols,” or to “make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints.” No matter how small your product, it was going to have a colossal impact on all of mankind, forever and ever.

I believe we’re in a different era, one that rewards radical honesty (or the illusion of it), utility, and a touch of humility. When I think about my favorite brands right now, they are building products that aim to make a notable difference in people’s lives, as opposed to trying to be their whole lives. We want brands to tell the truth, provide value, and then get out of the way.

People are more skeptical than ever, and with good reason. In a world overrun with fake news, seamless sponsored content, and media scandals, it can be difficult to know what to believe. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, today only 52 percent of global respondents trust businesses. The figures are even more dramatic in the U.S., where a mere 48 percent are similarly trusting, down from 58 percent the previous year. Brands clearly need to re-evaluate their messaging strategies if they are to regain the public’s confidence.

An Incomplete Checklist for Avoiding Bullshit

1. Can you describe it in one sentence?
Brevity is the soul of wit. If you can’t explain what you’re doing in one clean sentence, chances are you’re trying to be everything to everyone. A fantastic exercise is the 100 – 50 – 10 – 5 experiment. The challenge is to describe your company or product in increasingly tighter word counts. Think of this as a sieve for filtering out everything inessential about your brand and the value it provides.

2. Does your mom understand it?
Perhaps the hardest test of all: do your parents understand what you do? Beyond brevity, being able to describe yourself in plain language is key. My parents don’t know what a “global p2p marketplace for homestays and experiences” is, but they understand renting out a spare room to a tourist.

3. Can it be translated into another language?
You know what doesn’t translate well? Buzzwords, jargon, the word “unicorn.” Google Translate is one of the most underrated writing tools at your disposal. It forces you to consider your language in a global context, which you probably should be doing anyway.

4. Does a public service already provide it?
For all the disruptors, innovators, trailblazers, and game-changers out there: if you are working on a slightly modified version of an already-existing public service, you’re not revolutionizing anything. That doesn’t mean you don’t have value, it just means the language you use to describe yourself should be reigned in. It’s tempting to say you’ve “solved commuting” or “transformed how cities move,” but you have to remember: a tech bus is still, first and foremost, a bus.

5. Who is it really for? Who does it exclude? What does the world look like without it?
Who are you really “making the world a better place” for? Can something be revolutionary if it isn’t inclusive, accessible, affordable? Maybe your product isn’t for everyone—and that’s fine! But then your communications shouldn’t be either. When brands veer out of their lane into “universal good” territory, that’s when people call bullshit.

Like death and taxes, bullshit is inevitable. But we don’t have to let brands get away with it. Let’s enter the era of honesty, humility, and transparency—or at least the closest thing to it.

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

Why Do Billion-Dollar Companies Use Stock Photography?

Posted on October 13, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

The following pictures are from the websites of Fortune 100 tech companies in the year 2019. I did not edit or manipulate them in any way, and most of them are only one click away from the landing page. To reiterate, these are companies that drive billions of dollars in revenue, and often spend years crafting their identity.

Three business professionals inexplicably working on one computer, eleven people smiling into the same void, a hand with the power to emit data-point holograms – this is the visual language of stock photography for enterprises.

When it comes to the subject matter, there is a myriad of topics, but as Megan Garber of The Atlantic wrote in 2012, “One of the most wacky, wondrous elements of stock photos is the manner in which, as a genre, they’ve developed a unifying editorial sensibility. To see a stock image is … to know you’re seeing a stock image.”

The benefits of using stock are obvious: cheap, easy to implement, mostly inoffensive, time-saving. But why do so many lucrative companies with the time, resources, and money needed to produce authentic visual assets use stock? Either it doesn’t matter, or companies don’t understand how much it’s hurting them.

Stock Wastes Real Estate

According to an eye-tracking study by Nielsen Norman Group, people gloss over or entirely ignore generic or stock images. Every stock image is like a blank lot on the most valuable strip of real estate your brand has: your website. Regardless if stock isn’t detrimental to your brand, at the very least, it’s invisible. And in a crowded marketplace, whatever isn’t actively working to create meaningful differentiation is hurting you in the long run.

Stock Hurts Your Employer Brand

While there has been an effort in recent years to diversify representation in stock, it’s still a field that is predominately white and male. It may be unconscious, but when you lead with photography that doesn’t allow for other viewpoints to exist, you’re shutting yourself off to future talent.

Seventy percent of women don’t feel represented in media and advertising, and those who purchase stock photography are on the hunt for more inclusive and diverse images. Getty reports huge increases in the following terms over the past year: “real people” 192% increase, “diverse women” 168% increase, and “strong women” 187% increase. With authentic creative, you pull in talent because they see your real team, rather than a computer-generated idea of “teamwork.”

In a great post over at Intechnic, they compare the difference between real and staged photos. One of these women is a real Project Manager, the other woman is from a generic stock photo featured on countless websites. Can you tell which one is which?

It seems small, but the net result of using authentic visual language adds up over time. All of it works toward making your brand identity more approachable and tangible. People will feel more comfortable contacting you, inquiring about a job opening, trusting your products, doing business. As they say over at allBusiness, “There’s nothing more inauthentic than a professionally staged photograph of people who clearly don’t work at the company. It puts your company behind an overly polished veneer that makes you seem distant and possibly uninviting.”

Stock Sacrifices Your Vision and Brand Affinity

Images have a language of their own. For instance, this image tells me, “We need more computers at the office.” When it comes to your brand, your product, your vision of the future, why would you want to lead with someone else’s words? Even if you spend hours burrowing deep into the wormhole of royalty-free images, you’ll always end up making a concession on the integrity of the brand. As writer Grant Epstein says, “Imagine if a print ad for Coca-Cola used a generic image of people holding cups of unidentified brown liquid. It would be so bizarrely off-brand that you wouldn’t even identify it with the company at all.”

A Revolution Is Coming for B2B Design

For the record, there’s nothing inherently evil about stock photography. But for me, it speaks to a larger trend that I don’t quite understand. Why are so many companies, especially those in the B2B tech sector, comfortable with poor design? Why is there such a mental division between our expectations of what B2C and B2B should look, feel, and sound like?

As Ross Simmonds writes in his post, “Why Are Most B2B Websites Designed So Poorly Even in 2019?” from usability challenges to inconsistent visual assets, there’s no shortage of aesthetic issues in the field. Traditionally, B2B companies have complex sales cycles and logistics to convey. Trying to explain CRM, ERP, or inventory management software is obviously more aesthetically challenging than featuring a gorgeous consumer product. Still, that doesn’t mean people are willing to accept poor design, repetitive visuals, or a lack of differentiation. It doesn’t matter how good your product is: nothing sells itself.

“As the average age of B2B buyers drops, their expectations for the online experience rise,” writes Simmonds. “These buyers are expecting a buying experience that resembles something they’d find visiting Amazon, eBay, Etsy or their other favorite online retailer. The best website experiences are created from a place of empathy and a keen understanding of the goals a buyer has when they visit your site.”

As with any challenge, there is also a massive opportunity here for B2B companies that are willing to lead with something bold, emotive, and design-forward. Don’t package your brilliant product in bad creative.

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

This Is Not Another Blog Post: The Power of Differentiation

Posted on September 28, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Somewhere in a humid conference room right now, someone is adding the phrase “disrupt the status quo” to a bulleted list titled “our values.” Can you smell the whiteboard marker? Can you hear the crackled audio of the one remote employee dialing in to suggest that we “shatter the status quo,” since the word “disrupt” is so overdone?

I’ve been there, you’ve been there, you might be there right now. One thing we all know deep down as we finish our third coffee of the morning: this is not how you differentiate your business, brand, or culture in a meaningful way. You can’t just say, “I’m not like those other guys.” You have to prove it out in market.

What Is Differentiation Strategy?

In short, differentiation is about eradicating sameness. It’s an approach that a business takes to develop a unique product, service, or experience that customers will find better, more distinctive, more memorable than the competitors. It’s how you cut through the noise. If successful, it allows the business the opportunity to raise awareness, grow like crazy, and even charge a premium.

Especially in today’s business environment, where since the start of this sentence seven more data companies just materialized, differentiation is everything. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to build great technology. You have to tell great stories, provide incredible experiences, meet the customer where they are, and look good while doing it.

What Are You Making?

The best way to implement differentiation is through invention or innovation. Your product is your shaping clay, and if you’re working with something novel and exciting, you already have a massive head start. Plant-based protein company Beyond Meat is a good example of this. As one of the IPO darlings of 2019, they have experienced exponential growth as a result of being the first entrant in the market. But with Impossible Foods close behind, and juggernauts like Nestle and Tyson developing competitor products, that head start will not last long.

What Are the Options?

Once you have a product, the next chapter of the story is how it’s made, how it’s bundled, how it’s deployed. Across multiple industries, differentiation strategy can be executed at the product level, too. Think about the difference between taking a cab and calling an Uber. If you take a cab, you’re taking a cab. That’s pretty much your level of choice. If you call an Uber, you can select between an UberX, Comfort, Pool, etc. The end result is the same—getting you from A to B—but the experience of Uber embodies more choice and control, further differentiating themselves from competitors in the eyes of the customer.

How Much Does It Cost?

Money shapes our expectations. When I order the second-cheapest bottle of wine on the menu, it is a strategic decision to be disappointed—but only a little bit. Price segmentation is one of the biggest differentiation weapons a brand has, and a powerful lever to pull for margin growth. Are you about luxury or accessibility? Is this an exclusive, premium experience no one else can offer? Is your mission to provide access for all, or empower a small segment to do incredible things? Every decision narrows your focus more and more.

What Does It Look and Feel Like?

This is the bread and butter right here. Everything we’ve mentioned so far has been rational pursuits, the “What?” part of our brain that compares utility to cost. And that’s incredibly important because that opens the door. But how a brand makes you feel is that irresistible, magnetic force that pulls you through the door by the heart. Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform that resolves employees’ IT issues. On its face, IT management doesn’t seem like an emotional decision—but after scrolling through page after page of IT companies, each with similar offerings, how do you make a decision? A bold voice, a clear story, sleek design, interactive UI, a beautiful visual identity—this is what’s going to grab your attention and not let go. Your branding helps you attract the right people—whether prospective customers or employees—and hence plays a crucial role in differentiation.

Where Can I Buy It?

To butcher a Pepsi slogan from 1985, choice is the choice of a new generation. The ways in which we buy are changing all the time, from in-store, to online, to in-app, to subscription models, to droned directly to you straight from your vocal assistant. Your differentiation strategy should extend to your commerce experience, giving customers smart, easy, flexible ways to buy and be sold to.

What Happens After I Buy It?

The end of the purchase should not be the end of the customer journey. That would be the equivalent of being invited into someone’s home and then immediately saying, “Well, I best be going.” Now that you have this connection, you need to foster it by supplying continual value—before they even think to ask for it. That could be in the form of content through a newsletter or granting early access to products and experiences. With “Fans First” emails, Spotify gives access to presale tickets and exclusive merchandise not available anywhere else. You’re being rewarded for using the product, which only encourages you to engage more.

Why Does It Matter?

If there’s only one question you answer on this list, make it this one. For a moment, ignore price, ignore product-market fit, ignore the logo. Why does your brand matter? Why should people care? Why do your employees get up in the morning every day to come to work? What does a world without your brand look like? Why is it absolutely critical that you’re successful in your vision?

Your “Why?” is the ultimate differentiating factor. There will always be copycats and under-sellers, but articulating and delivering on your purpose is the hardest thing to replicate. If you pursue your “Why?” relentlessly, strategically, and passionately, everything else will fall into place.

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

Brand Salience Is the Lifeline Between You and Your Customers

Posted on September 27, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

How Are Purchase Decisions Actually Made?

Let’s say you need to buy a toilet brush. You’re at the store with your partner, and they say, “The brushes are just down that aisle, do you mind grabbing one?” Suddenly, you find yourself in front of a wall of toilet brushes. Never in your life have you actively thought about toilet brushes, toilet brush brands, or the state of the toilet brush market. But now, somehow, you find yourself in the position of trying to form an emotional connection to an object that arguably has the worst job in your house. Do you grab the cheapest one? Or maybe just the one you recognize?

The Magic of Brand Salience

Enter brand salience, the unsung hero of indecisive buyers everywhere. In cognitive psychology, “salience” refers to what is most prominent or noticeable. The term describes how “our attention is drawn to intense stimuli such as bright lights, loud noises, saturated colors, and rapid motion.” For marketers, salience is the degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation.

Not to be confused with top-of-mind awareness, which is simply the link to the name of the product category and depends on a single, specific cue. Salience extends far beyond brand awareness. It’s the probability of a person noticing, recognizing, and thinking about your brand when it matters most.

Emotion-led Decision Making

Why is this important? Because as much as we’d like to believe that people make purchase decisions based on rational, utility-maximizing thought, we don’t. According to a study by Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight and consultancy groups, “Consumers rely on mental shortcuts or heuristics when they make their brand decisions. One such heuristic is to assign greater importance to things that have ready mental availability, the effect of which is to choose the most salient brand.”

All this to say we’re flawed, tenderhearted creatures making most choices based on feeling, experience, or precedent. Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science have done research into brand salience, and they’ve found that it’s largely a function of the quantity and quality of the consumers’ memory structures.

Quantity of Memory Structures

In buying situations, consumers are often driven by mental cues that trigger their thoughts around brand consideration sets. For example, if I’m thinking about finding affordable healthcare coverage that allows me to thrive, I’m likely to consider Kaiser Permanente. Since 2004, their ubiquitous “Thrive” campaign has been a staple across TV, radio, online, print, and outdoor platforms in markets throughout the country. The more memory structures your brand is linked to, the more salient your brand, the more likely it is to be thought of during a buying situation.

Unfortunately, what people remember about brands isn’t always the same across buying decisions. Even if you’ve seen the same ads as me, you might have a completely different association to the word “Thrive.” Quantity alone isn’t enough.

Quality of Memory Structures

Romaniuk and Sharp argue that the quality of brand salience is a function of the strength of the association and the attribute relevance. As a former resident of Oakland where Kaiser is based, I’ve seen countless “Thrive” executions, so the linkage is very strong. Additionally, if affordability is important and relevant to me because I’m on a budget, this further increases brand salience.

The quality of brand salience speaks to that classic ad adage: “When I needed a mattress, I saw mattress ads everywhere. Then after I bought one, they all disappeared.” Your need and desire instruct what you see in the world. What you don’t need becomes invisible. At the end of the day, brand salience is a function of a) the quantity of memory structures your brand is linked to; b) the quality of these structures, as defined by the strength of association and relevance of the structure. Your job as a brand is to stay permanently visible by being exactly what your customer needs, right when they need it.

How Do You Increase Brand Salience?

Increasing brand salience is a real estate battle for taking up the most space in your customers’ heads and hearts. Brands can build their brand salience by developing a number of different memory links in buyers’ minds. This can be done a myriad of ways, whether through differentiation, storytelling, or creating meaning. Whatever you implement, maintaining customer share-of-mind depends on consistent and quality advertising. Deployment of the same distinctive assets is what will help your brand win in the marketplace over time. Here are three actionable measures your brand can take to increase its brand salience.

Lead with emotion to create distinctive, memorable assets. Could you pick your content out of a crowd? Is your design unmistakably yours? How can you make your look and feel unforgettable?
Take a bold risk to get noticed. When we talk about memory, we’re talking about that special signal that cuts through the noise. Who do you remember from the last party you attended? Was it the person quietly minding their own business in the corner? Probably not.
Go out of your way to continuously reach potential buyers. There are new ways to form memory structures with your target audience every day. Whether it’s podcasts, newsletters, or mixed reality brand experiences, every leap in technology is another tool to build a new emotional connection.

The Best Thing To Be Is Remembered

Byron Sharp, author of “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know,” says that the pursuit of differentiation and segmentation is not as useful as “creating memorable and consistent brand assets that trigger an instinctive response when they’re seen or heard at critical purchase moments – in other words, they should focus on brand salience.”

There are so many things to consider when building your brand. Of course, brand salience is not the only factor, especially in B2B situations where the journey to purchase is much more complicated than a single point of sale. Regardless, if you can create memorable and distinctive brand assets that trigger an instinctive response in a purchasing situation, you’ve already won.

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