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Author: Tracy Lloyd

Defining What a Brand Is: Why Is It So Hard?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Why is defining brand so difficult? Think of how quickly the bounds of brand design, voice, expression, and experience have expanded and continue to expand, thanks to the Big Bang of the internet and now the cosmic shift of AI.

If you were born somewhere south of the turn of the century, you may recall when brands were curated and controlled.

Mainly composed of a logo, tagline, ads, and packaging, brands were more like museum exhibits than living, breathing entities. That’s because so few touchpoints delineated the scope of people’s engagement.

Today? Not so much.

Here’s the thing. “Brand” is somehow just as easy to define, but harder to get your head and hands around: It’s everything—all the ever-multiplying experiences and impressions people have with and of your company, people, and products.

And all those moments of interplay between humans and brands release emotional energy that reverberates outward, in reviews, social media posts, tradeshow chatter, YouTube unboxing videos, reddit threads, and beyond.

That’s why it’s so critical to thoughtfully craft every brand experience and outcome you have the agency to shape.

Brand is how you respond to questions on Instagram. Whether your customer support is hands-on or MIA. How you treat your employees, and how they in turn show up for customers. The authenticity, or lack thereof, in your messaging and whether you lead or follow with design. It’s the choices you make and how they affect people.

Perhaps a strict definition isn’t appropriate for such a dynamic, expansive concept, anyway. So here are a few of Emotive Brand’s fundamental principles for giving your brand shape, meaning, and the power to move people–to action and loyalty.

Own and deliver on your brand’s emotional impact.

Putting emotion at the center of your brand gives you a barometer for decision-making and inspiration for meaningful, inimitable creative expression.

Ask people why they love a brand, and they often struggle to pin it down. They may list logical reasons like quality or aesthetics, but in the end it comes down to a feeling. How does the brand move them? Why do they come back for more of that feeling? What does that feeling mean to them? Brands that carry real emotional weight are the ones that earn love and respect.

This principle goes beyond relationships with customers. Take the value of an engaged workplace, creating specific meaning and value tailored to attract and engage employees and recruits with shared values and purpose, increasing innovation, productivity, creativity, and commitment.

No matter the audience, when it comes to defining your brand, emotional impact is key to unlocking business impact.

Think of your brand as a prism.

You can illuminate the same purpose, ideas, and values from different angles to connect with different audiences.

A single brand has many facets. The same purpose, values, and mission are reflected in different ways to connect with different audiences, whether potential customers or loyal devotees, longtime employees or new recruits, or–at the highest level of expression–the world at large.

For example, the statement of purpose or brand promise you’ve defined for customers should have a corresponding statement for employees—the same idea filtered through an internal lens. Imagine a hospitality company that tells guests to “expect remarkable experiences.” Translated internally as “creating remarkable moments,” employees are inspired to find ways to make every guest interaction worth talking about, thereby delivering on the customer promise.

Give your brand the freedom to flex.

Just like people, your brand needs the emotional agility to shift and meet the moment while maintaining integrity.

Even within the scope of one audience, how your brand shows up should vary depending on where, when, and with whom you interact. In your own life, think of the depth of communication with a new friend versus a lifelong bestie. A brand hasn’t earned the time and space in the lives of new customers and prospects to assume closeness or understanding.

As relationships deepen, your brand can be expressed in more meaningful, personal ways that align with needs revealed by the customer. Context matters, too. For an airline brand, a friendly greeting like “so good to see you again” conveys warmth when it comes from a familiar gate agent. Plastered on a sign, this message feels inauthentic and out of place.

At Emotive Brand, we create structure in the form of brand architecture, but the framework accommodates different phases of relationship-building, growth and change. Rooted in clear purpose aligned with a unique emotional impact, the brand can develop, expand and respond, connecting with people and shifting with the times.

Create your own definition of brand.

The concept of brand can be nebulous, but you can get a foothold by prioritizing what matters most to your business.

More often than not, the answer to “what is a brand?” entails a list of well-loved icons. Sure, references to Nike, Apple, or Google can give form to the concept, but solely thinking of brand in terms of big names isn’t enough. Especially when your vision challenges the status quo.

At Emotive Brand, we work with a type of leader that we call Visionary Reinventors. As category creators and market disrupters, they learn from other brands, but they’re not modeling themselves after them. Why look backwards when you’re trying to shape the future?

Think of what “brand” might mean to a B2B tech start-up—reliant on in-person pitches and tradeshow experiences to reach enterprise executives—versus a B2C innovator selling exclusively online to Gen Z. The former needs to emphasize the forging of connections in high-stakes, human-to-human interactions. For the latter, “brand” is centered on expressive, cutting-edge design and social media creativity to break through at scale.

“Brand” is yours to shape and imagine.

Today’s brand landscape is wide open. No more standard toolkit. No more checking the same old boxes. With the intended emotional impact of your brand as a guiding light, the path forward becomes not only clear–but exciting and inspired.

Own how you want to make people feel to accelerate connection and ignite business impact in ways no competitor can match.

Feel the Shift: The Rational Strategy for Emotional Transformation

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Humans are hard-wired to resist change. You can’t achieve transformation simply by enforcing new systems or strategies. You have to move people—employees, customers, and leaders—toward something greater. Something they can feel and believe in.

That’s why Emotive Brand embraces emotion as an ultra-potent tool for driving change and growth at every level. And this isn’t a hunch. The data is clear: emotionally resonant brands deliver 306% greater customer lifetime value.

Emotion is more than just a fleeting feeling. It’s a life force. It’s the spark that drives decision-making and forges loyalty. It’s how employees evolve into passionate advocates, how customers become lifelong champions, and how ideas turn into movements that redefine industries.

Yet, for many leaders, emotion remains ethereal—untethered and unquantifiable–due to a lack of the emotion-based metrics that, finally, more and more companies are using to reshape and reimagine performance. It’s all too easy to fall back into the comfort of the status quo: familiar tools of logic, data, and process.

By pulling these familiar levers, you may sustain performance in the short term, but you’ll rarely–if ever–ignite transformation.

By contrast, when you add emotion to the change management process:

  • Decisions resonate and inspire alignment.
  • Cultures thrive, not just function.
  • Brands forge deeper, longer-lasting connections.

We work with Visionary Reinventors—leaders who understand that emotion has the power to inspire action, build belief, and catalyze growth. Whether it’s redefining categories, aligning culture to accelerate ambition, or creating brands that matter, our mission is to amplify their impact by harnessing emotion.

True transformation is the outcome of bridging reason and passion, human and brand, in ways that resonate so deeply that people are moved to action.

If you’re ready to transform, we welcome you to read our guide, The Unstoppable Rise of Emotion, and discover how to leverage emotion as your most rational—and powerful—strategy.  Download it today.

Beyond Trends: 2025’s Top 5 Paradigm Shifts for Brands

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

More is possible for, and expected from, brands than ever before. The role of emotion in heightening the quality of connection has reached a tipping point, pushed over the edge by hyper segmentation, AI, demographic shifts, and ever-increasing competition.

Emotion and E-ROI will dominate brand strategies in 2025—and it’s mission-critical to understand the difference between them.

  • Emotion is the energy that sparks connection—how a brand makes its audience feel.
  • E-ROI (Emotional Return on Investment) is the measurable value brands gain when they successfully leverage emotion—turning connection into loyalty, brand equity, and revenue growth.

Emotion drives action. E-ROI measures impact. Brands looking to lead in 2025 must embrace both. Here’s how the emotional landscape is evolving and what it will take to win.

1. Emotional Personalization Will Fuel Authentic Engagement

By 2025, generic approaches will be dead on arrival. The brands that win hearts and market share will have outgrown personalization based on demographics or purchase history. Instead, they’ll own emotional personalization, using AI and emotional intelligence (EI) tools to anticipate and respond to customer values, desires, and real-time emotions.

Brands that embrace AI-powered personalization report 26x higher year-over-year revenue growth than their competitors​.


Nike and IBM have led the charge, mining emotional data to craft stories and experiences that resonate with customers’ aspirations. The SNKRS app powers product customization while collecting customer insights that Nike uses to shape brand interactions, and IBM’s Watson customizes customer service responses based on mood and context cues. 

In 2025, expect more brands to meet customers where they are—emotionally and situationally—making each interaction feel human and deeply personal.

2. Purpose-Driven Narratives Will Be Non-Negotiable

With Millennials and Gen Z holding the reins of purchasing power, demand for purpose-driven brands will intensify. Brands that tie their purpose to real societal change will earn the highest E-ROI. Social impact won’t be a bonus for consumers—it will be a core driver of emotional connection and brand loyalty.

Research shows that emotionally connected customers are twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers​.
—Harvard Business Review


Brands like Allbirds and Patagonia have shown how purpose, when woven into every aspect of the business from sustainability efforts to employee culture, can drive both emotional engagement and financial growth. 

By 2025, purpose will be the cost of entry.

3. Brands Will Balance Data with Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Data has been king for a decade, but 2025 will herald the rise of EI as a business asset. Brands will still rely on data, but with a more human lens that balances quantitative insights with the subtleties of emotions. Those who can decode emotional data will deliver experiences that feel intuitive and connected.

Companies ranked highly for emotional intelligence generate 20% more revenue growth and 18.3% higher share price increases​. 
—Capgemini


Brands from Dove to Salesforce are demonstrating the superpower of EI–from challenging beauty standards in ways that meet deep emotional needs, to detecting consumer preferences and sentiment with AI to tailor marketing strategies in real time. 

Such strategies will reverberate across B2B and B2C markets throughout 2025, benefiting both companies and customers.

4. Emotion Will Drive Innovation

By 2025, emotion will influence more than just marketing—it will become central to product development, customer experience, and organizational culture. Brands will embed emotional intelligence in their innovation processes, ensuring new products resonate emotionally from the start, with responsiveness to needs as they evolve.

“We must make a product or service that delivers in the person the emotions we care about—it’s an art.”
—Don Norman, UX Design Pioneer


This shift is evident in Adobe’s creation of a community in which customer feedback drives product updates. Not only do customer concerns and input guide improvements, but the community has forged emotional ties resulting in more repeat buyers and less churn. 

In 2025, this level of connectivity will no longer be exceptional, but expected.

5. Emotional Impact Metrics Will Define Success

As emotional impact takes center stage, traditional metrics like click-through rates and sales will no longer be enough to compete. Brands will need new KPIs focused on emotional connection, loyalty, and long-term brand affinity.

“The ability to recognize and use emotional data at scale is one of the biggest, most important opportunities for companies.”
—Deloitte


For leaders spearheading change, the ability to gauge emotion will determine outcomes of transformation programs. EY found that traditional KPIs are insufficient, lagging indicators, and that the behavior and emotions of the people are better predictors of whether a transformation program is on track. 

In 2025, internal and external initiatives will lean on emotion-driven metrics that precede, and therefore can help guide and realize, business impact.

E-ROI: The New Currency of Brand Success

The ascent of E-ROI in 2025 represents tantalizing opportunity–and potential peril. Brands that fail to invest in emotion as a strategic asset will fall behind. Those that tune into emotion will not only move their organizations forward, but also entire markets and even movements. 

Visibility and functionality are now table stakes. To lead, brands must evoke, engage, and elevate every interaction with emotion as a catalyst for connection. The meaningful and enduring impacts they create for their audiences will translate into transformation, innovation, and growth for their businesses.

Leading in 2025 means leading with feeling.

The Evolving Role of the CMO: Chief Alignment Officer

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

No role in an organization has evolved more rapidly than the CMO’s. It used to be that owning branding, communications, and campaigns defined the job. Now, CMOs need to be experts on customers, marketing tools and advanced analytics, and business strategy. Brand management remains an essential duty, but in service of driving business growth. Most importantly, because a CMO’s work connects directly to sales, product development, IT, finance, and other parts of the organization, CMOs find themselves needing to play a growing role in aligning their organization around new ways of thinking and work that will help them engage customers more effectively.

For those in TL;DR mode, the quick takeaway is: CMOs are being stretched, so they might sometimes need a hug (but please ask first).

Here’s a by-no-means exhaustive look at some of the shifts that we’ve seen impacting how a CMO shows up:

From To
Voice of the Brand Voice of the Customer
Intuition & Instincts Data & Technology
Brand Management Brand Innovation
Strategy + Execution Alignment

 

Voice of the Customer

The amount of information we have about customers is only increasing. How does a temperature between 70-75 degrees impact consumer behavior on Monday’s v Fridays? What is the correlation between a new Netflix series and GPU buying decisions? What invisible patterns in customers can data now make visible? More and more, it’s up to the CMO to develop the customer insights that shape how a business goes to market. And because so many groups touch the customers, from sales to product to finance to corporate strategy, the level of collaboration required to align on these insights requires a significant investment.

Data & Technology

The increase in customer data a business can capture also gives rise to new suites of tools and technologies that a CMO can use to mine for insights, optimize campaigns, and deliver experiences across channels. When almost every brand action can be quantified, decisions about how to go to market are becoming increasingly data-driven. As a result, the CMO is responsible for leading the digital transformation of the marketing organization which requires deep partnership with IT (among others) to develop the tooling and data models that align with the organization’s technology systems. While a CMO needs to rely on her or his instincts and intuition when it comes to decision making, increasingly they need to justify their strategies with that data that points to a certain direction. The more fluent a CMO becomes in technology, the easier it becomes to reconcile data-driven insights with gut instincts.

Brand Innovation

More than anyone in the organization, a CMO needs to connect the dots between a brand’s legacy and its future vision. As much as products need to innovate, brands must as well to remain relevant: messages need to resonate with how the world is changing, and their expression needs to drive differentiation. But in doing this, a brand must also feel familiar and to take advantage of the equity it’s built with audiences. As brand management becomes increasingly data-driven, brand innovation is also becoming more dependent on analyzing trends, creating new audience definitions and segmentations, and audiences, and delivering next-level experiences that are hyper personalized and hyper-relevant. And these insights provide fuel for both brand and product innovation. The CMO that can use data to drive innovation across the organization is one that will stick around.

Building Alignment

It’s not enough for a CMO to develop a winning marketing strategy and execute flawlessly. As organizations become increasingly customer-centric, a CMO needs to bring every function in the C-Suite into the conversation about how to drive growth. From gaining the full embrace of Chief Revenue Officer for their marketing strategies, to the creativity of the CTO as you make your strategies more data driven, to HR working to bring new talent to the table, to the head of Product working in partnership around how to claim new audience segments, and the CTO finding budget to drive the strategy forward, marketing has become increasingly a team sport.

It’s no wonder that CMO turnover is high, and those in their positions feel they’re continuously in the hot seat. While the complexity of marketing is growing and budgets are coming under increasing scrutiny, there’s never been a more exciting time to be leading a marketing organization. All the data organizations have been amassing and the tools ready to parse it can reveal truly amazing insights about customers and how to connect with them. But only if a CMO can enlist the organization in lending a hand in making this all happen. And this comes down to storytelling and building alignment.

We’ve worked with many organizations to craft what we call a Growth Manifesto—a narrative that shows how the thinking that goes into brand development can open up new possibilities across an organization—from how people think about innovation to the collaboration required to bring new ideas to life. We’ve seen that a Growth Manifesto serves as an incredibly effective tool for building that alignment that is essential to getting every part of an organization living a new brand promise. While CMOs will always own the brand, communications, and marketing lanes of a business, as their role evolves, we’re seeing how they also need to become experts at building alignment between the functions that marketing depends on.

If you have thoughts about the new challenges CMOs face today please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to address specific marketing challenges in your business, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Engine of Productivity: Wellness in the Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

How we define the workplace has changed radically over the last few years. Offices no longer represent the primary workplace, and remote and hybrid modes of working are becoming the norm rather than the exception. And this has greatly disrupted the way we work. The “office rhythm” is out the door when you’re zooming with people three time zones away one minute, taking a call from the car while you drive your kids to school the next, and collaborating with colleagues face-to-face once or twice a week. It’s hard to connect. Hard to disconnect. And it’s hard to orient yourself in a culture without the daily cues to keep you on track.

All of this leads to wellness issues. The stress of being connected all the time. Or the self-doubt that leads to quiet quitting behaviors. The physical toll of being rooted at your desk all day. The erosion of mentorship in the workplace, and the rise of coaching to fill the gap. HR professionals are on the front lines of a crisis, and they’re responding by paying more attention to wellness than ever before. Employee well-being has emerged as a major focus as organizations replace the free-lunch and foosball-driven ethos with programs aimed at helping people thrive personally so they can thrive professionally.

The data supports this trend: corporate wellness directly influences the emotional and physical health of employees and, by extension, the health of the entire organization. Companies that prioritize wellness not only see an uptick in morale but also in productivity and retention​​​. In fact, 83% of employees report that having a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace correlates with a significant increase in productivity.​​

Crafting Cultures That Resonate with Employees’ Needs

Leaders in HR play a pivotal role in translating these programs into strategic elements of the company culture. The trend is clear: holistic wellness programs that address the full spectrum of well-being—mental, physical, emotional, and financial—help retain people and attract new talent. They make people more productive, as happier employees take fewer sick days, are more loyal, and bring a higher level of creativity and energy to their roles. And they add to your overall organizational resiliency, which is critical to navigating the ups and downs of today’s volatility.

How to make well-being a strategic element of your employer brand

1. Define a Wellness Philosophy: Have a candid conversation with leadership about why your organization values wellness, and how much you’re willing to invest in it. This is a crucial first step to getting your leadership team aligned on the value that wellness creates for the entire organization. You’ll need to address the holistic equation of well-being—physical, mental, emotional, and financial—and how each dimension drives employee performance and satisfaction.

2. Consistently communicate your POV on Wellness: Use every communication channel to consistently reinforce how wellness is woven into your corporate culture. Share stories that highlight the positive impacts of wellness initiatives on employees, strengthening the perception of your brand as caring and supportive.

3. Align Wellness with Strategic Goals: A key part of your wellness initiatives involves connecting the dots between employees’ well-being and the strategic objectives of the company. For example, link mental health programs like mindfulness sessions to innovation to demonstrate how they result in a more creative and productive workplace.

4. Showcase the Impact: Evidence that wellness works only deepens belief in it as a necessity. Share real-life examples of how wellness programs have improved workplace outcomes. Highlight case studies and testimonials from employees who have benefited from these programs. Create case studies that demonstrate improved productivity, reduced stress levels, and better teamwork.

5. Lead with Wellness: When leaders actively participate in and advocate for wellness programs, it sends a powerful message that no matter where you sit in an organization, you’re still a person with the same needs for support. The more leaders participate and evangelize your wellness programs, the more they become a core part of the company ethos.

6. Offer personalized Wellness Options: There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to well-being. By offering personalized wellness options that can be tailored to individual needs, you underscore your commitment to supporting each employee uniquely. This flexibility makes the programs more effective and highlights your company’s dedication to its workforce.

7. Measure Success and Adapt: As your employees engage with wellness programs, their needs will change. You need to continuously assess and adapt your wellness initiatives to keep the offerings relevant, the energy fresh, and the impact high. By actively managing the portfolio of wellness offerings, you show your workforce that rather than checking a box, the organization is committed to making wellness a foundational element of your employer brand.

Thinking Beyond Wellness Programs

Wellness programs alone can feel like Band-Aids if they’re not connected to the employer brand—the internal expression of your mission, purpose, and values—that drives your organization. As employee well-being emerges as a dynamic force that shapes every aspect of workplace engagement and productivity, employees need to feel that it is part of your organizational DNA.

At Emotive Brand, we specialize in connecting business strategy to culture strategy to develop employer brands that are not just smart—they resonate emotionally. Making sure that employees experience wellness programs as part of a larger narrative around how you value people is essential to delivering the experiences that contribute to an organization being a great place to work.

If you have thoughts about the role wellness programs play in culture strategy, please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to get your culture better aligned to your business strategy, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Business and Brand Strategy: Separated at Birth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Peanut butter and jelly. Abbott and Costello. Disco and dancing. Some things in this world simply go together. So why is it that business strategy and brand strategy don’t always get invited to the same parties?

Growth is the Goal
We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning business and brand strategy. Leaders intellectually get this, but many organizations fall into ways of working where business and brand strategy represent two different schools of thought. Delivering on financial goals (business) versus understanding customers and their needs (brand). Defining winning through the lens of revenue, profit, and market share versus winning hearts (and then wallets) through engaging experiences. Economics versus Psychology. Science versus Art. The truth is, these are just different sides of a bigger conversation (we call it a Growth Manifesto) that revolves around how an organization drives growth.

The lack of alignment between business and brand strategy results from not having this shared vision of growth. Without it, the business side of the house will identify, quantify, and prioritize growth opportunities that most readily deliver on an organization’s financial goals. Brand and marketing teams will develop new and better ways to meet their customer engagement goals. Product teams will develop roadmaps and pursue innovation based on how they see user needs and technology evolving. Sales teams will go to market with tactics that drive immediate wins. HR leaders will attract and retain talent based on what each silo needs. Everyone will hope (assume) they are marching to the beat of the same drummer.

The reality: situations that resemble a three- or even six-legged race. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Aligning leaders around where the business needs to go begins with getting clear on ALL the ways an organization can or will deliver value—for customers, employees, stakeholders, and its communities. When you’ve aligned on the value you can create and the impact you want to deliver, getting brand and business strategy working together is a far easier task.

When was the last time you brought your leadership team together to discuss how you create value and for whom? A workshop that gives everyone a platform to discuss opportunities for creating new value through the lens of brand, product, customer engagement, go-to-market strategies, investing in employees, and supporting causes and communities can give you a bigger picture of the opportunity landscape. And it creates a conversation that brings business and brand strategy into the same arena.

What Your Business and Brand Strategy Should Answer Together
Once you’ve brought people together with a shared vision for creating new value, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Answering these questions can take you a long way toward building a plan for how every part of your organization gets aligned on growth:

  • What are the short- and long-term goals for the business? Is there an exit strategy? A merger or acquisition in the future? How does your brand need to support these efforts?
  • What are the revenue and growth expectations? Are there specific target revenue goals the board is looking for? Your investors? Wall Street? Are your goals based on revenue, profitability, market share, or something different? How does your brand need to behave to support that strategy?
  • What is the growth strategy? Is it based on selling products or solutions? Innovating new products and offerings? What role does your brand play post-sales?
  • What’s the human capital plan for achieving your desired business goals? Does that involve recruiting a different team? How can your talent acquisition team become an extension of your brand team?
  • What is the product roadmap? Are you entering into new markets? Developing new products? What are you building vs. buying to enhance your product offering? How can your brand open doors for you in adjacent markets?
  • Is your business structured to accelerate the progress toward goals and objectives? Do you need to shift your organizational structure? Are you ready to bring new members into the C-suite? Do you have a brand leader who is also a business leader?
  • How should you allocate resources to accomplish these goals?

These questions are integral for shaping both your business and brand strategies. By looking at brand and business together in the same set of questions, you’re ensuring alignment is in place before you start to execute.

Clear Goals Enable a Clear Brand Strategy
With a clearer picture of where you want your business to go, the brand strategy will answer:

  • What category do you fit into?
  • How do you define product-market fit?
  • What is the competitive landscape?
  • What is your positioning in the marketplace?
  • Who are your top target audiences?
  • What is the value proposition?
  • In what ways is your brand unique?
  • How does your brand look and feel?
  • What voice does your brand speak in?

By having the conversations required to make business strategy and brand strategy work together, you’re creating your own competitive advantage (in our experience, most companies don’t commit to the discipline of doing this type of collaborative exploration). As a result, you will not only find more opportunities to differentiate your brand in ways that create value, but because the organization is aligned, you’ll be able to do it with far less friction. And this is how you drive short- and long-term growth in any market condition.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland-based brand strategy and design agency.

You may appreciate the following post on Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy.

Leading With Beautiful Questions

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Many years ago, we got inspired by Warren Berger’s book, “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.” The basic premise of the book and the post we wrote at the time was that leaders simply don’t ask enough questions when they bump up against uncertainty.

Since then, two things have happened. Mr. Berger wrote another book tying the art of inquiry to generating breakthrough ideas (which we all need today), and the world has started to get wobbly. Every leader we work with and talk to is grappling with the issue of how to drive growth in uncertain times. And they’re also looking for ways to unlock new and different thinking on their teams for how to grow. This creates the occasion for us to update our own thinking on the value of asking questions—beautiful questions—to choose the way forward.

Uncertainty can feel familiar

Say that you and some friends are backpacking through a place you’ve never visited before. The call you took from the trailhead drained your phone’s battery and your navigation app is useless (doh!). Your destination is a campsite next to a breathtaking alpine lake that is a jewel of the mountain range and a like-amplifier on your Instagram feed. When you come to a place where the trail forks, with no signs marking the way, one of your hiking companions (who has years more experience in the outdoors than anyone else), declares, “it has to be this way.” 

Who hasn’t been here before?

Either on a trail or in a conference room, strong opinions emerge, experience speaks loudest, the phrase “trust your gut” gets bandied about, and the bias for action short-circuits the deeper process of inquiry. What should you do? Follow experience and take the trail to the left? Trust your gut that tells you not to trust that other person’s gut? Or do you pause to ask a few questions? 

Introspection v. action

When we translate this scenario to the current business environment, it mirrors a lot of today’s context: navigating landscapes (economic, market, technology, talent, etc.) that are unknown or unpredictable with limited information to guide you to the promised land. It feels like every day there is a crucible moment that can slow down progress or knock your leadership team out of alignment. And alignment is the key issue here. 

A basic assumption in team dynamics is that too many questions will slow us down, and that quick answers will speed us up. This is true, but only to a degree. Without alignment around those answers, you’ll actually move more slowly people will drag their feet or hold back in other ways until the direction proves to be correct. It’s like a cycling peloton that rides single file—you can’t draft off each other in this formation. 

On the other hand, lemmings show incredible alignment. But maybe they should learn to ask a few more questions.

The question leaders face during times of uncertainty is whether they should lead with answers (and keep the foot on the accelerator) or lead with questions (and do the soul-searching that builds conviction and alignment)? We think the answer is both. And here’s a simple framework for how to do it.

Identify the operating narrative

Simply put, times of uncertainty = times of fear. When we perceive danger, our amygdala gets activated, and our fight, flight, or freeze instincts take over. Expansion, contraction, or stasis. And when this happens, we begin constructing our own narratives based on how we individually deal with fear. 

One person might choose to avoid risk (not taking another step forward), while another wants to leap into bigger risks (bushwhacking to the nearest peak to get a better perspective). Your fellow hiker could employ head-in-the-sand behaviors that delay conflict (acquiesce but then grumble the entire time), while another could rebel (go back to the car to charge the phone). While these could all be appropriate actions, they put your organization at risk because they skip the most important step for how teams move through uncertainty. A leader needs to establish a unifying narrative first to build alignment. And then the action can follow.  

Ask beautiful questions

Because we all have different relationships with uncertainty, we need a way to get onto common ground. And the best way to do this is to ask questions that reframe the situation.

Berger’s books highlight how when we’re children, we’re full of questions because nothing is at stake when a kid asks a question. But as we mature many of us lose the willingness to reveal what we don’t know (except for the stellar innovators and leaders who are always in learning mode). By offering helpful guides to using a flow from “Why?” to “What if?” to “How?” Berger shows us how to gain awareness of what people want and need, what they’re avoiding, and where the new opportunities lay. 

Unfortunately, when the tension is running high and the talk turns to execution, people want answers and action rather than another @#!$& beautiful question. And there’s a price attached to this anti-question bias in business. As companies push away from asking bigger questions in the spirit of addressing short-term needs, they stop looking for the opportunities, trends, and threats that are just around the corner. And they let external narratives (the economy is slowing and companies in our industry must cut X, Y, and Z to survive) take over when they should be formulating their own stories (e.g. by shifting our efforts or leveraging our unique strengths, we can set the stage for the next five years of growth).

The best part of this is that questions are free, with the only cost being the amount of time you invest in exploring them. And by undertaking this process, can achieve results that range from alleviating stress to re-framing your opportunities to unlocking entirely new ideas for your business. 

To give you a sense of how asking beautiful questions can help you shift your narrative, below are a few inspired by Berger’s books:

  • Why are we in business? (And by the way, what business are we really in?)
  • What if we become a cause and not just a company?
  • What fears are holding us back?
  • What do we stand against?
  • Who does our company look like at its very best?
  • Where in our company is it safe (or unsafe) to ask radical questions?
  • Does our mission make sense? Do we embrace it? Does it unify us? 
  • What are we doing the way we’ve always done it?  Is it still working?
  • Where is the place we can be a start-up again?
  • If money were no object, how might we approach our work differently?
  • How might we create a culture of inquiry?
  • Does our future make us feel like dancing? How could it?

You’ll notice that these are open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have right or wrong answers. They’re not koans intended to stump people, but by they do have the power to get people into healthy debate (a conversation you enter into with a willingness to have your mind changed). And these questions are by no means exhaustive. Think up a few of your own that will rattle the cage (in a good way) during your team’s next meeting.

Translate questions into actions

Spending time in shared inquiry is the quickest way to regain alignment when things are wobbly. As a regular practice, it deepens alignment that allows your team to make decisions faster, think bigger, and reach higher levels of performance. By discussing these questions in ways that activate both the head and the heart, you identify the right actions to prioritize that will move the needle for your business while also keeping employees engaged and inspired.

When you’re aligned as a team and everyone feels that they’ve had their say, execution becomes easier. Decisions are more intuitive. You form collective gut reactions that honor everyone around the table. And you locked in on the key priorities for moving into the unknown. You might realize that the way forward lies in focusing on core customers. Or innovating your go-to-market motions. Or giving everyone in the company a day to reflect on a single question that will unify the team. Action is a force of expansion, and aligned action is the quickest way to make progress toward your shared goals. 

Your brand strategy is an alignment tool

Your brand strategy can be the catalyst for a culture of inquiry. Many of Berger’s questions are fundamental to building a brand that is authentic and differentiated. When your brand seeks to embody a purpose beyond profits, you get to explore the motives, orientations, and attitudes of your company. You create the space to ask difficult questions that lead to revealing and powerful answers that are rooted in meaning and emotion. This leads to a brand that navigates the world in a more purposeful way, asking the questions that need to be asked of itself, and discovering the meaningful connections that help them prosper.

Ask the questions. Live the answers. And thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is your brand positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition?

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic northstar. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people important to sustain its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Integrating Company Cultures After a Merger or Acquisition

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

High M&A Activity

Mergers and acquisitions are at an all time high, with $4.7 trillion of global deals signed last year according to a recent M&A report by KMPG.

And although the payoff of a successful M&A is great, these are high risk deals. It’s not just about the financial gains. Reputations are on the line. Stakeholders observe nervously. And in order to ensure the expected return on investment is delivered, a great deal of planning around integrating company culture must go into the preparation.

Cultural Integration Issues

After an acquisition, the merger is a difficult undertaking – and often controversial. Employees may feel confused or unsure about what the future holds. And uncertainty can undercut the upsides of the deal.

When there’s a lack of communication, an incongruent cultural fit, or a poor integration plan, many mergers fail to positively impact the business – not delivering on the expected ROI. In fact, research has shown that around 70% of M&A fail to deliver their anticipated benefits because of “cultural issues.”

Because most M&A have financial, operational, or positioning motivations as the driver, many organizations fail to recognize culture as an influence that can derail the deal. And neglecting how a merger will affect your people can lead to many problems down the road.

Integrating Company Cultures Is Key to the Success of Your M&A

1. Communicate Early and Often

When people on the inside feel as though they are left in the dark, they are unlikely to jump on board with change. Transparency is key here. When your people come along on the journey and see and understand the vision for the future, they are more likely to support the integration effort.

In order to ensure internal buy-in, you need people to feel confident in the decision to merge companies. You also need them to feel secure in their job and valued in their position. You need employees on both sides of the merger to get on board with the change. Keeping everyone in the loop about the change ahead is an important first step.

2. Examine Cultural Differences

In order to establish common ground, you have to recognize and address gaps. Define each culture and map them next to each other. Where are they not aligned? Determining differences is key to figuring out what shifts need to be made and where you might run into problems. Be clear and direct about disparities so you can tackle them head on.

3. Define Your New Culture and Develop a Cultural Integration Plan

A company’s culture is made up of the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are shared among all people within your organization. Oftentimes, culture is something that is difficult to pin down and, as a result, leaders may steer away from clearly defining their culture.

However, it’s very important to define the culture you are trying to build. Leaders should be aligned and clear so they can succinctly articulate the new organization’s aspiration for the future and then behave accordingly.

So it’s important to put in place the measures and incentives that will fuel the behaviors that will then drive your culture. Dedicate the resources needed to create tools for facilitating cultural integration, measurement, and management.

4. Celebrate Change

In the end, cultural integration is about both sides adapting and celebrating the new culture that is born from the merger. This is a time of coming together and taking the best that both organizations have to offer. It’s an opportunity for growth—to get aligned, adopt new thinking, strengthen your culture, and move your business forward.

It’s a Process and Brand Strategy Can Help

Oftentimes, M&As require an investment in brand strategy to really ensure the expected ROI is delivered by employees. Don’t expect the cultural integration to happen overnight.

Dedicating the time and resources to developing and articulating your new brand will help enable both cultures to understand the opportunities of the merger. And creating a newly developed employer brand after a merger will help everyone get on board and aligned with the new brand and the future of an integrated culture.

With the right investment and focus on employees and culture, all employees will meaningfully embrace the changes required during the merger and, as a result, your business will thrive moving forward.

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

HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Finding the Right Fit: HR’s Number One Challenge

HR and Marketing? The role of HR has evolved significantly in recent years. Attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is a high priority for executives, and most companies place this responsibility on HR. According to PwC 18th Annual CEO survey, a full 73% of respondents are concerned about the availability of talent – a 10% increase from 2014. Executives worry that it’s getting harder to recruit and keep the people who are both skilled high-performers and ‘fit’ within their organization’s culture. And without top talent, maintaining a competitive advantage, adapting to industry change, and growing business is nearly impossible.

Fierce marketplace competition makes it difficult for candidates to know if they are a good fit for the brand without some guidance. Ensuring employee ‘fit’ means your brand needs to know why it matters. That’s where an employer brand comes in. Your employer brand must do the hard work of being clear and consistent about its promise (EVP), communicating an authentic, meaningful brand experience across all touchpoints. When done well, an employer brand helps attract the right talent, allows prospects to self-select for fit with your organization, and increases the likelihood that they will develop into long-term, low-churn, high-producing members of your team.

The Heat is On

Today, HR is tasked with creating an employee experience that markets the business to recruits and employees. Crafting a relevant and resonant employer brand involves aligning your organization’s aspirations, values, needs, and wants with the people you are looking to recruit and retain—no easy feat.

The pressure to create a unified, engaging experience for employees and prospects is real. And, launching an employer brand often involves obtaining budget from a CEO who may not see its value. What’s more, building an employer brand can become nearly impossible if the corporate brand is outdated, or worse, non-existent. When HR operates in a silo, getting budget and approval can be an uphill battle.

We’ve worked with a number of clients with varying global challenges around recruitment and employee engagement and there’s one thing they all agree on: successfully building an employer brand can’t be done in isolation. Engaging and partnering with marketing from the very beginning is essential.

Five Ways to Create a Successful Partnership Between HR and Marketing

  1. Designate an owner. Clarifying ownership is key. There is no better steward of an employer brand than the CEO, but gaining alignment from the rest of your leadership team, including key stakeholders, securing budget, and taking the project to the finish line won’t happen without a designated decision maker from either the HR or marketing team. 
  1. Map the employer brand to the corporate brand. Even if the corporate brand looks outdated or lacks relevance, the employer brand needs to build off of the brand’s foundation, otherwise it is confusing to your employees and the marketplace. Use what assets the brand has and build from there. If your corporate brand has a brand promise, find a way to use that as your North Star. The authenticity of the employer brand depends on HR and marketing working together to create an employee experience that is true to the brand.
  1. Get a commitment from key stakeholders. Getting the leadership team invested in the employer brand is more than just establishing a committee where people can voice opinions. It’s also important for each leader to understand the reach of the employer brand as a key influencer of your brand’s image and reputation. Leadership needs to have skin in the game from the start. This up-front work will help you and your marketing team move quickly with alignment and see the project all the way through.
  1. Build a coalition. Once you’ve got your employer brand strategy in place and support from the key stakeholders, you’ll need advocates from both marketing and HR to roll out the employer brand. Unfortunately, there’s no “launch” button for your employer brand. To make the biggest impact, you’ll need a team dedicated to the project who have always been part of the journey. Marketers know how to drive and measure audience engagement, create engaging experiences, nurture audiences, and tell a story that keeps people interested and engaged over a long period of time. And you don’t just need the marketing execs on board, you need the whole marketing team.
  1. Don’t forget purpose. Your employer brand needs to be rooted in purpose and meaning in order to emotionally connect to and successfully recruit and retain the type of talent best suited for your business. HR understands what matters to employees, but marketing knows how to capture their attention, authentically win them over with purpose-driven messages, and create valuable brand experiences at every touchpoint. When HR and marketing collaborate on an employer brand strategy together, they ensure that the company lives up to its promise and executes it every day.

Collaboration Wins

HR and marketing are not used to collaborating on strategic initiatives, especially those driven by HR. But not engaging marketing in the project can be a fatal mistake. Marketing owns the brand and they need to be brought along on the journey. Marketing will appreciate being asked to participate and HR will save time and angst by getting them involved from the start.

Top talent have their choice of companies to work for. Access to information and opportunity has accelerated a new employer brand rule book where companies are continually learning to adapt the hiring, retention, engagement strategy, and practices for success. By coordinating these efforts with HR and marketing, your business will reap the benefits in terms of the talent you attract and how well they ‘fit’ into the company.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.