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How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Posted on 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 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 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 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.

Stock Photography 1

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.”

Stock Photography 3

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

Stock Photography 2

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 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

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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.

  1. 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?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Storytelling Is the Best Bridge Between Customers and Solutions

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Once Upon a Sales Deck

Salespeople want to sell. This much we know. Often, in our conversations with clients or in our perusing of sales decks, we hear a similar refrain. How do we cut to the chase and get to the meat? We don’t blame them. In today’s millennial-influenced age of purpose, you could sit through a narrative, a manifesto, a history lesson, a personal testimony, and a video on corporate social responsibility all before learning what someone is actually selling you.

That’s the balancing act. You’re only as strong as your story—but if your story goes on too long, meanders, or doesn’t naturally bridge to your solutions, people will read something else. When done properly, a story is the shortest distance between what your brand does and why people should care.

The Cost of Confessionals

Consider this study conducted by Origin/Hill Holliday. They asked 3,000 online panel participants between the ages of 23 and 65 about the perceived value of various listings. In every case, the addition of a story—whether it’s from a customer, an origin story, or even short fiction—increased the value, sometimes up to 64 percent!
storytelling

We hate unnecessary front-matter in sales decks more than anyone. But when you look at the numbers, it becomes clear that storytelling isn’t trite, it’s a trenchant tool. In a short amount of space, stories can do the heavy lifting of connecting your vision to your portfolio. As much as you might want to dive directly into the organizational prowess of your cloud infrastructure, it’s worth pausing to discuss the transformational outcomes of your product. What happens when everything works like it’s supposed to? Picture the worst day of your customer’s life—how does their experience change when they interact with your brand?

In a Crowded Marketplace, Far, Far Away …

Take the stylish and digitally-minded luggage brand Away. In an incredibly crowded marketplace, they’ve been able to differentiate themselves through their sleek design, cost transparency, and use of storytelling to elevate their solutions. Their blog isn’t about the intricacies of wheel design—it’s a travel magazine designed to activate your wanderlust. (And then, of course, buy their products.) As they say in their narrative, “If you’re looking down at your dying phone and broken bag, you can’t see up, out, and ahead to the world in front of you.”

By using storytelling to articulate the highest possible value, they take the customer on a journey from product to benefit. A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product. As goes the saying, people don’t buy features, they buy better versions of themselves.

 

This is in no way limited to B2C—B2B brands can be emotive, and should be. According to research by Google in partnership with Motista and CEB, 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy if they can connect emotionally with your brand. It starts with your goals, objectives, mission, and vision. But beyond that, it’s being able to communicate the professional, social, and emotional benefits one experiences in addition to the actual product. Storytelling can go a long way in bridging that gap.

The most important thing to remember in crafting your story is authenticity. Away sells luggage, they tell travel stories. Lenovo sells computers, they tell stories about people doing innovative things with computers. “When authenticity is put forward as the priority,” says Taj Forer, Co-founder & CEO of fabl, “the emotive stories will generate themselves as the organic byproduct.” In other words, you’re not allowed to airlift some emotional story into your brand if it doesn’t make sense.

Equipping your sales team with the right library of emotive stories gives them even more arrows in their quiver. So, they can do what they do best: sell.

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

What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One

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There’s a lot of talk about the concept of a brand promise. But, what is it? Why does my business need one? How would it make my business stronger? How does it relate to my brand strategy? Here we explore the answers to these pressing questions.  And perhaps more important, what kind of a brand promise does your business need in today’s world to have an impact?

A brand is a promise delivered.

A contemporary brand promise articulates an idea that goes beyond the rational benefits that worked in the past, and extols a higher-order emotional reward. A brand promise is not a slogan or advertising headline. It is not, by definition, a public statement (though it can be as long as your brand truly lives up to it). Finally, it is not a “unique selling proposition”. Indeed, its uniqueness and differentiating power comes not from what it says, but how it transforms the way your organization creates strong and meaningful connections with people.

Continue reading “What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One”

A Floor to Ceiling Look at Naming Architecture

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The other day I was researching printers. After narrowing my search based on the features that mattered, I landed on the Canon’s LBP623Cdw. I’m familiar with Canon from the cameras, the rest of the name might as well have been written in cuneiform. After some sleuthing, I discovered that LBP stands for Laser Beam Printer, 623 is the model line, C is for color, and dw means duplex wireless. As a brand naming architecture, I’m sure this name makes perfect sense to the product manager who approved it. But for consumers who need a reason to connect with a product as they consider a purchase, the name falls flat on its face.

Brand Naming Architecture

Naming architecture is one of the hardest things for a brand to get right, because the very need for an architecture means that you’re trying to solve for complexity. When we think of naming architecture, we start with our brand architecture. If your brand architecture is a House of Brands like Johnson & Johnson, then Band-Aid, Tylenol, Listerine, and Aveeno are names that live under the same roof but don’t need to be synchronized. They’re more collegial than connected. But for a Branded House architecture like Google’s, Google Docs, Google Earth, and Google Cloud all exist to support the Google Master Brand by communicating shared values and affinities. Similarly, internal naming (where there’s often less governance and more chaos) should lean into a Branded House naming architecture. That way, everything from how to brand your SKO to intranet, internal functions, and conference rooms all feel like they belong to the same family.

Alphanumeric Architecture

For the Branded House, naming architecture is a must for helping people navigate your products or offerings to locate what they need, engage with the appropriate product, and evangelize it. When we go back to Canon’s LBP623Cdw, we find an alphanumeric architecture that sits at the lowest rung of naming approaches. While the masterbrand (Canon) is the beacon that attracts consumers, the product name does very little to help people locate the right model, and because the name doesn’t tell a story, it’s not memorable and won’t help drive loyalty. Car manufacturers fall into this habit as well: Honda’s CR-V and HR-V don’t fit the automaker’s otherwise evocative architecture of city cars (Civic, Insight, Accord) and country cars (Ridgeline) and don’t build any emotional connection to the model.

While alphanumeric architectures offer the ability to provide more detail and are infinitely scalable (like the Dewey Decimal system), they represent codes more than evocative names, which falls short in terms of building awareness and driving engagement with people who aren’t brand loyalists. 

Value-based Architecture

 As we move up the spectrum of how names become more human and relatable, a values-based architecture that communicates a Good-Better-Best gradation is the most popular naming strategy. We’ve seen our share of Bronze-Silver-Gold builds in naming (think airline loyalty programs, or Standard-Premium-Luxury editions in the auto industry). Here the job of the naming architecture is to set expectations in terms of both functionality, experience, and price. Apple gives us a clear example in how they approach their tablet naming, where the iPad (standard), iPad Air (lighter), and iPad Pro (more powerful) give consumers an easy path for understanding the increasing value that these different models deliver. And because these names are easy to understand, intuitive, and memorable, customers are better equipped to act as evangelists. 

Emotion-based Architecture

At the pinnacle of naming architectures are strategies that deliver on being functional, consistent, and evocative all at once. A great example comes from a surprising place: IKEA. English speakers might be åstönishëd, but the furniture giant’s product naming makes complete sense in its native Swedish. Each product has a unique, evocative name that falls within a category. Bathroom products, for example, are all bodies of water. Desks and chairs are named after boys, with fabrics and curtains named after girls. Garden furniture takes its name from Scandinavian islands. 

The IKEA model isn’t entirely consistent, and names don’t have any obvious connection to the product category. But for a massive company with thousands of products, it’s a refreshing model and a remarkable achievement. And it works at both ends of the customer journey: there’s a whimsical pleasure in stumbling upon a bath mat called the Alpine Lake, and if someone asks you to pick one up, you’ll know which section to find it in.

Which approach to choose

We won’t say that Canon’s (and other tech companies’) use of alphanumeric naming is wrong. They’re simply following an industry standard and their business doesn’t seem to be suffering from it. But if they wanted to choose to compete differently and redefine their category, they would need to also adapt their approach to naming.

For most brands, a good-better-best approach achieves the important goal of creating clarity for consumers. The less confusion a person encounters in navigating your offerings, the more quickly they’ll find what they need and be able to engage with it. 

But for the companies that aspire to turn their names into advertisements that tell stories through their offerings, emotional-based architectures give them the opportunity to use naming to elevate the brand. 

The most important consideration is ,of course, the audience you want to connect with. How has the category set their expectations? What do their awareness and customer journeys entail? What type of loyalties do you want to build? And how do you see them playing the role of evangelist? Answering these questions will help you identify the best naming architecture for connecting your offering with customers, and driving the differentiation that sets your brand apart. 

 

 

Not Another Outdoor Brand: The Appeal of Meat Eater

Posted on by Emotive Brand

In our last blog post, Joanna Schull explored an approach to companies that are creating their own categories. Today, we’ll talk about what happens when a brand takes an existing market category and turns it on its head entirely. When this happens organically, as part of a larger vision, the results can surprise and excite.

Sandwiched between the romcoms, reality shows, and “Steamy Thrillers” of Netflix, you can find Meat Eater. In its tenth season, the show centers on hunting and fishing across multiple continents. There’s a clue to Meat Eater’s ambitions in its name: a determination to bring the drama of chasing animals back to its ultimate purpose of consumption. The show’s logo, in which moose tines transform into dinner forks, echoes this idea.

At the center of Meat Eater is Steven Rinella, a lanky, 48-year-old Michigan native and lifelong hunter and fisherman. Rinella is the series’ narrator, founder, and nucleus; around him orbit a rotating cast of characters: old friends, hunting guides, the occasional celebrity. Rinella’s spare commentary and self-effacing humor let the drama of the show unfold around him, and much of Meat Eater’s appeal is in watching him watch the rugged country he hikes through, waxing philosophical as he gazes through binoculars. 

Lesson 1: Differentiate from those in your market category.

Meat Eater’s depiction of a life in the wild isn’t radically new. All good hunters and anglers, by definition, need to be both cooks and conservationists. But conventional hunting TV shows rarely go beyond treestand grip-and-grins, leaving crucial parts of the story untold and making it inevitable that a new voice will stand out and get noticed.

The show’s pace is set by long, meditative shots of the natural landscape, punctuated by Rinella’s observations on the behavior of the animal he’s after, the ecology of the larger region, or both. Stalk sequences are predictably thrilling, but they’re not a given: Rinella and his crew will release episodes whether they find success or not. After a rifle shot, the depiction of field-dressing game is unflinching, but the camera’s gaze doesn’t linger there. Instead, in a stylistic shift, we’re off to a cabin or country kitchen, where Meat Eater reveals itself to be a cooking show.

Lesson 2: Change the category, challenge expectations.

Outdoor sports programming. Nature documentary. Cooking show. Meat Eater combines and confounds all three. Is it a Bourdainian foodie epic with a really long intro? Or a carefully considered attempt to reclaim hunting culture from the likes of Ted Nugent? Encountering the unexpected creates interest, and keeps your audience hooked.

Here, Rinella deftly breaks down game into roasts, medallions, and burger patties, showcasing recipes (Kung Pao Bear, for one) you won’t find on the Food Network. Meat Eater’s host is as comfortable with a cast iron pan as he is with a rod or gun, and it’s telling that the majority of his published books are cookbooks.

Along with the cookbooks, the Meat Eater media brand comprises spinoff shows, podcasts, and a website with a broad scope of articles (sample titles: How to Make Ramp Powder, Live 7-Foot Sturgeon in Car Trunk Leads to Massive Poaching Ring Bust). There are partnerships with apparel brand First Lite and rifle maker Weatherby, as well as an ascendant sub-brand, Wild and Whole, that caters to foragers and homesteaders. 

Lesson 3:  Know your audience.

Bowhunters, committed locavores, and environmental activists. Seeing the Venn diagram plot of these people is one thing; seeing how they can be the same person is another. The COVID-era explosion in outdoor exploration is nudging separate interest groups together in fertile and synergistic ways. Acknowledging an audience is about more than setting up a big tent: it’s about understanding inclusivity by way of the common thread that can tie people together.

America’s most famous chef may not be a hunter, but America’s most famous hunter is certainly a chef, as well as a citizen scientist and creative writing MFA (University of Montana, natch). Standing at the intersection of environmentalism, guns, ethical consumption, and animal welfare, Meat Eater straddles a political tinderbox, yet it manages to be a whole that outshines its parts. It’s proof that reimagining what category you’re in – and who your audience could be – can transform your business.

Blowing Up the Typical 9 to 5

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Adapt. Modify. Restructure. Sometimes, it feels like these three words are all anyone in the workforce has been doing since the pandemic started. We adapted to working from home, we modified our work schedules to include a hybrid of in-office and at home, and we restructured our workdays to allow all of us some flexibility in the chaos. 

As an agency, we’ve gotten pretty good at navigating unknown, potentially convoluted problems and finding actionable, savvy solutions. We’re in the business of turning straw (complexity) into gold (opportunity).

At Emotive Brand, one of the good things to come out of the pandemonium — I mean pandemic — is something we call Maker Hours. What are Maker Hours? Great question. We sat down with members of the team, including one of our founders, Bella Banbury, to talk about the origin of Maker Hours and why we love them. 

What are Maker Hours?

Maker Hours are blocks of time that allow us as individuals, and as a team, to dive headfirst into our work. They are also periods of time for us to bring some flexibility into our workdays. This can mean we take a couple of hours to really focus on a project for a client, go for a midday workout, or spend a little more time working on new design skills. 

Most importantly, Maker Hours allows us to continue to find a balance between our work lives and personal lives. Even if that just means blocking off time to watch the kids, walk the dog, or log off Zoom for an hour. The key word here is flexibility. 

Why did we start Maker Hours?

It all started in March 2020 with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of our projects were either canceled or put on hold within the first few weeks. Bella Banbury notes that, like many businesses, we went through a round of layoffs and had to ask everyone on the team to take a 20% cut in salary. Knowing what we were asking of our team, we went to a four-day work week. As the line between work and home blurred a bit with remote work, we realized that the extra day off was incredibly valuable to everyone on the team. It gave us some time to step away from screens especially when we were all constantly worrying about health, financial security, and our families. 

Within the next couple of months, business began to bounce back. Projects that were previously on hold had started up again and we were able to go back to full pay for all of our employees. Bella Banbury says, “We had come to realize that we needed something different. Not necessarily, a four-day workweek, just more flexibility in how and when we did the work. People wanted heads down space to do work or time to get away from constantly being on screens.”

Sometimes, the best work is done when there are no distractions and we can build out the structure of our day regardless of meetings. Maker Hours allow space for deep, uninterrupted thinking. We get to dive into a project in ways we haven’t been able to during the regular workday.  

“I use Maker Hours for getting things off the ground. I find that the distance between Nothing and Something ends up being much greater than the distance between Good and Great. Our brains are natural editors and if something exists, we can’t help but refine it,” says Chris Ames, Creative Lead.

Additionally, it’s all about trying to find a balance that will help keep us productive, sane, and level-headed with this new way of working. Rob Saywitz, Design Director, notes that, “something we lost in the pandemic is there is no commute or hard demarcation between home life and work life. There’s no natural balance. It all bleeds together.” Now, our ‘commute’ looks a lot like carrying coffee from the kitchen to the dining table. It’s so hard to find the line between work and life when we actually bring work home with us every night. 

Maker Hours doesn’t necessarily make us more productive than we were before the pandemic. The benefits are that we found a way to give ourselves the space to separate work and home in a way that allows us to be there for our clients, but also be there for ourselves. Saja Chodosh, Strategist, says, “Before COVID-19 when we first started working remotely, you only worked 9-to-5. Now, it all blends together. Balance doesn’t have to fit a certain equation or schedule. Maker Hours helps you find your own way to nourish yourself and find balance.”

Maker Hours gives us the space to create, take a step back, recharge, and do what we need to do to make sure the work we put forward as a company is the best it can be. During these hours, the main objective is to give ourselves autonomy over our time with the understanding that we have control over how and when we get the work done. Finding a sense of renewal when the world is working at warp speed can be tough and we are always searching for new ways to improve how we approach the work we do and how we create the best product possible for our clients. This is equally about our clients as it is about the wellness of our team.  Creating that work/life balance is a work in progress, but Maker Hours has been a great step in the right direction for all of us at Emotive Brand.