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Author: Tracy Lloyd

The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future.

This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee. 

It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions. 

It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful outcomes from their employee engagement activities, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This paper will suggest that the traditional notions of “purpose”, “values” and “culture” need to be rethought in light of the changing attitudes, expectations and aspirations of both current and prospective employees. It presents the alternative ideas of “ambition”, “feelings” and “behavior”, which are better aligned to the needs of the modern, meaning-seeking employee.

It will detail what composes the ideal master plan for a meaningful workplace and how that master plan can be used to fuel a range of plans designed to engender meaning at the corporate, workplace and individual levels. 

Finally, this paper will point out the need to rethink how to engage employees who are seeking meaning and urges businesses to think beyond mere “internal messaging” programs.

While this series challenges a number of established employee engagement “principles and practices”, it demonstrates how the “meaningful workplace” concept addresses the same business objectives of improved morale and increased productivity and engagement – albeit from a more compelling human perspective. 

Here’s what you can look forward to in the Meaningful Workplace

  1. Context: the workplace in crisis
  2. Understanding what makes something “meaningful”
  3. Toward the meaningful workplace
  4. Employees respond positively to a meaningful workplace
  5. Why people are looking for meaningful workplaces
  6. Why workplaces aren’t meaningful now
  7. Making your workplace more meaningful
  8. “Ambition” is the new “purpose”
  9. “Feelings” are the “values”
  10. “Behavior” are the new “culture”
  11. Making it happen
  12. Going beyond “messages”
  13. A process of self-discovery and self-identification

If you or someone you know is challenged by a workforce in which employees aren’t engaged, productivity is down and morale is low, download this paper. It is a must read for any business today.

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

Brand Strategy for Turbulent Times

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Business is in Flux

Brand strategy matters now more than ever. COVID-19 is a health crisis first, but also, an economic one. Many businesses that we work with are feeling uneasy about the current economic situation and the long-term effects of COVID-19 on business. Financial markets are no doubt showing extreme symptoms. There is an unignorable sense of shutdown and although the world has faced other economic crises before, this time is different. Business leaders, VC funders, investors, consumers, and employees are unsure how long this will last and to what extent they must shift strategies. Even economists are uncertain of how to quantify the true impact.

As the initial shock of this new world fades, brands are being forced to transform the way they do business overnight, continually adapting, thinking, and acting with empathy and purpose. These companies are facing more difficult choices. Below are some brands that have made significant shifts to how they operate to put their brand forward in more meaningful ways.

  • In early March, U-Haul provided free 30-day storage spaces for college students impacted by evacuations at university campuses amid school closures.
  • Top Auto Insurers, like AllState offered customers refunds for not driving during COVID-19 crisis. Since so many consumers can’t hit the road, insurance companies agreed that there was no reason to ask customers to pay normal rates.
  • Retail stores like Michaels, Ace Hardware, and Petco are offering curbside pickup services for a contactless way to purchase essential items.
  • Dyson shifted innovation focus to ventilators.
  • Local restaurants and chains have devoted profits to donate to healthcare providers experiencing a deficit in medical supplies and families in need.

So how can today’s brands start to adapt their offerings, reposition, shift and shift their communications, behavior, and marketing to maintain relevance and meaning in today’s turbulent world?

Brand Strategy Matters Now More than Ever

With much in flux and lots at stake, businesses need more customized brand solutions now more than ever. An external perspective can help businesses make sure their positioning, narrative, and go-to-market strategy are on track with shifting market trends and demands. Brand strategy has become more and more important to sustain a thriving, successful, and inspired business.

More Customized, More Tailored, More Agile

Business support needs to be more customized, tailored, and agile. Strategy has to move even faster in order to stay ahead and stand out. Positioning matters even more and brands need a strategy that is attuned to their specific needs, services, and current challenges.

Emotive Brand has listened to the needs of our clients and adapted our own client solutions in response. We have introduced a more agile approach to using strategy and design to solve business problems. More customized, easier to buy, lower commitment, and higher impact.

In Today’s World, Every Business Has Different Needs. We Help:

  • Leaders who need a new corporate narrative to maintain relevance
  • High-growth companies in need of an updated go-to-market strategy
  • Struggling companies needing to invest in a turnaround strategy
  • Corporate cultures that are off kilter because the company has grown too fast
  • Companies facing demands for top-line revenue growth quarter after quarter
  • Leadership teams having trouble formally articulating their brand purpose
  • Companies struggling to recruit fast enough and attract the top talent they need to innovate and grow
  • Websites that need an update to compete and convert
  • Brands that need to reposition to stay competitive in a crowding market
  • Brand identities that are falling flat and need a refresh

Whatever the issue, an external perspective will help you dive into matters and create customized and tailored solutions that overcome these challenges. A brand strategy that positions your business for success and helps your business thrive will weather the tides of 2020.

Learn more about our services that can help you transform your business and make your brand matter more.

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

Illustration created by Starline

Transforming Business Through Empathy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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Empathy and Business? Some say no, we say yes.

There are many factors that add meaning and purpose to a brand, and they all stem from a single source: empathy.

Empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes. That is, to see and experience the world from a perspective different from your own.

Here we explore how empathy plays a vital role in shifting brands from a bland and vulnerable position to one that is robust in meaning and purpose.

Empathy as a driver of brand strategy

When you’re close-in to a business’s daily operations it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the people you serve, both as customers and employees. To create a meaningful and purposeful dimension for your brand requires you to step out of your own perceptions of what’s good and valuable about your brand. It forces you to look at your brand – and everything it represents – through the lens of human needs, values, and aspirations. Through an empathetic approach, it’s easier to see the meaningful outcomes people experience based on their interactions with your brand. As such, empathy leads you to the deep-rooted, emotional connections that can be forged to create strong and enduring bonds. You won’t reach this point without allowing yourself to take the necessary steps back to the most common and fundamental needs, values and aspirations of humanity.

Empathy as a cultural ethos

Your business is a set of policies and procedures that have been conceived and designed to produce desired metrics (e.g. productivity, efficiency, profitability). Empathy can be used to elevate how well these functions not only produce the desired metrics, but do so in a way that aligns to the needs, values, and aspirations of the people involved. Empathy helps you create a more human-centric culture, by encouraging you to rethink and reconfigure the nature of your policies and procedures. As such, empathy helps you better engage and motivate employees. This means they’ll be far more likely to listen to, appreciate, and follow your leadership.

Empathy as an engine of innovation

If your business, like many, is struggling with hyper-competition and increasing product commoditization, innovation will be a primary focus. Nothing inspires innovation better than empathy. By encouraging your development people to “walk in your customer’s shoes”, either literally or through sensed experience, you bring them closer to what’s really important and valuable to the market. An empathetic attitude sheds new light on what’s needed now and how to best address that need or opportunity.

Empathy as a leadership practice

We’re all born empathetic. As babies we all had the capacity to perceive how others were feeling and what they were experiencing. Sadly, over time, we lose this skill. However, it is remarkably easy to revive and put to good use. Mindful leadership is the goal. All it requires is that you adapt your leadership presentation and style based on an understanding of your follower’s needs, values, and aspirations. You don’t necessarily change your management objectives, you simply radically improve your leadership performance by forging more meaningful connections with your followers.

If you are looking into the future, looking for new ways to transform your business, and have questions about your brand’s ability to navigate the rough seas ahead, you’ll want to carefully consider your own, and your organization’s, capacity for empathy. The strongest businesses going forward will be known for how their meaning and purpose-led behavior enhances both individual and collective well-being. They only reach this strong position by embracing empathy every step of the way.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
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Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now

Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly meaningful experiences is what really matters right now.

At Emotive Brand, we’ve built our methodology on our belief in the power of emotion. Our methodology has never proved more important or relevant than now. Emotive brands forge emotional and meaningful brand connections by caring deeply about people and aligning their actions and communications to the deep-rooted human needs, desires, and aspirations of all those important to the brand.

We see the keystones of such connections as empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. In our seminal white paper, “Transforming your brand,” we introduce these key drivers of thinking in this way:

“Emotive brand strategies use empathy to better understand and address the needs, values, interests and aspirations of people, both within and outside of your business. As such, we take your brand’s positive attributes and match them against what we know about the ideas and ideals that people care about, connect to, and that can change their behavior. We also encourage our clients to adopt new behaviors that are more empathetic toward both their employees and customers, and to use the insights they gain to identify ways to make their workplace and offerings more personally relevant and emotionally important in the moment.”

Why Empathy?

Empathy is being able to vicariously experience how another experiences something. It’s not actually having the same experience, but rather allowing yourself to see the world from another’s perspective. For example, you don’t have to be blind to understand what life is like without the key sense of sight. Empathy is an innate trait (children are naturally empathetic), and simply needs to be sourced from within. We take an empathetic view of your audiences and then assess how your brand addresses their deepest needs. The results are sometimes unexpected, but always gratifying to our clients, and cultivating empathy is especially essential in navigating uncertain times like these.

Why Compassion?

Compassion is putting the insights you gain through empathy into practice in a helpful way. This is the essence of problem-solving. You come to understand another’s needs and then redesign products, experiences, and communications accordingly. This means greater creativity, innovation, and a continually broadening perspective. We turn to our compassionate nature to translate the unique intersection between your brand and basic human needs into actionable practices that bring the resulting meaning to life.

Why Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of the surrounding world and more alive to its inherent possibilities. It is about having a broader perspective and a universal respect for others. It is recognizing that more unites us than separates us. It is about being humble, feeling connected, harnessing and using energy in new and more gratifying ways. When you employ a mindful attitude in everything you do, you enable a mutually-beneficial balance between your tangible business needs and the intangible meaning that will help your brand thrive in a COVID-19 world and beyond.

Every brand strategy we develop embraces the practices of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. Through this we are better able to match your brand’s attributes with what truly matters to people today on deep and meaningful levels. At the same time, the brand behaviors we develop aim to promote these factors on both leadership and organizational levels.

Making Meaning A Way Of Doing Business

Organizations and leaders are often overwhelmed by circumstances and respond by turning inward both as individuals and on an organizational level. A state of mindfulness enables organizations and leaders to rise above the immediate situation and to turn outward to others on a deeper and more personal level.

Brand behavior that promotes an empathetic, compassionate, and mindful culture helps ensure that your brand will evolve into the most meaningful state possible. As a foundation for your brand culture, these vital traits also make sure that your brand’s meaningful way of being is sustainable and enduring.

As brands seek to confront the challenges of this new world, it’s only natural that they turn to meaning. But it is important to remember that it’s one thing to claim meaning, and quite another to continuously create meaning both within and outside your brand organization. When empathy, compassion, and mindfulness inform the organization, drive its decision-making, and shape its vision, meaning goes beyond being a buzzword and becomes a way of doing business.

Download White Paper

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

Image by Alen Pavlovic

Fast Forward Your Narrative: COVID was a catalyst for change. Is your corporate narrative still relevant?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

COVID was a catalyst for change. Is your corporate narrative still relevant?

At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, companies were scrambling to respond to the moment. But as recognition sets in that these changes are here to stay, we must respond to a new movement: one that moves fast, with feeling, for the future.

The landscape of brand, business, and culture has been undeniably transformed. So, we must figure out how to communicate in ways that were empathetic and relevant, contextually aware, human, and sensitive. Given our new normal—a constant state of change—today’s leaders, brand stewards, and their teams must be extremely focused, maintain leadership amidst uncertainty, and have the ability to rapidly and dynamically re-evaluate what their company stands for, how it communicates, and why it’s vital to the world.

Making sure your Corporate Narrative resonates with customers, partners, and employees requires an agile strategy and clear communications that reflect your company in a way that is authentic and appropriate for this moment. There is no better time to lean into your brand, ensuring that it connects to both hearts and minds, knows what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.

We have developed a new program to meet these challenges that we’re calling Fast Forward. It efficiently develops one specifically-targeted Corporate Narrative to ensure you are on-brand in how you communicate with employees, customers, your wider partner ecosystem, boards, and investors.

  • The CEO Narrative enables CEOs to communicate a leadership vision appropriate for a moment that reaches all audiences.
  • The CMO Narrative is customized to enable CMOs and their marketing teams to communicate with external audiences, such as customers, partners, and boards.
  • The CHRO Narrative is designed to give CHROs and their teams the messages they need to speak with employees during this time.
  • The CRO Narrative is focused on sales with customers, prospects, and partners.

On this page, you’ll find our recommended approach to quickly assess and adjust your Corporate Narrative to ensure your company is in the best position for what is undoubtedly a new era for business.  

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Leadership in a COVID-19 World: Navigating “Fields of Paradox”

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Turbulence Takes a Toll

The acceleration of COVID-19, the speed and intensity of change, the current economic terrain, and the pressure to innovate, adapt, stabilize, and address each new challenge (of which there are many) with focus, grace, empathy, and precision is no doubt taking a toll on all of today’s business leaders. 

The current state of affairs reminded us of an interview with Gianpiero Petriglieri, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, who provides insights into the implications of turbulent times on leadership. 

“Whatever sector or industry you look at, we face enormous uncertainty and anxiety. Leaders operate under an increasing amount of pressure and great visibility. They are called on to provide predictability, at the same to spark leaps of innovation; to be resolute and inclusive; to have a firm point of view, yet to also take into account a plurality of constituencies; to be self-confident and question themselves at the same time.”

“Fields of Paradox”  

Professor Petriglieri refers to this tension between resolution and plurality as a “field of paradox”. And to prevail in this turbulent environment, leaders need to operate mindfully, effectively, and responsibly.

For many (if not most) leaders, this signals a significant change in their normal approach to leadership. It pulls leaders out of their isolation and forces them to rethink their leadership intents, attitudes and behaviors. It prompts leaders to translate their personal vision, purpose, and ambition to a new language and behavior that up-levels empathy and compassion,  ensures relevance, and truly responds to the concerns of others.  

Finding Solid Ground: It’s Universal

Remember that everyone–your customers, employees, partners, suppliers, investors, and even your own friends and family–are also caught up in their own “fields of paradox”. Feeling both fear and love, anxiety and calm, uncertainty and hope, loneliness and community, distance and closeness. This means the people that you need to reach are seeking out, choosing, and gravitating towards the ideas, people, products, and businesses that will help them navigate these daily paradoxes. 

The leadership challenge becomes how to meet people where they are, wherever they are. This requires an unparalleled level of empathy and ability to understand the contradictory emotional states of your employees, customers, and business partners. 

Toward a Meaningful Position

As a discipline, Emotive Branding, our proprietary methodology, seeks to move businesses to a new meaningful position from which their beliefs and offerings more closely align with what people are seeking–both emotionally and rationally. For any leader today looking to “rethink” and “translate” their personal vision, purpose, and ambition to better resonate in today’s status quo, please reach out with questions. 

Read my full interview with Gianpiero Petriglieri here.

Please reach out if you want guidance on how to rearticulate your leadership vision during this time. 

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

Cultivating Empathy: Essential in Uncertain Times

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Empathy in Uncertain Times

These days, everything feels unsettled. We’ve watched travel discontinue, lively offices expeditiously shift to remote work, restaurants and small businesses shut their doors, cities still and quiet, as the landscape of our global economy shifts on a daily basis. Recognition that this COVID-19 state of living, working, and doing business will not be ephemeral is settling in. We’re seeing first hand as our clients are forced to quickly adapt—make swift decisions, innovate new solutions, and reimagine the way they’ve always done business.

It’s clear that the weight communications hold has heavied. Executives are reaching out to their employees, eager to instill both calm and action. Businesses are connecting with stakeholders aiming to secure trust. Brands are reaching out to customers, motivated to emotionally resonate with consumers’ current state of mind. These connections, big and small, have never been more critical. Empathy has never been more essential.

Getting Closer in a Socially Distanced World

Empathy is an innate human skill that is available to each and every one of us. As such, it is a talent that stands ready to be reanimated through leadership, organizational behavior, and brand behavior.

As your brand aims to re-create a collective sense of what truly matters to people, and responds accordingly, it has the opportunity to take on a new and more emotionally valuable role in people’s lives. Employees will feel closer to your organization if they feel it is working hard in favor of their interests. Customers will feel a sense of kinship if they feel your brand truly understands them. Now is the time to think about how the experience of your organization’s products, marketing, and support all confirm its commitment to putting people first. How do you ensure that people walk away from every communication feeling they’ve been listened to, that their needs (both emotional and rational) have been better met, and their fears have been quieted? That every connection means one step closer together?

Redefining Empathy

At Emotive Brand, we see empathy as something a bit more than simply “sharing someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation.” (the dictionary definition). To us, it’s more powerful than both sympathy and compassion combined. Empathy is two-fold: both understanding and action. It’s the ability to truly feel and understand someone else’s situation—their emotional state of mind, their needs, desires, and fears. To use that empathetic understanding and take action that is in tune with the person and their state—ultimately improving it.

It’s no secret that business has never been strong on empathy. The closest it usually comes is in consumer research, but that science often leads to inhuman numerical analyses of the human psyche. People are notorious for telling researchers what they want to hear and are often unable to articulate what they really want or need.

Empathetic understanding is not necessarily an empirical process. Rather it is an experiential one leading to deep insights and a profound understanding and appreciation of the lives of others. It is a way to feel the hopes, dreams, fears, and concerns of the people your business seeks to impact. It is a way to vicariously experience what they see and feel when they use your products, experience your marketing, and deal with your people. This informs you of how you can retune and refine what your business does in ways that better reflect the insights you’ve gained through empathetic understanding. This also leads you to new ways of doing business that is more aligned with today’s world and more resonant with where people are today.

It’s Time to Rediscover Your Innate Empathy Skills

The smallest children show empathy for others, but we tend to lose this skill as we enter the mainstream of life. We can, however, reawaken this valuable talent and put it to good use.

The first step is to turn up the dial of two other innate traits: curiosity and caring. Think of the people who your brand impacts as people you know, love, and treasure. Try to imagine the perspective they have on what’s happening, the attitudes and beliefs that drive their behaviors, and the emotional nature of their new daily realities. Give them permission to have values and needs other than your own. Don’t ascribe right and wrong, rather strive to find out more about what drives them, what fulfills them, and what brings them greater peace of mind.

Empathy Has Rewards

For leaders today, empathy might be your most powerful tool. By better understanding what makes followers tick, empathetic leaders can find ways to make their new ideas, messages, strategies, and dreams more relevant and emotionally important. This shifts the response from followers, not only in aligning them to your vision, but also energizing them to work better together, develop new ideas, and strive for the highest goals.

The rewards multiply for an organization in which empathy is a core practice today. More resonance, greater impact. More appealing, relevant, and differentiated products. More compelling, activating, and loyalty-building marketing. More innovation, collaboration, and spirit flowing within the organization and greater stability to underpin your business.

If you want help embedding empathy into your executive and company communications during this time, please reach out.

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

Using Metaphors to Communicate on Behalf of Your Brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Meaningful Connections

Even the most complex brands need to make meaningful connections with customers. At Emotive Brand, we work with a lot of brands that have complicated technology, products, or services. As we dive into these brands, we often find that even company founders struggle to clearly explain what their brand does and why it matters in a way that truly resonates with customers. Oftentimes they use a metaphor to describe their offering.

Metaphors are powerful communication devices. They help us consider new ideas or concepts in a relatable way. They help us move away from talking about features and benefits and towards a better understanding of the brand’s significance.

In the evolving marketplace of SaaS, AdTech, FinTech, cloud services, big data, platforms – the list goes on – the amount of brands out there with innovative and complex offering is seemingly endless. We encounter technology, banking, professional services, and even luxury brands that need a better way to communicate their value proposition without getting stuck in the trenches of abstract vernacular and terminology. With the proliferation of different products and services, brands are under increasing pressure to stand out, be clear about what they offer, and create an emotional connection. Brands that do all of that and articulate why they matter set the stage for meaningful connections.

Brand Name as a Metaphor

A metaphor can be used in a brand name or as part of a tagline. By choosing a culturally familiar symbol as a representation of your brand, you can create a deeper meaning that resonates with the people important to your brand. A metaphor shapes the way we engage with the brand because it is often the basis for a brand story. Consider the metaphors used in some of the world’s most valuable brands:

Amazon: It’s the largest river in the world. You can find everything on Amazon. And the brand promise reinforces the metaphor as “… a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Oracle: Defined as a thing that delivers authoritative, wise, or highly regarded and influential pronouncements. Oracle has a wide range of technology offerings from software to cloud engineering, all of which are intended to act as oracles in the world of technology.

Corona: ‘Crown’ in Spanish. A symbol of a powerful force. A thing preeminent in its class. Corona is the ‘King of Beer’ and its name makes people feel confident, masculine, and proud – qualities we often associate with beer drinking.

Campaign Metaphor

For a truly complex business offering, a brand might need to lean on a marketing campaign based on a metaphorical concept. We looked to some of the best campaigns of all time to see which of these turned a metaphor into a way of communicating what the brand stands for, why it matters, and what sort of emotional connection it created.

Chevrolet: Like a Rock

The “Like a Rock” campaign evokes toughness, ruggedness, and safety. When people are referred to as a ‘rock,’ it suggests the person will never leave you hanging, they are dependable, and unwavering. Chevy’s campaign expands on the subconscious feeling of people who own a Chevy: it’s there when they need it, and it’s all they need.

Red Bull: Give You Wings

The idea that Red Bull “gives you wings” suggests that Red Bull can metaphorically lift you up to achieve even the riskiest endeavors. Whether it’s staying awake longer on a graveyard shift or diving off a 50 foot building into a shallow river, Red Bull promises to give you the energy and courage to make it happen. The campaign conveys the feeling of capability, determination, and power.

How to Choose a Metaphor for Your Brand

If your brand offers a complex product or a service that is difficult to explain (maybe because there’s nothing to compare it to), consider using a metaphor as the roadmap for how you talk about your brand or explain the complexities of what it offers. When leading clients down this path, we often ask:

  • What does your product represent to customers?
  • How does your brand deliver value?
  • Where does your brand fit into your customers’ lives?
  • How do you connect your offering to your brand’s promise?

Consider brainstorming these questions to help guide your metaphor. Although products and industries evolve, the beauty of a brand metaphor is that they don’t change. The core meaning is a constant and the way people connect with your brand becomes long-lasting. With the right brand metaphor, you can create meaningful connections and relevant customer experiences that grow alongside your brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Making Everyone a Brand Champion

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Developing brand champions is critical

Good brand strategies don’t stop at defining why the brand matters. They go further to define the attitudes and behaviors that will define the brand experience in ways that truly matter.

Behavior is best defined on two levels: brand and workplace.

Brand behavior

Brand behavior focuses on the tangible and controllable aspects of your brand. These include the brand’s visual identity and it’s voice in marketing and advertising. Brand behavior identifies the shifts that will generate the feelings with which the brand seeks to be associated. Coupled with new messages that blend the brand’s promise with its key benefits, your brand presence will start to be seen in new, more appealing, and better differentiated ways.

Workplace behavior

Workplace behavior addresses the way leadership, management, and staff can all shift what they do, and how they do it, to better fulfill the brand’s promise. These shifts focus on the role of people who either shape (by designing customer interactions), or who actively create customer experiences (by making a presentation, doing a demonstration, etc). The ideas within the workplace behavior show how they can make the brand’s promise come true, while at the same time evoke the brand’s feelings within every brand experience.

Making everyone a brand champion

Good brand behavior is extremely practical. It helps those specifically involved in managing and promoting the brand to ensure a coherent brand presence. It also helps everyone else in the business see the role they can play in the helping the brand succeed by fulfilling on its promise.

Brand behavior is also an invaluable tool when dealing with outside vendors, including PR and advertising agencies. While brand behavior does not proscribe PR or advertising executions, it does provide these important partners with a strong sense of what makes the brand matter, what they can do to help make the brand promise come true, and how they can evoke the brand’s feelings within the executions they create and manage.

Brand behavior is much more than a set of rules

Brand behavior is helpful advice and guidance, not a set of strict rules or harsh dictates. It recognizes that the brand needs to be able to remain current, and to react to emerging trends and opportunities. It also needs to establish its presence in an increasing number of places.

As such, good brand behavior invites individuals within the organization, and outside vendors, to explore a constant stream of rich and relevant ways to convey the brand’s truths, engage people in the brand’s promise, and change the way people feel about the brand.

All together now

By aligning internal leadership, management and staff, as well as external vendors, brand behavior plays a vital role in shaping brand experiences that are consistently meaningful to customers and prospects. It helps make your promise come true. It helps you create a unique emotional aura around your brand that makes it more appealing and gratifying. Most importantly, it draws more people closer to your brand, so prospects are more likely to try it, customers are more likely to be more loyal, and your brand is more likely to thrive now and in the future.

It’s never been more important to matter as a brand. You take the first steps when you identify what’s most rationally and emotionally valuable about your offering, and embody that in a single brand promise. Your brand thrives when you couple that promise with brand and workplace behavior that’s designed to make it all come true. As shifts in behavior take place, more and more customers and prospects see the truth of your promise, realize its benefits for themselves, and respond in kind.

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IMG credit: http://www.markcypher.com/dusseldorf/dusseldorf.php

Build a Stronger Business by Embracing Your Brand’s Hidden Truths

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Behind every brand there stands a set of as-yet realized or evergreen truths. These truths have the power to change the way you, and everyone vital to your brand’s success, think, feel, and act with respect to your brand.

These truths emerge when the many things your brand does are seen in light of their meaningful outcomes. This means analyzing the actions, attitudes, and behavior of the organization. It also means assessing the organization’s policies and procedures. In each case, the search is for the positive and meaningful outcomes that result.

Not only true, but meaningful

By meaningful, we mean how the outcomes have a positive impact on people, society, and the environment. These are outcomes that resonate deeply with people. Once people are aware of the meaningful outcomes a brand creates, they have greater respect for, and affinity toward, the brand.

As customers, they are more likely to use the brand, talk about it with others, and remain loyal longer. As employees, they are more likely to be engaged, align better to the organization’s goals, and feel more gratified by their work.

Why aren’t these truths evident now?

The fact is, business is a largely rational affair, and meaningful outcomes based on truths tend to operate in the less familiar and comfortable zone of intangible emotions and feelings. As such, their value isn’t so much in what they say, as how they make people feel.

Sadly, most leaders don’t venture far into this domain. But, when leaders do so by retaining outside help to identify the truths about their brand, they are invariably impressed by what comes to the surface, and proud of the meaningful outcomes that flow from their businesses. It then doesn’t take long for them to realize the power and value these outcomes represent.

Where will your brand’s truths take your organization?

That depends on you. If you’re a progressive and forward-thinking leader, you will readily seize the possibilities of competing on a meaningful level. You’ll see how being a champion of your brand’s meaningful truths will make you a more admired and trusted leader. You will recognize that by bringing these truths to the surface in sincere ways, your customers and prospects will start to see your brand in new and deeper ways. Your brand strategy will shift to reflect the emotional connection you are forging with your entire network.

However, if you leave your brand’s meaningful truths lying dormant under facts and figures, your competitive power will diminish, your followers will hardly be inspired, and your customers will likely gravitate toward those brands that do reach out on a more meaningful level.

Choose the truth. Focus on meaningful outcomes. Matter more to people. Get them on your side. Win by being meaningful.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

To read more about brand differentiation and stronger business practices: Why all the Talk About Purpose and Brand Strategy? Or, check out our white paper:Download White Paper

Img credit: Anton Burmistrov