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Category: B2B

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.

Creating a Brand That Resonates: 3 Grammy-Worthy Lessons from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.”

Posted on by Nick Ott

Is your brand telling a story for now or a story forever? Take a lesson from pop music and learn how to create a brand that lets your customers feel like they “can be someone.”

Imagine a slightly different 2024 Grammy Awards. In this one, there’s still a comeback performance from a reclusive 1980s star, but instead of Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” alongside Luke Combs, it’s Billy Ocean singing “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.” Can you picture Taylor Swift singing along rapturously to his lyric: “Lady driver, let me take the wheel”?

Probably not, but why? Both “Fast Car,” and “…Get into My Car” were released in 1988 and Ocean’s was the bigger single that year, number 15 on the year-end singles charts versus 76 for “Fast Car.” So, why was it Tracy on the stage in 2024 instead of Billy?

Emotional resonance
While Billy Ocean still has his fans (I’m one), his singles are largely characterized as novelty hits: bright, catchy, quick hits of dopamine. If “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car,” were released today, we’d say it was written with engagement in mind. It could inspire a TikTok dance.

“Fast Car,” on the other hand, has only grown in popularity, becoming a staple cover of artists spanning generations and genres, all of whom want to do what that song does uniquely well: connect emotionally with their audience. It communicates the eternal human desires for escape and rebirth—desires that are universal and enduring. It gives a voice to people with those desires. In this respect, Tracy Chapman is capable of speaking for them on an emotional level.

At Emotive Brand, we create brands that aspire to deliver the emotional resonance “Fast Car” delivers, and believe there are a few things that any company can learn by connecting the songwriting process to the brand-building process.

1. Consider the emotional needs of your customers (not just their material needs)
“Fast Car” is a song with a story: its protagonist is a woman stuck in a cycle of poverty and struggling to care for an alcoholic father. While many people can empathize with that, not everyone can see themselves in it. “Fast Car” feels universal because it tells us the emotional needs of its protagonist, not just her material ones: wanting to belong, wanting to “be someone.” Nearly everyone knows what that feels like, regardless of circumstance.

Brands should do this too, regardless of industry or offering, because one way or another, to some degree or another, every buying decision is an emotional one. No matter how rational or materialistic your customers may seem at the moment of decision, they are human beings with human needs, goals, and emotions. If your offering helps your customers cut costs or make a business process more efficient, perhaps your brand is helping them advance their career or gain the respect of their peers. As we’ve recently said to one client, “even CFOs have feelings.”

2. Make your story timeless
A good story can always grab attention, but to endure, it needs to resonate beyond the moment. Tracy Chapman’s own brand was that of an “activist” singer (her second single was “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”). She could have written “protest songs”: straightforward stories about the specific political and social issues of her day, but songs like “Fast Car” offer a different perspective, framing social issues through the lens of perennial, emotional desires.

Similarly, while your product or service may be meeting a need that is very much of the now, your customers’ most important needs are their aspirations: longer term goals that are often both primal and enduring. You do your brand an enormous disservice if you don’t identify those aspirations and connect your offering to that distant horizon. If you make plain to your customers how you can help them reach their goals, your brand can truly resonate.

3. Share the spotlight
As we’ve seen, for most listeners of “Fast Car,” the song isn’t about Tracy Chapman, or even about an unnamed protagonist; it’s about them. Instead of putting the spotlight exclusively on the singer of the song, “Fast Car” lets listeners hear themselves within its lyrics and makes them the hero of a shared narrative.

There are few more important lessons for any brand to learn. Even with a truly revolutionary, world-shaking offering, a brand is almost always better off being an enabler of heroic change than the hero or heroine making that change. Iconic consumer brands (and iconic musicians) have understood this for decades, but many B2B brands still struggle with it.

Today, many brands are built like a Billy Ocean hit, with more hook than pull. Whether that means confusing their product with their brand, or hyper-focusing on the tangible benefits they offer at the expense of the needs of their audience, they tell a story exclusively about themselves, and one their customers can’t see themselves in. But if you can create a brand like “Fast Car,” tapping into near-universal desires for things like belonging and significance, you’ll forge emotional bonds with your audience that will endure beyond that first attention-grabbing moment.

The No Predictions Blog Post for 2024

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

Welcome to 2024. Have you already been bombarded with every person on LinkedIn’s latest and greatest predictions? The blog post titles can practically write themselves at this point. Artificial Intelligence: Everything You Need to Know in 2024, 10 Predictions for MarTech in 2024, What to Watch for in Social Media in 2024, and our personal favorite (and actual title), What’s Ahead in 2024? The Cookie Cutters May Tell!

Well, here’s some good news. We’re not here to add to the predictive noise by adding our own set of predictions for branding. Nope, we’re not going to do it. And this is why. As best as we can tell, there is a fair degree of unpredictability afoot in almost every important realm–the economic arena, the political atmosphere, the climate, the global stage. Making predictions, though enticing (and popular), feels foolhardy and a little bit inconsequential. So instead, at the head of this new year, we offer you some evergreen branding principles. Some hard-learned truths and tips that ensure that any brand creates resonance, builds trust, and ultimately, grows businesses. We’d put our money on these ahead of any predictions.

1. Find your highest possible ground
When it comes to finding the right altitude for your brand, it’s NEVER wrong to shoot for the stars. It may feel comfortable to stay within your comfort zone (yes, we see that roundabout logic) but if you want to break through, you’ve got to push out and reach higher. What can you say about your brand that is truly unique to you? What is the most elevated way of talking about its benefits to customers beyond the ever-popular “efficiency, speed and confidence”? Can you push it a tad further and still be believable? Seriously, this is your baby—let it soar.

2. Tell the truth, even if it’s ugly
We all have our warts, even our brands. The thing is, warts caked in make-up don’t fool anyone. And neither do your brand’s less appealing features. Find a way to reveal your warts in a truthful, perhaps charming or self-deprecating manner. Your customers will appreciate you not trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and will probably be more inclined to believe what you say about your best features because they’ve come to trust your honesty.

3. Anticipate (and embrace) a dialogue
It’s 2024. It’s a whole new world. When Web 2.0 emerged and enabled people to contribute their voices through social media, brand owners were given the shock of their professional lives. All of a sudden, customers were starting to take control of the narrative. A brand was no longer just what the company said it was, not if somebody disagreed with it. And so began the brand dialogue. Today, more than ever, especially with the advent of AI and an ever more vocal and self-empowered customer base, brands need to not just expect a dialogue, but to create its conditions so that customers feel welcome within the conversation.

4. Make the brand everyone’s business
When your company decides it’s time to refresh your brand, make sure that it’s not just the marketing department that feels implicated. Over the years, we’ve seen countless rebrands happen not just because a company feels like it needs to (re)establish its value proposition to the marketplace, but because it is an organic and systemic way to reinvigorate and realign the company itself. Get Finance, Sales, Customer Success, Operations, Engineering and Product involved—the rewards of making your brand relevant and important to every employee within every function are exponential.

5. Be consistent, and stay the course
A/B testing is great for your product but not really for branding. It’s tempting to try a few things and see what sticks. The problem is, the more messages you have in the market, the greater the risk for confusion or dilution. You really only get one chance to make the impression that’s going to stick, so once you find your highest possible ground (see #1) and everyone is bought in (see #4), go in deep and hard on that brand message. Don’t take your foot off the gas or get distracted. Soon, you’ll know if you’re on the right track.

We’ve got a few more good thoughts up our sleeves but we’ll leave it here for now so that you have time to go and read some Predictions blog posts (we read them too, for laughs). Give us a call if you want to hear more. Emotive Brand is a kickass branding firm that does really good work for brands everywhere.

Rebranding in 2024? Move Fast to Go Slow.

Posted on by Bella Banbury

As 2023 winds down, odds are you’ve already set your goals for 2024 and are taking these last couple of weeks to tie up loose ends and get ready to take a running leap into Q1. But before you turn out the lights on the year, we have one piece of advice: if a rebrand is something you’re considering before the end of Q2, the time to start is now.

“Starting now” doesn’t mean kicking off the project. But it does mean you need to socialize the endeavor with your leadership team, clarify the goals, secure budget, identify internal teams and resources, define the brief or create an RFP, find the right agency partner that can deliver the work based on your timing and budgets, and get all the appropriate agreements in place. All of this takes time—time you don’t want to steal from the strategic work that goes into the rebranding process.

Make the time to go slow
A rebrand is never a cookie-cutter project (and beware of those who claim otherwise). Because brand impacts every part of your organization, the process is as much about building internal alignment as it is about creating a new story, identity, or positioning. You need to make time to explore the implications that moving in different directions can have on your business. You need to create space to surface philosophical differences and provide the frameworks for getting people on the same page. You need to understand what different teams require of the new brand and how they can put it to use. The more deeply you can dive into these conversations, the better chance of seeing the essence of your company come to life in stunning language, arresting design, and experiences that set you apart.

When you need it yesterday
Over the years, we’ve seen the New Year brings a desire to make things new, and 2024 will be no different. Maybe a competitor that jumps into January with a refreshed brand or a story that tilts the playing field away from you. Maybe a new opportunity asks you to rethink your positioning or dial up your differentiation. Maybe a new round of funding translates into headcount and the need to elevate your employer branding.

While you can address things like product positioning or messaging updates with short-term solutions, bigger brand-related conversations beg for deeper consideration. You can certainly shore up your website copy and discuss new features and functionality without needing a brand overhaul. But when your company is ready to go to market in a new way, it’s time to take a deep breath and start planning for a rebrand.

The cost of delay
The longer you wait to get the gears in motion, the harder it can be to reach your organization’s goals. Sales kick-offs, trade shows, customer and investor roadshows, and other activities can put your project on the back burner. And, like someone showing up to the Oscars in an outdated outfit, you’ll be missing opportunities to attract the attention you need to grow.

Here’s the good news: without making any big budget outlays, there are steps you can take right now to ensure you’re in control of the timing for when you update your brand:

Lay the Groundwork
Start the internal discussions with your key stakeholders to build alignment on goals, expectations, timing, and budgets.

Identify an Agency
Research potential agencies that align with your business, your vision, and your values. Look for an agency that knows your space and has worked with companies at your stage of growth.

Prepare an RFP or Creative Brief
Detail your branding objectives and requirements, including timelines, key deliverables, events you want to leverage for a brand rollout, and your desired budget. The more complete the story you tell about what you want, the easier it will be to find an agency that can deliver.

Select an Agency
Meet with your top agencies, review their proposals, and meet their teams. A branding project will span months, and chemistry is crucial to ensuring good communication and a positive engagement style throughout.

Procurement & Planning
Onboarding an agency, finalizing SOWs, and scheduling planning sessions all take time. Depending on your organization’s procurement process, account for this time accordingly.

Preparing for Kick-Off
Gather all the necessary materials that will help your agency hit the ground running, including documents, product demos, and research. Identify key stakeholders early to avoid project delays during interview scheduling.

If you are planning any brand initiative in 2024, we can’t overstate the importance of starting the process sooner rather than later. When the process gets underway, you’ll undoubtedly encounter challenges you hadn’t predicted and twists and turns that you’ll be grateful to have some extra time to address.

If you’re contemplating going on a rebranding journey and are looking for guidance, Emotive Brand is here to help. Let us know how we can help you get ready to jump into the process.

Q&A with Sarah Cincotta of Aperian About Rethinking the Brand of a DEI Pioneer

Posted on by Jim Humes

As the DEI category grows larger and new entrants fight for attention, it can be hard for companies to identify the right partner for their journey of creating an inclusive workplace. Founded in 1991, Aperian is a pioneer in helping organizations develop culturally diverse teams that deliver measurable value. Trusted by over half of the Fortune Global 100, their experience serving over three million learners has driven their evolution into a data-driven, product-led company.

Emotive worked with the Aperian leadership team to redefine the company’s brand as it embraced a new strategy, refreshed its values, and developed a new visual and verbal identity to further differentiate its offering in a crowded space. As they go to market with an updated brand and story, we had a chance to chat with Managing Director of Global Marketing Sarah Cincotta to get her insights on the process of rebranding an industry leader to accelerate its growth.

Emotive Brand: There was a lot going on when you undertook this work. Your two co-founders were stepping back after decades of work to build the brand, and your two co-presidents were stepping up to face the challenges of competing in a rapidly growing space. Why was this the right time to re-examine your brand? 

Sarah: The DEI landscape has really exploded over the last few years, and every indication is that it will be a growing part of the corporate culture and governance landscape going forward. This has attracted a number of new competitors to the space who are aggressively building their brands. We found that even though we have longevity and heritage in this space, our message was getting drowned out. One of the biggest assets of being an early leader is that a significant portion of our business historically has come from client referrals. But we got to the point where we were seeing business plateau, and we knew that to keep pace in this rapidly growing landscape, we needed to reposition our brand.

Emotive Brand: Aperian’s go-to-market strategy is also evolving to match the dynamics of the marketplace. How did that play into the work of updating your brand?

Sarah: Aperian offers both live training and asynchronous online learning. As our company evolved, clients began to associate the Aperian Global brand with live training and the GlobeSmart brand with our online products. The market wasn’t always aware of the connections between our offerings, and even internally we struggled to blend those sides of the business. We’ve also added other products to our portfolio during our 30 years in business, and we used the brand development process as an opportunity to unify all of our offerings under a single umbrella.

A big part of this process was building an identity around Aperian that could speak to our existing customers as well as help us build awareness in the SMB segment. With our go-to-market strategy shifting to a product-led approach, our goal was to develop a brand that could deliver a unified message across all segments. By simplifying our brand architecture, we can go to market with a suite of products rather than point solutions to meet the needs of different customers. Our new brand story also gives our sales team a better starting point for engaging customers in our portfolio. And as we get more comfortable leaning into the emotional foundations of our brand, we’re already seeing how our brand is opening the door for new types of conversations with the people we serve.

Emotive Brand: What advice would you give other companies, regardless of industry, that are operating in an increasingly competitive market?

Sarah: A great exercise would be to see how difficult or easy it is for employees across the business to articulate what makes your company different and better than everyone else. At Aperian, we had the problem of having too many reasons we could claim we were different, which is not a bad thing, but we found it prevented us from rallying our brand around a single idea that we stand for in the hearts and minds of our customers.

Emotive Brand: So what is the idea that you rallied around?

Sarah: Simply put, it’s the butterfly effect: how one small change can cause ripples that create an outsized impact. We call this The Aperian Effect, and it gets to the heart of how pursuing our mission can change a workplace, an organization, and the world for the better. After the team landed on this idea, we discovered that back in 2016, Ernie, one of Aperian’s co-founders, sent a state-of-the-union email to employees that referenced this same idea. It was a confirmation that in the process of developing a brand for our next chapter, we were staying true to the DNA that makes Aperian such a unique company.

Emotive Brand: Before partnering with Emotive, your internal team had done some work to update its brand platform. What did you discover while working with Emotive? 

Sarah: Our previous work helped us align on the language of our key messages, but what was missing from our work was the emotional piece. Focusing our team on how we want our customers to feel opened up entirely new conversations about where our brand could go. Our work is intrinsically emotional, but getting intentional about creating a specific emotional space—and having the confidence to lean into it as we go to market—has made a big difference in how we’re building relationships with customers.

Emotive Brand: Aperian is blessed with a dedicated group of people who have been with the company for a long time, and a new brand represents a significant change in how a company sees itself. How did you onboard people into this process? 

Sarah: There is a good reason why one of our values is, “Stay curious and keep learning.” This mindset creates the perfect opening for communicating openly and transparently about the motivations behind undertaking this work. Our management team hosted bi-monthly coffee chats where people could bring their questions, which allowed employees to learn more about the thinking that went into the new brand. We also made it clear that this was an evolution of Aperian, not a dramatic shift. And by educating our teams about brand and letting them see the iterations of the work that helped us land our new identity, they could see the care and consideration that went into the process. We have a new logo and a new color palette, which is great, but our employees also understand the why behind them.

Emotive Brand: As part of this work, the team also refreshed the language around the company’s values. Why was this important to do? 

Sarah: The rebrand could have fallen flat for our employees if we hadn’t taken the time to reflect on our values. In the same way that we refreshed our brand to support our changing strategy, we agreed that our values had to shift to align our culture to our aspirations as a company. So we undertook a process to preserve the ideas core to our existing values, but to evolve them to shape the behaviors that would take us forward as a company. We articulated our new values using language that is more action-oriented, measurable, and emotional, and we’ve found this has made our values more relevant and accessible. Their language is showing up in everyday conversation. Teams are using them to ask better questions about how they can contribute. And across the company, we’re seeing how they can elevate our expectations about how we show up for each other.

Emotive Brand: Now that you’ve launched your new brand, what initial reactions have you experienced? 

Sarah: The big takeaway from me, internally and externally, is that in creating a better articulation of who Aperian is and what makes us a different kind of company, we’ve unlocked a new language for sharing our story with the world. It’s a matter of simplifying so we can amplify, which in a crowded market makes a tremendous difference. We’re getting ready to roll out a campaign, and just knowing that we’ve found the right notes to hit gives us confidence that it’s going to make an impact.

Finally, the fact that our co-founders, Ted and Ernie, believe in the work we’ve done is the most important endorsement. We’re stepping into the future in a way that honors our past, which is critical to the customers and employees alike who have made Aperian a company unlike any other.

Q&A with Eric Futoran of Embrace about Building a Brand to Lead the Mobile Revolution

Posted on by Jim Humes

Embrace is a company dedicated to unlocking the potential of mobile technology. As companies envision new ways that mobile can transform the ways people live, work, and play, they are asking their mobile teams to deliver mission-critical experiences that are increasingly bold and ambitious. Developers need help managing the growing complexity of what they build—so they can dream bigger about the role mobile plays in their future—which is what Embrace helps them do.

Emotive worked with Embrace Co-Founder and CEO Eric Futoran and his team to redefine their brand and align their organization on the next chapter in their growth story. As they prepared to launch the new Embrace brand, we had a chance to sit down with Eric to get his insights on how the process helped bring his team together to bring a new story to market.

Emotive Brand: You spent a few months going deep into the why, how, and what of Embrace, with a lot of healthy debate about how to tell the Embrace story. What are some things you learned along the way?

Eric: As a founder, I’m so used to thinking about the long-term vision for the company and how we can power the incredible promise of mobile. And in some ways, this visionary thinking is too far out for people to map to the work in front of them. A lightbulb went off after a conversation with Emotive about how to frame the role our brand needs to play over the next two years. It made the goals much more practical and a lot easier because it didn’t have to play out the brand vision in such detail. And to be honest, I think it made the result more exciting because we could see how it could impact the ways we go to market. While mobile disruption will take five or ten years to realize, not every company thinks that far out. The most significant personal learning was to shrink my timeframe and be okay with that.

Emotive Brand: Throughout our work together, you continually encouraged us to swing for the fences about where we could take the brand. What were your instincts telling you about creating a bold story?

Eric: My thinking was that we needed to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. For all sorts of good reasons, we are focused on the weeds of what’s in front of us. But you don’t build a brand for today. A brand needs to be aspirational by definition and build the bridges between today and the better future we’re all working to create. If we had stayed too much in our comfort zone, we would have created a brand that was good for us today but not tomorrow. By learning how to get comfortable operating outside our comfort zone, we recognized new possibilities for where we could take our brand.

Emotive Brand: Building a start-up brand in a newly forming category brings several challenges in building awareness, understanding, and advocacy with developers. How did you see emotion as part of the equation in bringing this all together?

Eric: When you connect with the brand, there’s an implicit connection that goes beyond the functional ways you will use the brand. For example, when you look at the Apple logo, it has nothing to do with what they do and everything to do with setting the emotional context for their offerings. When you’re talking to developers, I think it’s crucial to think of them as people with goals that inspire them and challenges that give them headaches. Developers are so used to seeing the same set of messages and color palettes and comparisons that they feel like they’re being sold to rather than a brand trying to build a genuine connection based on how well they understand their experience. Our goal is to make developers feel empowered by giving them technology that meets their needs and confident that they have a great partner in Embrace to help them achieve their goals. Emotion allows developers to recognize their aspirations and pain points in our brand, which creates a very human connection.

Emotive Brand: As someone who has successfully brought two start-ups into growth mode, when do you think it’s the right time to invest in brand?

Eric: I’ll preface this by saying I hate this answer—it depends. Everyone has a different product and a different strategy. For us, we’re trying to do something very different in our space and cut through a lot of noise that is out there. So brand is an important tactic to tell a unique story that keeps us from getting lumped in with companies we don’t compete against.

If you think about the other end of the spectrum, where 80% – 90% of SaaS products live, they drive differentiation based on doing something slightly better or cheaper than their competitors. These companies typically use brand to create a different emotion rather than paint a bolder vision. The majority of SaaS companies are highly iterative, which Embrace is not. We built our company to be a disruptor.

Emotive Brand: We started working together when there were signs of a weakening economy, but you invested in your brand when others were holding back. What were your reasons to keep pushing forward on the brand front?

Eric: A lot was the practical nature of where we are as a company. We have a best-in-class product with a well-defined product-market fit, but no one knows about us. Our best move in this situation is to lean into brand and marketing initiatives to fuel our growth. Until now, we’ve underinvested in brand because we never felt the pain because the economy was on fire and people were less cost-conscious. The rising tide lifts all boats. But now, as the tide is wavering, we need to make sure we’re positioned to compete in any market condition. We’re still growing, but our brand activities give us the ability to grow faster.

When VCs tell companies to lengthen their runways, I think that’s good advice for seed-stage companies where money is the greatest asset instead of time. For a growth company, time is of the essence because you’re now measured on what you achieve or don’t achieve over time. To reach our potential, we need to increase our awareness, and brand is a key component of that.

For a growth company, time is of the essence because you’re now measured on what you achieve or don’t achieve over time. To reach our potential, we need to increase our awareness, and brand is a key component of that.

Emotive Brand: As a CEO, you were deeply involved in this process. What were the pluses and minuses (if any) about a founder being so involved?

Eric: In many ways, it depends on the founder. We needed to make a bold pitch based on where Embrace is as a company. And for that to occur, we had to get out of our comfort zone. I think I implicitly had to be part of that initiative because it is really hard to ask a head of marketing or sales or product to put themselves out on a limb and take that risk without the founder being part of it. I’m not a marketer by any means, but I know the power of good storytelling. So from an ideal perspective, the founder and CEO should 100% be part of the process to ensure the brand’s story aligns with the bolder vision for where the company is heading. You’re not just telling the story of this moment in time—you’re telling the story of the people and the journey as part of that company. And so, if I hadn’t been as involved, we may have lost some of the potential of what the brand can do and the impact it can create.

Emotive Brand: As part of this work, we worked with you to develop a Growth Manifesto that tells the story of how you plan to grow over the next two years and beyond. How did this help your team connect the dots and align around the strategic pieces of your business, product, and GTM strategy?

Eric: It helped build a bridge between the near-term goals for driving awareness and our longer-term vision. When we started writing the Manifesto, the combination of the two came together. We were able to frame what we do in the five-to-ten-year vision of how mobile will transform the world and get people excited about this future, and then we made it real by focusing on the next two years and what will be required. The two horizons don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

But the team is still digesting the Growth Manifesto. When rolling out anything new, you need to create a drumbeat of communications and experiences. I have an -ism on this called the Rule of Three: give people the information in three ways and three different times. That’s what we’re doing with the manifesto so that it becomes part of our everyday thinking.

Emotive Brand: Because we’re Emotive, we need to ask you about feelings. Do you think feelings and emotions play an essential role in the B2B space?

Eric: 100%. Our customers are people. The people they serve are people. I think a lot of businesses forget that. We’re a very customer-first, customer-centric company because I truly believe it’s the right way to do business. Rather than B2B, we’re Human-to-Human. Retention is king for all SaaS companies. In addition to having a great product, you need to treat your customers right because they are making a bet on you. There will be bumps in the road, but they’re betting both on your vision and your ability to support them when the product isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, and they need you to take action. The only way you retain customers is by treating them like partners, like people whose success you genuinely care about. That’s the only way you’ll build a relationship that can weather the storms that arise. It’s not commonly expressed in the B2B space, but business is all about leading with emotion.

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.

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Market Insights That Come from the Heart

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Asking different questions can reveal new insights about your market.

No matter what your company sells, the markets where you operate change constantly. One day the sun is (metaphorically) shining, and the next day a tanker gets stuck in a canal, there’s a virus outbreak, a prominent bank fails, a fragile aging musician opens fire on a twelve-pack of beer, or some other event happens to change our collective outlook.

Reading the tea leaves of market dynamics is both art and science. There is no shortage of brilliant people putting advanced technology to work to uncover patterns and make predictions for all types of scenarios. At Emotive Brand, we believe that in addition to market analytics, there are emotional insights that you and your team can gather that can help you paint a fuller picture of how your world is shifting and the role your brand can play in keeping your business in front of these changes.

Emotion Is Critical to Your Peripheral Vision

In their book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company, Wharton professors George Day and Paul Schoemaker wrote, “You must ask the right questions to identify what you don’t know so you can explore the edge of your business… You must identify new sources of information or new ways of scanning to unveil important but hidden parts of the periphery.”

Emotions, while harder to quantify, offer critical insights into your market opportunity. From the macro to the micro levels, emotional information can explain the synaptic connections between what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in your business. While emotions don’t answer everything, they do provide a critical layer of context that makes market behaviors seem less arbitrary and a little more “human.” And as you get more attuned to how the emotional landscape contributes to or detracts from your success, you gain the confidence to speed up decisions, make better bets, and deploy your brand in the best ways possible.

Below are a few lenses you look through to develop market insights that will expand your peripheral vision as a business:

Macro Forces

The economic outlook, employment and wage trends, the regulatory environment, political and cultural currents, public health issues, environmental issues, social trends, and other top headlines—these primary ingredients create the bouillabaisse of market dynamics. But how often do you look at these macro forces as waves of emotion moving through the population? Looking at the feelings generated by the headlines that impact your market gives you insights into opportunities for the role your brand needs to play in the world. And having this conversation with your team every week keeps your brand in tune with the world.

The Category

There’s a baseline, meat-and-potatoes narrative that defines the category where you compete. Many of our clients in the enterprise technology space discover that they default to telling a category story, which in general is pretty generic. Differentiation comes down to products and features—your “what” and “how”—rather than the articulation of “why” your company exists. Categories drive sameness for the sake of making easy comparisons, and the safe players tend to hold to the center. Emotion gives you a fulcrum to break out of the box, or better, expand it, to see and understand what you see as possible. And when people connect with your vision for how you can change the world, there’s a high likelihood they’ll be rooting for your success.

The Competition

As your competition grows more sophisticated, they will look to claim a specific emotional territory. Branding in consumer packaged goods is where you find true expertise in using emotion to claim specific turf. How else can you choose from the 27 different toothpaste brands on the shelf? For longer sales cycles, once someone is in the consideration phase, it all comes down to the emotional cues your brand delivers that elevate the decision-making from rational analysis to the emotional moment of commitment. By understanding the emotional space your competition is trying to own and ensuring your emotional space is better defined, more compelling, hyper-relevant, and executed with originality, you’ll gain the upper hand as you compete for the same customers.

Your Customers

Do you look at your customer as the person with the budget and purchasing authority? Or, as someone driven by human desires and motivations? Seeing customers as people you can make successful allows you to engage with them on a deeper level. You tap into their ambitions and their fears. You ask different questions that give you insight into how they want to succeed, instantly deepening the relationship. And when you think of the customers you have today as the leaders of tomorrow, it pays to invest in building their loyalty early. When a brand builds deep, meaningful connections with customers, you earn the permission to innovate in new ways and lead your customers to new destinations. The trust you build inspires them to come along for future journeys.

Users or Consumers

B2B. B2C. B2B2C. B2H. We like this last acronym because we believe the best brands are Business to Human. The humans could be the people buying and consuming your product. Or they could be your partners, channels, or resellers you depend on to bring your brand to different audiences. No matter where you sit in the value chain, the question to ask is, what emotions do users or consumers count on you to help them feel? The mechanics are different when selling hand soap versus a SaaS platform, but it still comes down to delivering an experience that communicates emotion across the entire value chain. Creating emotional bonds with people turns them into true advocates and evangelists. Having a great product is key to connecting with consumers. But having an emotionally-driven brand accelerates your ability to increase market share, galvanize a tribe, or lead a movement.

Your Company

Your company is a system of functions that work together to deliver a product, service, or offering. But how connected is your company to the emotions that your brand stands for? Do people proudly wear your swag? Do they consistently engage customers and partners in ways that convey a clear set of emotions? When your company is clear about the feelings behind your experiences, you can stand out in any market. Because it’s the companies who own the emotional experience inside and out who claim a stake in the ground and are genuinely different. And according to the people working inside them, truly better.

By looking at each aspect of how you go to market through the lens of emotion, odds are you’ll uncover some white space you haven’t considered and some insights that can sharpen what you’re already doing well. And if you ever need a partner exploring emotion-driven market insights, that’s what Emotive Brand does every day.