B2C Archives

Storytelling Is the Best Bridge Between Customers and Solutions

Posted on September 6, 2022January 9, 2025 by Emotive Brand

Once Upon a Sales Deck

Salespeople want to sell. This much we know. Often, in our conversations with clients or in our perusing of sales decks, we hear a similar refrain. How do we cut to the chase and get to the meat? We don’t blame them. In today’s millennial-influenced age of purpose, you could sit through a narrative, a manifesto, a history lesson, a personal testimony, and a video on corporate social responsibility all before learning what someone is actually selling you.

That’s the balancing act. You’re only as strong as your story—but if your story goes on too long, meanders, or doesn’t naturally bridge to your solutions, people will read something else. When done properly, a story is the shortest distance between what your brand does and why people should care.

The Cost of Confessionals

Consider this study conducted by Origin/Hill Holliday. They asked 3,000 online panel participants between the ages of 23 and 65 about the perceived value of various listings. In every case, the addition of a story—whether it’s from a customer, an origin story, or even short fiction—increased the value, sometimes up to 64 percent!

We hate unnecessary front-matter in sales decks more than anyone. But when you look at the numbers, it becomes clear that storytelling isn’t trite, it’s a trenchant tool. In a short amount of space, stories can do the heavy lifting of connecting your vision to your portfolio. As much as you might want to dive directly into the organizational prowess of your cloud infrastructure, it’s worth pausing to discuss the transformational outcomes of your product. What happens when everything works like it’s supposed to? Picture the worst day of your customer’s life—how does their experience change when they interact with your brand?

In a Crowded Marketplace, Far, Far Away …

Take the stylish and digitally-minded luggage brand Away. In an incredibly crowded marketplace, they’ve been able to differentiate themselves through their sleek design, cost transparency, and use of storytelling to elevate their solutions. Their blog isn’t about the intricacies of wheel design—it’s a travel magazine designed to activate your wanderlust. (And then, of course, buy their products.) As they say in their narrative, “If you’re looking down at your dying phone and broken bag, you can’t see up, out, and ahead to the world in front of you.”

By using storytelling to articulate the highest possible value, they take the customer on a journey from product to benefit. A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product. As goes the saying, people don’t buy features, they buy better versions of themselves.

This is in no way limited to B2C—B2B brands can be emotive, and should be. According to research by Google in partnership with Motista and CEB, 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy if they can connect emotionally with your brand. It starts with your goals, objectives, mission, and vision. But beyond that, it’s being able to communicate the professional, social, and emotional benefits one experiences in addition to the actual product. Storytelling can go a long way in bridging that gap.

The most important thing to remember in crafting your story is authenticity. Away sells luggage, they tell travel stories. Lenovo sells computers, they tell stories about people doing innovative things with computers. “When authenticity is put forward as the priority,” says Taj Forer, Co-founder & CEO of fabl, “the emotive stories will generate themselves as the organic byproduct.” In other words, you’re not allowed to airlift some emotional story into your brand if it doesn’t make sense.

Equipping your sales team with the right library of emotive stories gives them even more arrows in their quiver. So, they can do what they do best: sell.

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

Why Have a Purpose Beyond Profit?

Posted on August 10, 2022November 22, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

Defining Purpose

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

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

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

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

Why look beyond profit?

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

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

How does one define a purpose beyond profit?

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

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

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

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

A brand purpose is not a tagline

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

Download and read our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

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

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bridging the False Divide Between B2B and B2C

Posted on March 11, 2020November 22, 2024 by Chris Ames

Business is made of people trying to sell each other things. That’s it. And yet, there is still this massive gulf between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). You feel it immediately in the design and language used. You don’t need a branding vocabulary to know when you’re seeing a B2B ad, because it will probably feature code, a weird bar chart, and copy like, “Adding code coverage with Slather to Zendesk’s iOS SDK build.”

Here’s what I want to know: high-level B2B decision-makers are still people – people with hearts, minds, and feelings who make decisions based on emotion outside the office. In an era where the lines between online and offline, work and non-work have never been blurrier, does it really make sense to treat B2B and B2C so differently? Or are we entering a new era of business relationships where hard data and soft emotion can coexist happily?

Here’s how I most often see things delineated.

B2B: All Work, No Play?

In B2B, we’re told to focus on the logic of the product and its features. Supposedly, there is little-to-no emotion involved in the purchasing decision. It’s all about understanding your buyers and how they operate within the confines of their organization. In this space, we care more about people using the product than the product itself. As a result, design tends to be “good enough.” The most effective messages explain how the product or service saves time, money, and resources.

B2B typically sells intangible technology, software, and services, which makes forming an emotional connection that much more difficult. Then there’s the question of time. An average B2B transaction can take anywhere from 2-24 months depending on the product or service being sold and the number of decisions to be made within the buying process. The nature of content marketing within a B2B strategy is to not only focus on outreach and backlinks, but to focus on getting exposure on relevant sites that will educate people on the product or service offering. As such, B2B campaigns typically have industry-specific keywords that require fluency in insider baseball.

An example in market right now? Webex.

We get a little visual intrigue with “Webex” and “exceptional” bleeding together, a little humor in the numbers-heavy approach, but mostly a design that I would describe as “meat and potatoes.” A cynic would say this took 2 minutes to make. Those on the inside know this is probably the end result of 3 months of grueling compromise and workshopping. Either way, this is the world of B2B. You could imagine this joylessly slapped on the side of a bus.

B2C: All Heart, No Brain?

In B2C, we’re told to focus on the emotional benefits of the product. Consumers are different in that they demand a variety of distribution channels for convenience – web, social, print, in-store, subscription, droned directly to me, etc. Consumers are less likely to be interested in a lengthy marketing message and want to get right to the heart. The most effective messages focus on the positive end-state and the benefits that your product or service will bring them.

Most of the time, B2C has the advantage of selling tangible products you can actually hold in your hands. The campaigns focus more on sales and revenue figures per month, with sales occurring in shorter sessions, typically single or multi-session visits within days and weeks. An average B2C transaction can occur anywhere from mere seconds – from Instagram to in-the-cart – or a few weeks, with the number of decision-makers typically being less then 2 individuals and the buying process being much more straightforward. As such, B2C campaigns focus on keywords that can be considered, how you say, actual words people use.

An example in market right now? Away.

Is this an ad, or is this one of your beautiful, successful friends at the Cannes Film Festival? That’s kind of the point. Seamlessly blended into your Instagram feed, the top 90% of this image is focused on the emotional benefit of their product. It’s only as your thumb scrolls to the bottom do we realize we are being sold a suitcase. Critics would say there isn’t enough information, but never underestimate the power of FOMO.

Where Are the Intersections Between B2B and B2C?

So, those are our rules. But like all rules, they are meant to be broken.

B2C might look like they are all gloss and polish, but they use an insane amount of big data to craft their “effortless” aesthetic. Think it’s a coincidence that your Instagram feed, your favorite podcasts, and your Facebook ads are all pointing you in the same direction? Taking a page straight out of the B2B world, what B2C brands really care about is understanding their buyers and how they operate in their environment.

Even something seemingly pure, like a Netflix show, is fueled by big data. Through the rich amount of user data stored and analyzed by the company, Netflix found that movies from David Fincher are not only popular but also being watched from beginning to end. In addition, it observed that films featuring Kevin Spacey (pre-scandal, of course) were performing well. Finally, the British version of House of Cards is popular among fans. Combining these three insights unearthed by big data – Fincher, Spacey, and the British version of House of Cards – Netflix created the American version, pushed it to relevant target audiences, and snagged a 9/10 rating on IMDb.

For B2C, that feels a lot like ABM and big data-fueled demand gen. Even if you’re selling a consumer product, you have to bob and weave like a technology growth company to survive in the digital economy.

By the same token, the most successful B2B brands right now have never felt more boundary-pushing. Mailchimp, Squarespace, Zoom, Asana, and Dropbox look beautiful, sound human, and are leading with an emotional impact that prioritizes benefits over product-level detail. Even tech giants like Salesforce have adorable (if not slightly infantile) animal mascots that wouldn’t look out of place in the next Pixar film.

The Takeaway: The Best of B2B and B2C

Keeping the aesthetics of their traditionally superior design, B2C companies need to operate with the data-and-analytics backbone of their B2B counterparts. Companies that use it to their advantage, from recruiting to customer retention to selling, will be the ones that thrive. Regardless of industry or sector, B2C brands can reinvent themselves by turning massive amounts of data into insights and executing swiftly against them.

Leaning into the emotional draw of B2C to build meaningful differentiation, B2B brands have much more creative rope than they think. There is space for outside-the-box thinking, clever subject lines, and gorgeous design – as long as you continue to solve problems for your buyers. As Hubspot says, “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of B2B brands maintaining a human element.”

Forget the false divide. Let’s combine the brains of B2B with the heart of B2C to create a new standard of commerce for all.

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

Image credit

Competing for Talent in a Hot Market

Posted on November 20, 2019 by Dominique Smith

When you’re a young company hoping to thrive and compete for talent in a hot market, like the tech industry, it can be tempting to succumb to the table stakes of the “free” work culture. Many of the most well-known tech giants of Silicon Valley offer free food, gym memberships, massages, dry cleaning, concierge services, work activities, the list goes on, all with the intention of attracting and retaining talent. But, are the free add-ons really working?

According to a 2018 LinkedIn report, the tech industry had the highest turnover rates at 13.2% with a median tenure ranging from 1-2 years. In other words, free employee perks might attract talent, but it definitely doesn’t keep them.

Organizations that effectively cater to their talent are those that prioritize strong leadership, effective communication, and dedication to its employees and their growth within the company. The lack of presence of these initiatives within some of the larger tech companies are exactly why employees end up leaving—just take a look at their company reviews on Glassdoor.

So, how can your company attract, retain, and engage talent? Here are three markers of a successful employer brand.

Growth and Recognition

Employees want to work at organizations that not only create opportunities for continuous learning but also for career growth within the company (i.e. promotions). There is an understanding that when you stop learning and advancing in your career, you run a high risk of falling behind and becoming less competitive, especially in today’s economy. New companies and trends are constantly emerging and the talent pool will only become more skilled.

Vision

Full transparency and communication between leadership and employees about the direction the organization is heading in and how it intends to get there highly factors into how aligned employees feel within a company. Employees want to have a clear picture of where they are investing their efforts and ensure that there is still a place for them in the organization. Implementing this heavily relies on effective communication from managers and executives.

Leadership

The togetherness of an organization must trickle down from the top. Employees want to trust their managers and believe that they are competent, communicative and experienced enough to not only lead and make well-informed decisions on behalf of the company but also provide mentorship and value to the company.

In today’s climate, working for an organization that has a strong, effective foundation and is willing to invest in its employees in a way that cultivates opportunity for growth and advancement are the organizations that will have the upper hand in attracting and retaining talent. The free add-ons are a plus, but employee satisfaction is really rooted in working somewhere that is dedicated and supportive to the growth of your career and goals.

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

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor

Posted on January 29, 2019January 15, 2025 by Chris Ames

Battle of the Brands

Even for people who spend most of their time online, there are still those moments that remind you just how surreal our current technological moment is. Earlier this month, while mindlessly browsing, I suddenly realized I was six comments deep into a Twitter argument between the social media managers of Wendy’s and Steak-umm. Participating in #NationalRoastDay – an annual tradition of lightly making fun of people and brands – the playful hashtag game quickly turned aggressive when the two companies started vehemently attacking each other’s brand voice and products. Just think how little sense that sentence would make to someone in the olden times of 2006.

How did we get here? Traditionally, creating a strong brand identity online meant ensuring consistency across your various assets – logo, typeface, taglines – and developing a brand voice. As we’ve spoken about before, your brand voice is the purest expression of your brand’s personality. When used consistently, your voice reinforces the emotional impact you’re trying to create with the people most important to you. Just like a human voice, it sets you apart from others and creates a sense of familiarity that people need in order to form a long-lasting connection.

IRL vs. URL

For years, the dissonance between a brand’s voice online and in the real world was pretty slim. And that makes sense because one of the core tenets of brand building is consistency. Yet as time has passed, more and more companies are viewing their online voice as an absurdist off-shoot from their main brand. Denny’s, Wendy’s, Netflix, Chipotle, and MoonPie are classic examples of brands that have fully embraced the surrealism and nihilism of millennial humor.

Though often misunderstood, millennial humor is not so different from the Neo-Dada movement of the 1950s and 60s. The use of collage, assemblage, and found materials is in the same spirit as brutalist meme culture. Dada was formed in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the first world war, so it’s not too difficult to imagine why young people today are responding to a violent and nonsensical world with more nonsense.

Brands are People, Too

The fact that companies are tapping into this vein of humor signals our changing expectations of what a brand is, how it speaks, and what we demand of it. It’s not enough for a product to simply work. The market is way too crowded for that. No, even a flawless product has to be attached to a brand that is whip-smart, well-designed, socially-conscious, purpose-driven, and fluent in the ever-changing language of the now.

When it works, you get something like this:

Using the structure of a meme where people share the most common misconceptions about their careers, Netflix treats their product like a profession and lists the biggest stereotypes about the platform. It’s self-deprecating, funny, and most importantly, 100% related to their offering. In the comments, the dating app Tinder replies with, “Honestly your Tinder bio looks amazing.” Again, clever, playful, related to their offering.

If you’re still freaked out by the spectacle of corporations pretending to be people for imaginary points on the internet, you’re not alone. But at the end of the day, whether you’re B2B or B2C, every business is human to human. At least until the robots take over, the end result will always be people. If you can find a way to win hearts through humor, they’ll pay you back by voting with their wallets.

Comedy and Marketing: The Best Idea No One Asked For

So, if every brand is human to human, does that mean traditional B2B brands can join in on the surrealist fun? That one’s a bit more complicated. The other day, I enjoyed reading Craig Beadle’s blog post, “Four reasons to avoid comedy in B2B marketing (and how to use it anyway). Beadle is a copywriter at Velocity, a content marketing and strategy firm that clearly doesn’t mind embracing humor. They describe themselves as “an odd bunch of international misfits, huddling together for warmth in a cold, indifferent world,” so it’s clear they can take a joke.

In brief, the post talks about how comedy and marketing are antithetical at the core. Comedy tends to be singular, divisive, and puts the punchline last. Marketing tends to be consensus-driven, direct, and tells you everything upfront. Yet they share a common goal of communicating information in a human, delightful way. There is a sugar-hit of recognition when you “get” a clever ad, in the same way that jokes and riddles are entertaining. As famed ad-man David Ogilvy said, “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” So, let’s look at some funny-thinking B2B brands.

Zendesk

Zendesk makes cloud-based customer service software and support ticketing systems. Are you laughing yet? Nothing about what they do should be inherently funny, but they were able to drill down to one value proposition with real comedic potential: relationships are complicated, and Zendesk improves the relationships between customers and companies. Represented by an astronaut and a deep-sea diver, they created a series of 16-second videos exploring relationship tensions.

MailChimp

Like many businesses in Silicon Valley, MailChimp is a great company with an awful name. That’s not a value judgment, it’s something they know and have actively leveraged into a massive, self-referential campaign. The “Did you mean MailChimp?” campaign centered around nine ways you could possibly mess up their name, each with its own faux product. The results were brilliant and bizarre creations like FailChips, KaleLimp, and MailShrimp. If humor is about following through on a joke, you’ve got to hand it to them. The FailChips leg of the campaign featured a web page, product packaging, and a distribution strategy for the pre-crushed chips.

Slack

Slack’s mission is to change the ways teams communicate. There is a lot of comedy in the minutia of office life and working on projects – just look at “The Office.” So, it only makes sense that they went super meta, producing a video about the process of making a video for Slack. Throughout the spot, we see all the points of friction their product solves. The end result is a clever case study, showing a reluctant client slowly falling in love with Slack.

What a Time to be Alive!

In conclusion, it’s a super strange time for brands, technology, comedy, and honestly just being alive in general. We know there will always be stakeholders to appease, risks to be assessed, and reputations to manage. But if you find something genuine and funny about your core offering, don’t be afraid to inject your brand voice with a little life. People will forgive a lame joke, but they’ll never forgive a boring brand.

To learn more about how to improve your brand voice, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Customer Journey Mapping: The Key to Delivering on the Experience You Promise Customers

Posted on October 2, 2018November 22, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

Everyone’s Offering ‘A Great Experience’

Today, brands that aren’t focused on the entire customer experience simply can’t compete. Every touch point counts. Every interaction matters. Brands are expected to live up to their promise at every moment. And to do so, everyone within a business must behave in ways that help make this promise ring true authentically.

We see a lot of brands today differentiate themselves on “great experience” or “unparalleled service.” But in order for businesses to truly commit to creating unrivaled customer experiences, they have to fully align their value with what people truly care about and need – at every brand moment. This requires getting to the heart of what these pains and gains are and when and why they are happening. How? Customer journey mapping.

Customer Journey Mapping, A Different Type of Research

When conducting consumer research, the mistake a lot of businesses make is framing themselves as the stars and consumers as the extras – how can consumers fit into our story? Customer journey mapping, on the other hand, flips the script. It asks: how do we fit into consumers’ lives? Their cognitions? Emotions? Social realities? Priorities? What’s going on in peoples’ lives and how can we better fit into them? How can we shift and adapt to consumers’ needs and desires?

Through this approach, customer journey mapping can uncover what role the brand plays in peoples’ lives and optimize the whole customer experience to a certain set of emotional and situational circumstances.

Customer journey analysis examines the entire journey people go through with your brand – even before they make any kind of contact with you. It’s an approach that yields a full understanding of what your business does, and doesn’t, fulfill for people. It offers a more sophisticated way of looking at how connections are built with your customers.

Customer journey mapping can help your brand connect more meaningfully with people. Here’s how:

1. Alignment

Journey mapping fosters alignment by bringing organizations into sync with the people they are looking to serve. By analyzing the physical maps, businesses gain a holistic picture of how their purpose, intention, and investment can be positioned to be the most powerfully differentiated from their competition. By uncovering what moments really matter in a customer’s entire experience, the whole team can get aligned around how to connect, behave in line with the brand purpose, and evoke the right emotional impact at every moment during a customer’s journey.

By getting to the heart of what customers are thinking, feeling, and perceiving along their whole journey, your organization can better align the way it does business with customer needs.

2. Respect

Customer journey mapping looks at the entire customer experience: every interaction and every moment of contact. For a lot of employees who may struggle to see the ways in which their role matters, seeing this kind of map can be an a-ha moment. The importance of their work really sets in.

Seeing the journey from start to finish, people discover that everyone is a key player. Everyone within the organization contributes to the way customers perceive their experience. As such, people start to recognize the roles of those that are less visible in a customer’s experience. They recognize that everyone (receptionist, project manager, sales person…) contributes in essential ways.

Because it reveals the contributions of teams and individuals, it can help people celebrate what they are doing well. People across the board feel more valued and more important. They feel more empowered to contribute and shape the way people experience the brand.

3. The Whole Picture:

Some research can be confusing or misleading because it only offers a single segment or chunk of data or meaning – a piece of the puzzle. However, customer journey analysis is unique because it provides the whole picture, even before the brand enters the scene. By unveiling the shape of the entire overall experience, journey mapping gives a unique view of what you do and why you matter – from the outside in, not inside out.

The maps themselves offer helpful mental models for everyone across the organization – helping people to understand what they are trying to accomplish with every interaction and at every brand moment. With this whole picture view, interdependences are more easily seen, and you can be more strategic about your areas of focus, as well as figure out where the real opportunities lay.

This kind of shared visualization can also be of great value for businesses today who may be stuck in a siloed way of thinking. People can contribute their own insights to it and the maps can shift and flex as business does. Embracing the whole picture is the way to create a compelling, consistent, meaningful, and differentiated customer experience today.

Qualitative Data, Back it Up

At Emotive Brand, when we do customer journey mapping it means in-depth interviews that help people bring us into their world. We take the time to build rapport and spend an extended period of time with the people we are interviewing. This kind of qualitative data gets to the what, why, and the how.

However, qualitative data always needs to be validated. That’s why we always back up our findings with quantitative data – often in survey form. This quantitative data helps answer the question: to what extent are our findings valid and true? The combination of quant and qual is key and helps ensure the usability of the maps.

That being said, customer journey mapping is meant to be a living tool. It should be updated and used as something you can measure against. It’s important that people don’t just see it, but that they use it too. Keeping it up-to-date can help ensure that it is being used in the most powerful, impactful ways.

If you want to enhance the power of your customer experience, look to customer journey mapping. Investing in this kind of mapping and strategy will ensure you deliver on the great experience you promise and connect more meaningfully with the people who matter to your business.

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

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Creating Resonant Digital Brand Experiences

The Power of Good Research for B2C Businesses: Interview with Emotive Brand Strategy Director

Posted on July 19, 2016November 22, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

As Strategy Director, Taylor Standlee is an expert at identifying business challenges, creating strategic solutions, and driving business growth. Taylor offers thoughts on the changing landscape of good research for B2C businesses today.

How is consumer research evolving?

Businesses are constantly looking for new ways of understanding, reaching, and connecting with the people important to their success. This includes customers, consumers, investors, and employees. And we’ve never had so many tools or so much data at our fingertips. The challenge, as always, is to be smart about how we go about gaining the information that will help a business make better data-informed decisions.

Data is an essential requirement for successful business today – but not all data is created equal. It’s about getting research right.

So how do you get it right?

Getting research right means meeting the research objectives in the most efficient and effective manner available. This begins with clear, focused research objectives. The objectives dictate the methods, not the other way around.

There’s a tendency to obsess over the growing streams of real-time data – coming from sales, CRM, social listening, and customer satisfaction surveys – that help businesses identify patterns indicating what’s happening. However, these largely quantitative streams of data are just not as good at answering the critical question of “why”. In the famous words of sociologist William Bruce Cameron:

“Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”

Smart businesses are coming to understand the strengths and limitations of these quantitative tools and we’re seeing a revival of interest in modern qualitative methods as a result.

Can you talk more about the resurgence of qualitative measures happening in research today?

I think we are in a classic ‘lurch and learn’ moment. We see a resurgence of interest among our clients in qualitative methods that are designed to get at the ‘why’. This means depth interviews, ethnographies, and even focus groups that capture rich data on people’s behaviors and emotional needs. These methods help us come to terms with the ‘why’ – generating an understanding of the emotional and rational drivers of engagement, connection, and the behaviors those quantitative measures are so good at tracking. Since people now demand brands to act more humanly and authentically, while seamlessly integrating into their lives, qualitative research holds profound value today. This is why there’s increased interest in taking new-school informed approaches to old-school methods like ethnographies, focus groups, shop-alongs, and IDI’s.

So what we advocate for is approaching research holistically. Using all available methods in order to achieve your specific objectives in a way that empowers decision making and coordination with the organization.

What are some best practices for good research?

1) Use research to help align your organization.

Make the findings accessible to non-research experts. When only specialists see it and understand it, you undercut the value of the research. By being transparent and open, findings can help create a shared understanding of the situation. They can also fuel both creativity and collaboration.

2) Socialize the findings in an immersive way.

Research is most valuable when businesses build a living way for people to interact with the data. The experience has to be authentic and as real as possible. At Emotive Brand, we are creating highly immersive environments for presenting research findings. These environments allow people to interact with those findings in meaningful ways. Decks and reports just don’t cut it. By allowing people to really immerse themselves in the data, they are better able to embrace the findings and apply them to their own work. They can grasp brand moments, and get into the hearts and minds of the consumers they are building and designing for, marketing towards, or working to connect with and reach. This means higher functioning marketing materials, better designed products, and a business and brand tailored for growth.

What’s the overall payoff of good research for B2C companies?

Good research is efficient, accurate, and acts as an aid to decision making. It captures the essence of both what’s happening in the market and, critically, why it’s happening. Success hinges on a rich understanding of people’s lives and decisions. You can’t get around that. Smart businesses are constantly thinking about how and why they matter to the people who matter to their business, specifically consumers. Businesses need to embrace a holistic approach to research that includes qualitative measures and a heightened emphasis on how they present and share findings in order to find success today.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.