Tracy Lloyd, Author at Emotive Brand

The Real Cost of Brand Transformation

Posted on September 6, 2022July 14, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Oftentimes, branding is seen as just another expense. Another project that needs budgeting. Another to-do to check off the list. Additionally, a brand’s visual identity and its implementation are often seen the same way—but they shouldn’t be.

Branding is only costly to a company if the company doesn’t fully tap into the brand’s value. Likewise, if you leave your brand’s visual identity to flounder in a presentation deck, it remains an untapped value. Understanding the value of your brand and what its visual identity means is key to shifting the conversation from a business cost to its transformative value.

Symbol of Change

Before the introduction of the visual identity, the rebrand is just words on a page, insights explained, or a strategy outlined. People can’t visually see their brand in action. It hasn’t come to life. That’s why the visual identity is one of the most exciting phases of the brand strategy process. It’s the first time business leaders really get to see the strategy come to life, and it’s oftentimes exhilarating, empowering, and transformative for them.

This is where the visual identity becomes a symbol of change. It represents what’s to come for the organization. It shows how the brand will flourish in the future. It demonstrates growth potential, transformation, and exciting possibilities. It emotes the brand’s promise. Executives can finally visualize where their brand is headed, and this new frontier is intoxicating to watch unfold.

In a successful visual identity presentation, everyone in the presentation is on their feet. The room is filled with excitement and ideas are flowing. Everyone is imagining the look and feel in real-time.

The Cost

The difficulty is that before this stage, leaders often can’t fathom their budget because they haven’t seen their brand come alive yet. This is why it’s important to prepare them for this moment early on. Help them understand that a visual identity might change everything, and that advanced planning is needed to support the upcoming shifts of this wake-up call that’s right around the corner.

Approaches like a phased roll-out or touch-point conversation might help prepare them for discussions about what aspects of their brand might hold the most impact. What are the most important elements to implement first? What’s the sign of change for the media? What’s the most transformative aspect internally? This kind of prioritization will help them get ready for what’s to come.

More Value

The value of branding will transform your business. It will touch every aspect of your organization and, through the visual identity, everyone will be able to see a part of themselves in it. So, it’s critical that the brand—and visual identity—be valued from the start.

Plan for cost, but focus on value.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

For more reading on our point of view on branding, check out this post.

Brand Narrative is a Necessary Part of Brand Strategy

Posted on August 26, 2022July 14, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Here we explore the brand narrative as a key element of brand strategy, by explaining what constitutes a brand narrative, demonstrating how it supports the overall brand strategy, and showing the brand scenarios which call for a strong brand narrative.

Continue reading “Brand Narrative is a Necessary Part of Brand Strategy”

Emotive Brand and Emotive Branding: Our Origin Story

Posted on August 24, 2022July 14, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Brands for the Better

The idea of emotive branding—and the creation of our agency, Emotive Brand—flowed from our desire to make a positive difference in the way people and brands interacted with each other. These were our goals:

Bridge the gap between commerce and civility.
Create brands that people appreciate, respect, and actively seek out.
Help employees of brands feel better about their jobs.
Make partners and suppliers vie for the opportunity to work with our clients.
See communities welcome our clients’ brands with open arms.

As a result of all of this goodwill, our clients’ brands would thrive and prosper.

Realizing the Value of Meaning Something More

We came to those goals through two major realizations:

First, as consumers ourselves, we noticed that only a handful of brands really went out of their way to mean anything to us. When they did make a connection, wow, it was love! We’d go out of our way to interact and engage these brands. We even felt disappointed when we had to settle for something less. We’d get excited when other people started talking about these brands and chimed in with our most recent, “I can top that!” story. These brands had come to mean something to us because they had a clear reason for being and made us feel something good time and time again.

On the other hand, zillions of brands never really hit our emotional radar. These brands meant almost nothing to us–even though we’ve heard about them or even bought and used dozens of the brands regularly.

A Problem in the “Brand Decks”

Second, as brand experts, we saw firsthand why so many brands fell flat–lackluster and bland–in the minds of customers. As designers, copywriters, and strategists, we work on virtually every aspect of communication from identity to websites to advertising to point-of-sale to employee recruitment and beyond. Behind each piece of work, there’s always a brief, and often attached to the brief is a two-hundred some page PDF titled “About the Brand.”

Reading through many of these so-called “brand decks,” we quickly recognized a problem. In fact, the “brand decks” were the problem.

Traditional brand thinking results from business people from branding agencies talking to business people within client organizations. The language they use is full of industry jargon, client-speak, and solely rational thinking. Everything is expounded upon, nothing is simplified, and little is made human. And after several rounds of review, the final documents show the scars of compromise.

And what do these documents lack? The brand’s meaning as defined by its reason for being (why it does what it does) and how the brand wants people to feel (how the brand connects emotionally with customers). Brand decks, on the whole, left out what matters most to us as consumers and businesses and what we admire most in the great brands out there.

So we asked the question: What if meaning was the entry point into brand thinking rather than an appendage at the end? And that, folks, is how Emotive Brand was born.

Learn more about our methodology emotive branding, how our approach challenges convention, and why emotive branding is a next generation brand strategy.

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

Why Have a Purpose Beyond Profit?

Posted on August 10, 2022July 25, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Developing a purpose beyond profit business strategy has been gaining momentum in the business world, with both positive and negative attention.

For decades, enterprises have had “mission statements”, “vision statements”, and “values”. Check almost any corporate website and you’ll find these “drivers” of the business buried deep down and many clicks away from the surface.

Despite having taken on these important steps to say what their business is all about, there’s often a big difference between what they intend, and the effect they have. The fact is, these tools of business have rarely gained much traction outside of the C-suite.

Defining Purpose

A “purpose” is a more powerful and effective tool because it engages in a way that matters to a wide range of people across an organization. It is not dry, administrative, and full of corporate jargon. It doesn’t set a goal that feels irrelevant outside the C-suite. Rather it is an idea that touches upon a quest for meaning and purpose that is universal in appeal, while at the same time relevant to the business.

People connect to a purpose. Within the purpose they see room for themselves to do something meaningful with their work lives. They feel closer to, more aligned with, and willing to help the business.

A good purpose can radically alter the customer experience as well, as the brand gradually starts to live up to its purpose and make life better in meaningful ways. As such, products evolve to embody greater meaning, the changing attitudes and character of the staff leads to more meaningful service, and every experience with the brand more clearly separates what it does from its competitors.

Think of purpose as a “North Star” for your organization, not as a marketing message. Let it help shape, guide, and align the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of your people. Let the energy that new spirit generates create a beacon that attracts new customers, job recruits, partners, and others to your brand.

Why look beyond profit?

The most powerful purpose statements look beyond profit. This means they talk only of the good the brand seeks to create without stating the obvious goal of every business: profit. It is within the context of profit making that goodness makes a difference. People always remember the profit orientation of a meaningful brand, but it is the meaning the brand conveys that leads people to appreciate and prefer that brand.

While it may seem counterintuitive to not include the profit motive—after all what will shareholders think?—the benefits are clear. Having a purpose is not about forgetting profits, it’s about changing how you think about the positive outcomes that happen when you make profits.

How does one define a purpose beyond profit?

Strong purpose statements flow from the emotional impact that is generated by the prime meaningful outcomes the brand produces through its products, policies, procedures, and behaviors. The ideal purpose operates on a level that makes it possible for even the most disparate people to see the relevance of the brand to their lives.

The outcomes to which the purpose points are the positive impacts that are made by the brand across the personal, social, or environmental realms. Positive impacts are those that add to the individual or collective well-being.

Everyone affected by the brand should feel that the purpose is personally relevant and emotionally important, that it embodies an ideal they share, and that they want to be part of fulfilling that promise, whatever their role.

As such, the language of a good purpose is anything but corporate-speak. Jargon gives way to simple, honest, and memorable words and phrases. The voice is positive, uplifting, and purposeful.

A brand purpose is not a tagline

A purpose is not written to fit the style of a slogan or tagline; it contains all the thoughts it needs to engage and inspire people. A new brand purpose may well inspire a new tagline (as well an overall communication style) for your firm. Though we caution you to be realistic about how much a tagline can achieve with respect to creating a meaningful difference. Remember, real change won’t come from what you say in advertising and marketing, but from the emotions your brand evokes in every interaction.

Download and read our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

The Secret to Thriving Business

Posted on June 14, 2022July 9, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-Led Business, Now the Expectation

Surviving – let alone thriving – in today’s uncertain economy is hard. Successful companies share one unifying factor: they are purpose-led companies. Purpose is the driving force of thriving business today, a key mobilizer for employees, and the key attribute for well-built and sustainable organizational cultures that can grow, thrive, and shift with the times.

Research shows that people are demanding and craving more from the businesses, brands, and companies they work and buy from, and leading with purpose is not a bonus but an expectation for business in 2022. A good product or service is just not enough to stand out, guide your business forward, or recruit the people you need for long-term success.

Purpose needs to penetrate more than just marketing or branding. It should guide how a company conducts itself. Authentically purpose-led businesses use purpose to drive innovation, and as a guide for how the business sells, sources, recruits, hires and fires. It’s easy to lead with purpose in your marketing, but far more meaningful to lead your company with purpose that rings true through behavior and business decision making. And developing strategies for how to “live purpose” is the difference between purpose-led marketing and purpose-led business. A guiding aspiration (your purpose) gives people something to believe in and work towards. And in today’s business world, a strong, unifying purpose has a strong ROI.

The Buzz and Confusion

Because of all the talk around the importance of purpose over profit, “purpose-led” has become a buzzword in the business world. And like any buzzword, confusion accumulates around what it really means, why it matters, and how your own business can authentically and successfully lead with purpose.

So how do you ensure that your business is genuinely purposeful and not just another marketing facade that your customers will see right through?

An authentic purpose needs to flow through your company seamlessly. It needs to drive your company’s way of being, the experience of dealing with your company, and your company’s presence in the marketplace. This includes how your brand behaves internally and externally.

Here are four examples of high-performing, purpose-led businesses we can learn from.

Chobani: Empowers Employees

Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani, gave 2,000 of his full-time employees’ ownership of a stock worth about 10% of the company that employees will receive once the company goes public or is sold. Valued at about $3 billion dollars, this is no petty decision. The earliest employees could be given more than $1 million dollars. Ulukaya wants to share the wealth that his employees have helped grow since the company’s inception. The future of Chobani and consequently, each individual’s own future, now lies in their hands. Employees are empowered to continue building and share the prosperity of the business. Everyone has involvement, interest, and ownership. And this makes working for Chobani all the more meaningful. Imagine how much more inspired, driven, and empowered employees now are to see Chobani succeed in the long run.

Unilever foregoes short-term profits

Staying true to your purpose even when your business has to sacrifice more immediate profits will drive business in the long-term. Unilever CEO, Paul Polman, assured that the company’s carbon footprint would be cut in half, while simultaneously focusing on doubling revenue. Even though sourcing 100% of its raw materials using environmental, social, and ethical principles meant sacrificing some short-term profits, the Unilever leadership understood that this choice would actually drive profits. Similarly, CVS stopped selling cigarettes, taking an estimate $2 billion loss, to lead by purpose — helping people on their path to better health. Purpose-centric businesses understand that how you do business should be dictated by why you do business.

Google gives back

Genuinely generous brands give in a way that aligns with their purpose. Google, a thriving company, has a major philanthropic mission. Google helps “innovators around the world who are using technology to combat humanity’s biggest challenges.” By helping accelerate and scale the work of others who share their same purpose, Google reinforces its own purpose with each act of generosity. This makes the Google purpose more authentic, genuine, and impactful. For example, recently, the company gave a 1 million dollar grant to Unicef engineers who are working to fight Zika virus. On the cutting edge of technology, Google makes sure the way it gives is always towards the future.

UPS is committed to accountable reporting

Because of our work with UPS, Emotive Brand learned first-hand that efficiency is the DNA of a vast logistics company. Scott Davis, UPS Chairman and CEO asked the right question: “How do we meet the needs of the many in the most efficient, responsible way possible?” Asserting that “such a challenge requires continual innovation, a global perspective on what matters most.” UPS’s sustainability reporting shoes that they are “committed to more.” The company is more than just a transportation giant. In every aspect of business, they work to “help customers pioneer more sustainable solutions”— delivering more efficiently, creating global connections, taking action, and giving back. Similarly, Salesforce makes sure to point out that sustainability is more than just a buzzword, and considers the environment to be one of its key stakeholders.

So if you are looking for a purpose-pivot for your business, be sure to create a strategy that moves beyond just marketing and branding. Take stock in why you matter. Develop a purpose-led strategy that aligns to your business. And then use that strategy to make the necessary shifts to ensure you are actually leading with purpose. Live and breathe it internally, while creating the right brand experiences externally so that people really feel it throughout all that you do.

When you lead with purpose in this way, your customers and employees will feel more invested, engaged, and loyal to the brand and your business will be positioned to thrive.

If you are in need of formally articulating your corporate purpose, learn more about Path to Purpose.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Adopt a Growth Mindset to Drive Business

Posted on November 9, 2021July 24, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

We believe an organization that adopts a growth mindset can position itself to thrive. But what exactly defines a growth mindset?

At Emotive Brand, we define a growth mindset as a set of attitudes and behaviors that reflect the belief that an individual’s talent is not set in stone. Talent can be developed. Intelligence can be fostered. Creativity and innovation can be strengthened. Leaders can emerge. People hold potential.

This means every employee within an organization has to have the ability to develop, grow, and learn. And organizations who believe this seek out individuals who show a capacity for such growth. And we believe that the companies who work to help each of these individuals progress, advance in their roles, take on more leadership capabilities, and constantly evolve their skills and thinking will thrive as a whole.

Growth Mindset Is Key

Strong leadership, continual learning, and innovation are key to thriving business today. And not just amongst the C-suite or those in designated leadership roles. Leadership and learning must be fostered throughout an organization in order for that organization to really progress. Although this often starts at the top, it must ring true throughout an entire business.

A fixed mindset – unlike a growth mindset – does not encourage any of these ideals. Nor does it allow employees to grow and new leaders to emerge. And less risk-taking, less freedom, less collaboration, and less acceptance of failure – all behavioral symptoms of a fixed mindset – can be detrimental to business.

Adopt a Growth Mindset to Drive Business By:

1. Seeking out learners

Often times, in business, as expertise increases, individuals struggle more and more to see new solutions or ideas. Learning stalls and this leads businesses to get stuck in their thinking.

In order to adopt a growth mindset that can fuel your organization forward, you must focus on people’s capacity and not their pedigree. As such, recruitment should value people who show a real commitment to learning. These people will help build a learning culture, develop independently, collaborate successfully, and be able to adapt to whatever challenges arise.

Individuals that value learning, and show a capacity and passion for continual knowledge have a natural growth mindset that can move any business towards success.

2. Allowing employees to step out of their daily work

Creating a growth mindset means enabling each individual’s work to be more than just their job. Developing new skills – even if they shift outside of someone’s current daily work – is always valuable.

We believe that understanding and learning other roles than your own can help promote empathy, collaboration, and encourage new ways of approaching things. And setting aside time to build skills such as collaboration and leadership is key to making your people more productive and inspired at work.

3. Building a culture that is willing to take risks and accept failure

An inevitable part of growth is failure. And adopting a growth mindset means accepting the chance that, in the end, you might fail. But innovation, creativity, and fueling a business forward wouldn’t be possible if people weren’t willing to take risks.

And often, this starts at the top. Leaders should set an example but also allow all employees to take on leadership roles – giving individuals the independence and freedom to try things, fail, and learn from their mistakes.

Taking on challenges is key. And organizations who view their people as capable of taking on challenges – even if it means failing – position themselves for success.

4. Driving commitment, determination, and innovation

Employees at growth mindset companies feel more committed to their work because they feel they have the potential to grow, learn, and thrive within it. They also feel more motivated to do their best because they know that their personal development and hard work is valued.

In fact, research has shown that employees at growth mindset organizations pursue more innovative projects. They also behave more transparently, cut fewer corners, and work more collaboratively. And these authentically motivated people will drive innovation and fuel business. Goals and Objectives

Any business that wants to position itself to meet goals and objectives, set new ones, continually move forward, and advance needs to adopt a growth mindset to succeed.

It’s all about developing, advancing, expanding, and seeing the opportunity and potential in every moment, individual, failure, and success. A growth mindset will move your business forward and position your business, its brand, and its people for growth, profit, and success in the future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

Eight Questions to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

Posted on November 1, 2021July 15, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Do you ever wonder about the strength of your brand? And its impact on your business? Do you monitor it and measure it? Do you evaluate it like you do for your business? If you wanted to know how it’s doing, would you even know what questions to ask? We’ve put together a quick diagnostic test to help CEOs assess when it’s time to for a strategic brand check-up.

Eight Questions to Ask Yourself to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

Does your company have a purpose that your employees live up to every day? Is it meaningfully activated in your corporate strategy, inspiring how your business behaves, driving your brand, and most importantly, emotionally resonating with your employees?
Does your brand have a distinctive brand positioning that sets it apart from competitors?
Have you defined the right category for your brand that is right for today and tomorrow?
Do your brand and product messaging cut through the clutter and resonate with your target audiences beyond just features and benefits?
Does your company have a corporate narrative that tells your story to all your target audiences in a clear, compelling way? Is it still aligned to the business strategy and vision for the future? Is everyone in the company able to tell the same story?
Does your company deliver on a clear and compelling brand promise to customers, employees, shareholders, and the world that they experience in a meaningful way?
Does your company communicate in a characteristic brand voice that’s consistently applied by your people at all levels?
Does your company have a visual brand identity with clear guidelines for consistent use at every touchpoint?

If you answered no to any of these questions, your brand might need a check-up.

It doesn’t hurt to check the strength of your brand, but it could hurt if you don’t.

For more information on how to evaluate the strength of your brand and understand its impact on your business, check out Fast Forward, an agile way to address your brand at the intersection of your business strategy, marketing efforts, and sales.

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

Progressive Positioning for Tech Companies that Scales

Posted on June 3, 2021July 15, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Positioning, While In Evolution

Our studio works with a diversity of clients, but most come to us in evolution: at pivotal points in their growth, maturation, and offering. For instance, we’ve worked with Series A companies that want to go to market with a compelling brand but don’t yet have a fully realized product, companies looking to emerge out of stealth who have a big vision for tomorrow but want to focus on their current product to prove results today, and maturing organizations at pivotal points in their trajectory who are facing existential decisions about how to evolve their products or build new ones. We also work with organizations who have built credibility around a certain product and/or product suite that now need to shift due to market changes and outside forces, or corporations who’ve grown via merger and acquisition and now find themselves with a complex product architecture and a diluted position in the market.

Whenever they are in their maturation—from startup to legacy—the tension between today and tomorrow can be a challenge when it comes to brand positioning, especially when what a company offers is changing or plans to change. Some worry that if they stand for something too big and too far away, the brand might overpromise on what it can actually deliver to people today. On the flip side, for many in growth mode, positioning solely around what you can credibly deliver on right now means outgrowing that position—and quickly.

Brand Positioning Should Be A North Star

It’s important to remember that product positioning and brand positioning are not the same. Your Brand Positioning sits on top of your product or offering, elevating the features and benefits, and value of what you offer to new heights of meaning, differentiation, and relevance in people’s minds and hearts. Ideally, a Brand Positioning should last more than several years (investing the time and resources in a brand positioning is not something you want to undertake every time what you offer evolves slightly), acting as the North Star not only for brand marketing decisions, but for product decisions, sales decisions, recruiting strategies, brand experiences, and beyond.

A Question of Balance

So, the question becomes: how do we position a brand in evolution for success today? And tomorrow? Do we own a position that speaks exclusively to what our product can offer our customers right now, or do we go big and position for the future? Or, somewhere in between? What’s the right balance?

Enter A Progressive Positioning Strategy

Enter what we call a Progressive Positioning Strategy. A brand positioning strategy that can move and evolve as your business, product, and culture does…which, for those in growth mode, it’s bound to.

Take a look:

1. Look outside-in

No compelling positioning is built in a vacuum. Our process always begins with examining trends and forces, both within your industry and in the world at large. For many clients, it’s easy to get stuck in your own thinking, rules, and expectations. Opening the aperture to what’s happening around you can change the game in terms of what’s possible.

2. Build around what’s true and unchanging

We work collaboratively with our clients to uncover what we call evergreen truths: foundational tenets that are baked into the DNA of what you do, how you do it better and uniquely, and why it matters—focusing on uncovering the truths that are true today…and will be true tomorrow. Starting here can enable relevance right now and in the future.

3. Scale the product to meet your ambition

Brands in growth mode have a vision or aspiration they are growing towards. They can envision what they want their brand to be five or even ten years from now. Aligning around this ultimate aspiration can ensure that the product decisions you’re making today are getting you step by step towards that ultimate ambition.

4. Find the right mix of today and tomorrow

Ultimately, any powerful brand has a blend. We work with our clients to find that perfect mix of today and tomorrow to create a brand that is both future-forward and visionary, while delivering and proving results and building credibility today. No brand requires the same balance. That’s why we dive deep to understand the nuance of the perfect blend for your brand, business, and culture.

5. Invite others into your shared vision of tomorrow

Building a community of “believers” who not only believe in what you do today, but what you have the potential to mean to them and the world in the future is critical. We help identify who those people are and what they care about, rationally and emotionally. We brand build to evoke immediate trust and credibility, while letting customers into your vision and helping them feel like they are a part of it is something bigger: your future.

Navigating the New Norm: Fast Forward for Efficient Growth and Strategic Stability

Posted on April 26, 2021July 15, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure to enhance efficiency, sharpen competitiveness, and improve profitability—all at the speed your business demands.

As a brand strategy firm, we understand that many of our clients, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, need a much more agile approach to address the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a six-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Below is an outline of what we tackle each week to gain momentum and drive impact.

Weeks 1-2: Immersion and Audit
We embark on a comprehensive week of intelligence gathering and analysis. We dive deep into your brand, business, and industry, fully immersing ourselves to gain insights and understanding.

We’ll assess your current positioning to distinguish your brand from key competitors, interview stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working, identify white space opportunities for you to own in market, evaluate your latest brand and product messaging, and present a comprehensive audit of our discoveries.

Week 3: Workshop
Based on our findings from the immersion and audit, we develop, explore, and workshop new ideas to enhance your positioning and messaging, ensuring alignment with internal teams.

Weeks 4-6: Develop, Refine, and Deliver
During the final phase of Fast Forward, we focus on producing your bespoke deliverables that will provide the highest possible value and impact on your organization. Below are just a few examples of deliverables you can choose from after we’ve aligned on the key challenges you are facing:

Implement your augmented positioning and messaging through website landing pages that stand out and move the needle
Refresh your sales deck to amplify the impact of your elevated story
Craft a narrative to align and empower cross-functional teams with a unifying vision and strategy to harmonize your efforts

At the end of the six-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process of our Fast Forward offering.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you looking to make an immediate impact?

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on February 18, 2021July 15, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

A brand strategy can take what people know and believe about your business to new levels. Active brand management takes a valuable asset that may now be largely underused and turns it into a powerful competitive weapon.

Regardless of how sophisticated your current approach to branding is, your business has a “brand” today, though you may have acquired it by default. Simply by being active in the marketplace, your business will have accrued a reputation, a level of fame, and a degree of notoriety (for better or worse) with your customers, and within your industry.

A strong brand strategy will take all that value and put it to work in new ways. It will elevate the importance and relevance of what is already known and believed about your business. It can also add many new reasons, both rational and emotional, that will create stronger bonds with customers and make your business more attractive to prospects. Finally, a well-constructed brand strategy can be used to unite and motivate your employees.

When your business has a focused brand strategy, all its working pieces generate more preference, loyalty, and appeal for your offering and greater profits to your bottom line.

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

Your brand serves as a magnet, drawing prospects to your offerings. Buyers see more difference between your offering and those of your competitors and act in your favor. Your brand stands out in an engaging way in the “me-also” world of your industry and beats back your competitors.

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

Your brand works as a glue, binding customers to your brand so they stay with you, grow with you, and tell others about your brand. It helps you identify your best customers and to direct special efforts against them. There’s far greater ROI in keeping an existing customer than recruiting a new one, and a strong brand idea can optimize your marketing budget.

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

Your brand works as a North Star that your employees follow. As a result, employees feel more engaged, work harder for your brand’s success, and become great ambassadors for your brand. And when recruits feel the energy of your brand, and see the results your workplace generates, they are more likely to join your business.

Today’s most successful leaders embrace brand strategy as part of their overall business strategy. By setting concrete brand goals, and developing strategies and tactics to achieve them, they have seen their brands grow and prosper.

Arm your business strategy with a stronger brand. Develop a brand strategy that takes everything you do today to a new level. Then use your brand to win.

Learn more about the power of a strong brand strategy and brand differentiation. Download our white paper, Transforming Your Brand.

Download White Paper

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

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