Sara Gaviser Leslie, Author at Emotive Brand

To Every Marketing VP: How to Talk About Brand so Your CEO Will Listen

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

The Role of VP of Marketing – It’s Not Easy

Is VP of Marketing one of the hardest corporate jobs? We think so. As a Marketing VP, you have a set of responsibilities that varies dramatically day-to-day – and company to company. You touch every area of an organization and engage with almost every member of the leadership team to solve your business’s most pertinent problems. People look to you to drive demand gen campaigns, build awareness for products and the overall brand, support sales teams, support the company’s HR, and fuel recruitment efforts. And, of course, no technology marketing job is complete if you aren’t working to get included – and/or maintain your place – in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Even if you do all of these things well, though, nothing matters if you don’t have a strong brand strategy. Your brand strategy connects your work in marketing to the business strategy. It provides a backbone to everything you do. It explains what you do, why you matter, and what people should expect from you. If you don’t have a strong brand strategy, you risk confining yourself to the role of executor, not an essential member of the company’s leadership.

Whether you use an outside agency or bring together a team within your company, first off, you’ll need to convince the CEO to invest in the brand development process. We’ve found that this can be the most difficult step in developing your brand strategy because CEOs often don’t understand it! You mention “brand strategy” and you hear:
“We have a logo,” or, “I like our color scheme,” or “PR’s doing a great job getting us press.”

Maybe your CEO has had a bad experience with a branding project – and wants to avoid more of the same in the future. They respond to you with something like this:

“A brand strategy workshop? I don’t want to tell people my spirit animal!”

So How Do You Get Around CEO Misconceptions About Brand Strategy?

First, you need to explain that a brand strategy is just that, a strategy. It describes why and how you do what you do. It creates meaningful and emotional connections between the brand and both internal and external audiences. One of the most important elements of brand strategy is positioning. Positioning is about separating your company from your competitors, telling the market where you stand as a brand, and explaining the part of the market that you will own.

Then, depending on what you are trying to accomplish, here’s how you should talk about the business problems your brand strategy project solves:

Demand Gen: A strong brand will differentiate you from your competitors and convert leads
Go-to-market Strategy: When you’ve got a great brand story to tell – crisp and interesting – you can increase customer awareness. You develop pull for your brand and drive sales.
Recruiting and Retention: When you purposely build emotion into your brand, you create the potential for not just customers but also current and prospective employees to opt in.

Language Matters: Talk Business

For example, if the project you want to invest in will drive all marketing initiatives for the year, explain to the CEO that your “repositioning” project takes a new cut at the company’s go-to-market strategy, helps to differentiate the product, and increases productivity of the channel and grow sales.

If you want to do an employer brand project and must convince your company’s Head of People or HR, talk about “internal alignment”,“culture”, and“behavior”, and how your work will ultimately reduce turnover and recruiting costs.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, when you take the word “brand” out of the conversation and focus on the business problem, you speak in a language that a non-marketing person can understand. You also introduce accountability – solutions to business problems have measurable and reliable results. When you use business terms to sell your brand project, you’ll have an easier time reaching your audience and, ultimately, be more successful.

Emotive Brand a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

You may also like this post about aligning business strategy and brand strategy for long term growth.

A Corporate Narrative: Convincing the Skeptics

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

The Case for a Corporate Narrative

CEOs often doubt the necessity of a corporate narrative. As a marketing or salesperson, you see messaging and storytelling as strategic tools. But what if they’re only fluffy buzzwords to whomever signs the consultant’s check? How do you convince someone who sees the world in revenue and profit to invest in a positioning process?

You speak their language and you support your arguments with numbers.

We’ve listed some quantified benefits of a corporate narrative to convince even your toughest negotiators:

1. Drive Corporate Value

McKinsey & Company found that companies with strong reputations generate 31% more return to shareholders than the MSCI World average.

2. Engage Employees

A company with a strong narrative boasts more engaged employees and typically finds it easier to hire, motivate and retain talent. According to a Watson Wyatt study, companies with high employee engagement outperform those with low engagement levels by 186%.

3. Connect in B2B

Again, according to a McKinsey & Company study, enterprise organizations now view a corporate narrative as a “central rather than marginal element of a supplier’s proposition.” In fact, B2B companies with clear narratives perform 20% better than companies with weak narratives.

In addition, strong narratives influence enterprise buyers’ decisions. A study found that B2B decision-makers are 10% more likely to consider solutions from companies that the market understands and feels connected to. The top 10 connected companies demonstrated a 31% greater growth in revenue than the 10 least connected organizations.

4. Command a Price Premium

The impact of a strong, clear master narrative is the ability of the company to command a premium price. A recent study indicates that brands that provide remarkably clear and unexpectedly fresh experiences garner greater customer loyalty and increase revenue. The same research revealed that 63% of customers are willing to pay more for simpler experiences.

5. Bolster Reputation

Corporate value is closely tied to a company’s reputation. A powerful narrative works to enhance reputation and serves as a promise and acts as a kind of insurance when a company is unable to deliver on this promise. Companies with stronger reputations even get the benefit of the doubt by investors in a crisis versus those who don’t, 54% vs. 20% of the time.

Additional Benefits

Furthermore, companies with strong narratives have an easier time launching and driving the adoption of new products. Kasper Ulf Nielsen, an executive partner at the Reputation Institute, said, “People’s willingness to buy, recommend, work for, and invest in a company is driven 60% by their perceptions of the company and only 40% by their perceptions of their products.”

You know that a strong narrative will differentiate you from the competition, motivate your stakeholders, help you attract customers and employees, and, most importantly, increase revenue. But when your colleagues make decisions with data, you can explain the process ad nauseam without convincing them to move forward. So give them the data they need. End your frustration and, instead, use the evidence we gathered to make your case.

You’re welcome.

Emotive Brand is a Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Laser-Focused Branding and the Sales Learning Curve

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Not For the Masses

Every company wants to climb the Sales Learning Curve — a model for establishing and ramping up a sales force and increasing sales yield — faster. But few focus on branding as a way to accomplish that. In fact, a laser-focused brand is a critical driver of your sales reps’ ramp-up and revenue growth. It sounds risky to create a brand and launch a product based on the needs of a very defined group. But it might just be a better approach to branding and marketing.

The Laser-Focused Branding of PubMatic

Take the company, PubMatic. Before contacting Emotive Brand, PubMatic had spent years trying to serve everyone in the ad-tech ecosystem. We helped them see that laser focus on a specific kind of customer would help them both create a stronger, more compelling brand, and clarify their business strategy. PubMatic chose to double down on publishers: this group struggled more than any other to keep up with ever-evolving digital advertising technology and to stay relevant. So we developed an Emotive Brand strategy for PubMatic that repositioned PubMatic away from ad-tech and to a marketing automation platform designed for publishers. While this approach intentionally left some potential customers on the sidelines, it’s paid off. PubMatic has had quarter over quarter revenue growth ever since they narrowed their focus.

Laser-Focused Branding and Getting to the Heart of It

The job of sales and marketing is to show how your products solve customers’ pain. As the PubMatic case shows, while a product may be relevant to many potential customers, narrowing your focus to beachhead customers — those accounts where the product-market fit is strongest — may be the best way to boost your brand. (Sequoia Capital, by the way, has a great piece on how companies create “sales ready products” and dives into beachhead customers in greater depth.) If you can’t get the attention of beachhead customers, you’ll struggle to gain traction and sales will come slowly. In cybersecurity, for instance, financial institutions are often early adopters of new technology. If a security company chose to laser focus its brand just on this group, it would likely uncover a list of common objections and learn which features matter — or don’t — to most financial services companies. Beachhead customers might not care about the same things as your wider customer base, but when you double down on the capabilities and features that really matter to them, you can increase the rate at which you climb the Sales Learning Curve.

Just naming beachhead customers or industry, of course, isn’t enough. You’ve got to have an intimate understanding of who they are and what matters to them. Our Customer Journey Mapping process is about deep customer research. We help companies understand the role a product and brand plays in individuals’ lives and then optimize the brand around this customer experience. The result is a brand that holds meaning in people’s lives.

Sales Comes Into the Picture

Brand strategy and positioning answers integral questions like: Why does your product matter? Why does it matter now? How is it different and better than what competitors are doing now? Sales teams answer these questions every day. This is why our brand strategy work, if possible, always includes involving a company’s sales team. We don’t like to take Sales out of the field unnecessarily, but we try to leverage enough people so that the resulting brand strategy benefits from their front-line experiences. And once we have a new positioning and messaging, we often conduct training sessions with sales teams.

It’s easy to want to deliver everything that any of your potential customers desire. But when you target a well-defined customer group’s needs, you have to decide what your brand will support — and what it won’t. Laser-focused branding helps you more quickly pinpoint what matters most to customers which, in turn, strengthens your brand.

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

How Not to Fail in a Super Bowl Ad

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Ads Can Only Get You So Far

Do you remember the ad for Mophie from a few Super Bowls back? Neither do I. What I do recall is a small, private company spending what seemed like a crazy amount – around $5M – on a Super Bowl ad. And while Mophie is still chugging along, it certainly isn’t conquering the world.

Interestingly though, the mistake they made wasn’t spending too much on the ad. In fact, the 1-minute spot allowed the brand to reach hundreds of millions of potential buyers. The error they made was spending that kind of money on advertising when they hadn’t yet built and honed their brand to warrant it. The commercial gave them 10 seconds of fame, rather than reinforcing the brand and propelling it forward.

Building Brand

Some companies are a lot smarter about brand building.

Driving on the highway the other day, I saw an example of a company that’s taken the opposite approach: Lyft. A billboard they put up next to their headquarters along Northbound Highway 101 states this:

Thanks to

the aspiring architects,

the caretakers

the overachievers.

We know you’re

more than drivers.

So no matter what

you’re driving toward, we’ll help

you get there.

It matters how you get there.

Lyft has decided that the partnership they forge with drivers will distinguish them from their competition. Lyft doesn’t just exist to make money from passengers, it also provides a convenient and flexible way for people to earn money to support their needs and wants. By calling out “caretakers”, “aspiring architects” and “overachievers”, Lyft reinforces their beliefs that their drivers are not a homogenous group and have different goals. When I looked up their values on the Lyft website, I wasn’t at all surprised to see “Drive toward what matters,” followed by this explanation: “Wherever you’re going, we’ll help you get there — and will be here as long as you need us.” It’s not a “you work for us” relationship.

Lyft’s advertisements reinforce and propel the brand forward – and we the brand it working. Lyft continues to invest in their brand because the payoff is huge.

Not Just B2C

These are, of course, consumer examples — I chose them because you may be familiar with the companies. The same rules, however, hold true for B2B brands. You might not put up billboards but you probably do some demand gen marketing, right?

Your demand gen campaign has to reflect your brand. If your prospects have had at least some exposure to your brand, they should be able to immediately make a connection between the emails you send them and what they already know of your brand. It should just “fit”. If they don’t know your brand, what you tell them in your demand gen collateral should give an inkling of what you are about, not just describe your new software release.

So before you start advertising, launch an email campaign, or cement your sales strategy, do some work on your brand. If you don’t, all that investment you make may be a big, ‘ol Mophie waste of money.

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

Early Warning Signs You Need a Brand Refresh

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Brand Presentation Counts

Presentation is everything. It’s the way a gourmet meal looks on the plate, what you wear for a job interview, or the tidiness and odor of your hotel room when you open the door.

The same rings true with a corporate brand.

Your brand is who you are. When your brand presentation is clear, people understand who you are and what you stand for in the world. On the other hand, when your presentation doesn’t make a great first impression, you must prepare to deal with the fallout.

This is why when we work with clients, we often need to stress that how you present your brand externally is different from what you say internally. Externally, you speak to shareholders, partners, and customers.

We believe external messages must address these four questions:

Who are you?
Why do you matter?
What do you do?
How do you do what you do?

You communicate these same ideas to your internal audiences — your employees, foremost, and, secondarily, your board of directors. But you have to tailor them for each audience. Not only does the way you communicate your brand connect your stakeholders to your strategic goals and objectives, it also affects your ability to be a sought-after employer and great place to work. You’ll attract and retain great people when you socialize and operationalize corporate strategy in a way that employees can understand and relate back to why it matters to them.

So how do you get to a place where you can communicate simply, strongly, and boldly?

You create the right message for the right audience and the right message for the right time.

Recognizing The Need for a Refresh

First, ask yourself, “Can we easily articulate who we are and why we matter?” More specifically:

Is our story simple?
Is it externally focused? Internally focused?
Is it easy for people to know everything we offer?

Or try some more tactical, capital investment questions:

When is the last time we invested in a brand campaign?
How is our lead gen?
Are we investing in content?

Maybe the easiest question to answer is this one:

“Can everyone in the company, even outside of the sales organization, give the pitch with confidence? Can they do it in 10 slides? Would it be consistent overall?”

Time for Change

If you don’t like the answer to these questions, you need to change how you present your brand.

It’s time to bring someone from the outside in to freshen up your story and your presentation so you can to start the new year in full alignment.

We’re here to help.

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

The Right Ad, Just When you Need It: Talking “Moment Marketing” with Randy Wootton

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Randy Wootton and Moment Marketing

Continuing our Emotive Brand expert series, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else – and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today.

In this post, we speak with Randy Wootton, former CEO of Rocket Fuel, a past Emotive Brand client whose positioning project resulted in a major acquisition for the company. In this interview, we talk about the evolution of marketing and advertising today and why brands poised for success are focusing in on what Randy calls “Moment Marketing.”

Below, we discuss his book in-progress and hear what he has to say about one-to-one marketing, audience segmentation, AI, and the future of advertising. Could advertising ever be truly helpful for consumers? Even welcome? Randy says it’s possible. Read his interview below:

Tell me about your book-in-progress, Moment Marketing?

First, let me clarify what I mean by “moment”. When I use that term, people often think about big moments in their lives: the groundbreaking discovery, a wedding proposal, or solution to a difficult problem. But 99% of moments are banal. Moment marketing means you reach the right person at the right time, at the right place, in context.

Last weekend, for instance, I sat on my couch and watched the Raiders with my 11-year-old son. He played a Disney game on his phone. I checked email. It was a perfect opportunity for Disney – or a similar advertiser – to create a wraparound experience. If they could push an ad to me for a 20% discount on my next trip while also placing an ad in my son’s game, chances are the advertising would be a lot more effective than a Disney billboard I pass on the way to work.

If we’re targeting individuals, is that the end of audience segmentation?

I think it is. Segments can be helpful but they also limit you. Think about one of the popular segments: soccer moms. Marketers make many assumptions about this group and target based on age, gender, and location. But segments don’t capture the robustness of individuals. They don’t describe individuals; they don’t tell you that one mom has other kids who do baseball and guitar but hate soccer.

When you track individuals’ actions, interactions with brands, and purchases and then target them one-on-one, you can be much more precise. What’s even better than that, though, is engaging them at the right time, in the moment.

You have said that consumers could eventually welcome advertising. Really?

Think about Amazon today. When you look for a book, they suggest other titles you might enjoy as well as reviews of those books. When you get this data at the right time, in context, it improves your experience. Consumers aren’t opposed to advertising, they are opposed to bad advertising!

In a world of Moment Marketing, what will stop advertisers from hounding me with ads for the pair of shoes I didn’t buy?

Online advertising today is disruptive and interruptive. Moment marketing requires companies ingest lots of data in near real time and take action in less than 20 milliseconds. That’s where AI comes in. You need insight engines to mine all of this data or you’ll get overwhelmed and drive your customers and prospects crazy. AI can help us discern the relevant data and then deliver advertising at the right time, in context.

Do you think marketers are ready for AI?

Right now, we are still in early innings of understanding the possibility of data. Think about when people first rode in cars. It probably seemed very dangerous. People named cars “horseless carriages” because the only way they could conceive of the future was through lens of the past. We are going to see computers make decisions more and more often. Marketers will have to surrender control and trust results. Otherwise, they’ll stand in the way of progress – and higher conversion.

How does this affect non-digital commerce? Brick-and-mortar stores?

It will be the end of those flimsy circulars we get in the mail, for sure. I see marketers getting really good at combining offline and online. Holiday shopping, for example, will be defined by mobile. When I go Toys R Us to shop for Christmas presents, that’s when I want to know about the hottest toys and receive a discount coupon.

The opportunity to stitch online and offline together thru predictive marketing is radical. When marketers understand individuals and context, they create more meaningful experiences. Companies that successfully do this will differentiate themselves in the market and, ultimately, capture more than their fair share of revenue.

Stay tuned for what both Randy and Emotive Brand do next.

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

Timing a Positioning Project: How to Set Yourself up for Success

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

When Considering a Positioning Project: Timing Is Everything

A positioning project requires a serious commitment of time and attention from your team, as well as a financial investment. Whether you do it yourself or partner with a firm, you’ll (hopefully) end up with a positioning you can own that differentiates you in the marketplace.

The most successful positioning projects we’ve run have three things in common: time, attention, and urgency.

So how do you figure out the best time to start a positioning project?

We’ve seen positioning projects thrive when:

Your business, sales, or competitor issues require you to invest now.
Your executive – or sales – team is asking for the project and motivated to make it a success.
You have the chance to test it right away, i.e. a compelling even or launch.

Here are some instances where timing aligns for a maximum impact positioning.

1. Sales Kickoff

Most companies invest in readying their sales team in Q1 of each year. That means that Q4 is one of the best times to launch a positioning project. Chances are, the team will focus on positioning because they know the new positioning will affect the pitch and, most importantly, revenue.

Kickoff is also the perfect test-market for the positioning. When you see new sales messaging in action, you know exactly what changes are necessary to create an emotional connection with customers

Similarly, when you bring in a new head of sales, they’ll want to refine or even overhaul the sales pitch. That’s another good time to assemble your team and figure out who you are as a company and the messages you want to bring to the market.

2. Fundraising

Most pitch decks detail your technology, team, roadmap, and use of funds. But what you really need to sell to investors is how you will change the world and why people should care. Your positioning is core to this story. Like most startups, your positioning will change slightly – or drastically – in your company’s first years. Whatever your positioning was the last time you raised money, before you go out to the market again, it most likely needs a refresh.

3. M&A

When you complete a merger or acquisition, everyone from the executives down to the front line should share the same story. That story reflects your positioning. Once you bring two companies together, the new company will be eager to move into the next phase of growth. When you agree on your positioning and narrative, you’ll decrease the assimilation period and accelerate at a quicker pace.

4. Customer Event/Product Launch

Think VMworld, Dreamforce, and Oracle OpenWorld. These events connect you with your most loyal customers and motivated prospects. You’ll probably announce a product launch – or two – during the conference and your marketing team will create mountains of content just for that event. Your positioning must shine through all of your keynote speeches, signage, and even swag. A strong positioning and messaging can unify all that you do at the event and ensure that your content is meaningful and relevant to the story you need to tell.

5. Keynote Speech

Finally, while it doesn’t have the urgency or attention of a sales kickoff, when you are invited to speak at an event, you have the chance introduce – or reintroduce – your company and message to the world. If your positioning needs a revamp, this is the perfect time. Your speech can begin to situate your company in peoples’ minds and hearts, setting the tone for business to come.

The Clock is Ticking

Like any big project, timing matters. When you consider a positioning project, consider your calendar. Timing is one of the common denominators of a repositioning project’s success: when you launch a positioning at a point of inflection, you increase the likelihood that the shift goes as smoothly and successfully as possible. So look at the big picture, look at the clock, and make timing a part of your positioning equation.

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