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Category: Brand 101

Verbal Branding: Because Words Matter

Posted on by Jim Humes

If you were to open up a brand and look inside, beneath the logo and colors and typefaces, the images and illustrations, the interactions and experiences, you’d find language. It’s because the basic building blocks of brands—the ideas, emotions, aspirations, values, and promises that create value and differentiation—emerge from the words we use to express them. And for a brand to truly resonate, it needs to embody a coherent set of language (Verbal Branding or Verbal Identity) designed to create meaning.

So, What is Verbal Identity Exactly?

Verbal Identity is the practice of using language to focus and amplify how brands create connections. You might think of naming and nomenclature as the tip of the Verbal Identity spear, with messaging, copywriting, and your outward-facing communications following along (here’s more on this in an earlier piece). These are all part of the practice, but the roots of Verbal Identity reach far deeper. In the same way that the brands are inside-out representations of an organization, Verbal Identity considers the language an organization uses to either fortify a position or drive change. (A wonderful distillation of this idea resides in Paul Pangaro’s classic piece on language and organizations).

Verbal Identity isn’t a standalone deliverable—it’s part of the Brand Foundation. Once a company has done the work of establishing what’s true (Conviction), how it competes (Positioning), and how it needs to be felt (Emotional Impact), Verbal Identity is the structured language system that converts each of those into communication: Conviction into language, Positioning into argument, Emotional Impact into tone and expression. It’s not decoration on top of strategy—it’s strategy translated into words.

For example, when a company undertakes the work of articulating its Purpose, it’s engaged in a verbal exercise where mood, tone, associations, nuance, culture, and historical context all inform language choices. Some words can ignite change, while others maintain the status quo. Some words can make people angry. Or apathetic. Or inspired. It’s not the actual word they’re responding to, but the meaning they bring to it. The same thinking goes for articulating the Vision and Mission of a company or codifying its Values. These discussions about language establish the source code for how a brand should show up externally.

Verbal Identity can make an impact on even more mundane parts of your brand. Employees at a healthcare company might be confused when attending a meeting in a conference room named “Mike Tyson.” Organizations that prioritize lasting customer relationships might think twice about branding their SKO “Piranha Week,” as it’s only a matter of time before the metaphor of being skeletonized in a murky river makes its way to prospects.

Why it Matters

What makes Verbal Identity so critical to brands, and also challenging, is that language embodies both literal and emotional meanings. “Sunlight” and “Sunshine” both refer to rays of light, but we tend to measure sunlight and feel sunshine. Writing code gives a set of instructions for what action you want a CPU to perform, while writing narratives gives people instructions on how to embrace the feeling, beliefs, and possibilities underpinning your brand. Maybe most importantly, Verbal Identity creates the linguistic framework for the stories your brand gets to tell—the metaphors and allusions, the voice and imagination. And stories, more than messages, are what people remember and repeat. Code gets executed. Stories live on. 

And in the era of AI, Verbal Identity matters now more than ever. Companies are no longer evaluated one surface at a time. Buyers, investors, analysts, talent—and increasingly AI systems—assemble their understanding of a company from its entire available record: its website, product experience, executive communication, customer language, and sales materials, among other things. AI systems intensify this condition because they synthesize from whatever record exists. When that record is stale, contradictory, generic, or fragmented, the interpretation that comes back is weaker, less specific, and more likely to default to the nearest familiar category—rather than reflect what the company has actually become. Verbal Identity isn’t just how humans experience a brand’s language anymore. It’s also raw material machines use to decide what a company is.

Verbal Identity can be a secret weapon for a brand because, when done well, it connects everything you say internally with how you show up externally. It builds internal alignment around language, which reinforces your external positioning. It helps everyone tell the same story about what you do, how you do it, and why it matters—which, when you’re trying to reinvent a category, offer up a compelling vision, or break through to a new set of customers, is essential to creating clarity, focus, and trust.

Five Brands That Embrace Emotion

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Looking for a quick hit of strategic inspiration? A dose of oxytocin in brand form? We found five examples that are hitting the mark by moving people. Emotional connection for the win.

Over recent years, the rise of emotion has been undeniable. The following five brands—across diverse categories and including one of Emotive’s own clients—offer proof that the era of emotion has arrived. Can you feel it?

1. Unlocking the potential of those who advance the world.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), global consulting firm.

Many brands claim to be human-centered, but few actually are. BCG’s succinct yet powerful premise—supporting the leaders who move us all forward—is inherently emotional and deeply human. And it’s refreshing to see that emotion and humanity are injected throughout the brand, even in how insights are presented.

Acknowledging the unique challenges of leadership today and rather than preaching from on high, BCG presents expertise in a relatable and trustworthy way by inviting chief executives to “Hear from Fellow CEOs.” Their CEO Moments of Truth YouTube videos attract hundreds of thousands of views each.

The brand is also emotionally bolstered by fostering strong, ongoing relationships with past employees, referred to as alumni and considered part of the BCG family. BCG’s Alumni Program includes a learning library and events to connect current and past employees.

We get the impression that, through and through, BCG walks the walk in “unlocking the potential” of the people it serves and employs. Good feels all around.

2. Clean feels good.

Clorox, multinational manufacturer of consumer and professional products.

Clorox’s latest campaign, “Clean Feels Good,” pivots from the science of disinfecting to the emotional upside of cleanliness. They teamed up with a neurotech firm to measure and show how the everyday act of cleaning—far from a mere burden—is for many people a proven way to boost mood and foster a sense of wellbeing.

We notice that spot-on (or off) expertise, as seen in their online database of practical cleaning tips, is balanced with touches of emotion throughout the Clorox website, as in, “Follow our tips to save time, money and possibly the day.”

More than ever, Clorox positions itself as a health and wellness company that exists to help people thrive—not just kill germs. They don’t just grab attention by challenging expectations—they earn engagement and loyalty by highlighting a source of joy hiding in plain sight.

3. Powering the inclusion economy.

Katapult, leading omnichannel lease-purchase platform.

Spanning B2B and B2C, Katapult—an ecommerce-focused FinTech company—is one of Emotive Brand’s clients and an example of how feeling elevates brand in any sector.

With empathy and optimism, Katapult challenges the dreary status quo of retail purchase plans, dominated by predatory rates and gatekeeping via credit scores. A friendly, buoyant brand identity showcases a fresh point of view: Seeing the good in people is good for business.

For retailers, Katapult encourages openness to overlooked, unfairly excluded consumers. For shoppers, Katapult opens doors to major purchases, central to quality of everyday life but too often out of reach. We enjoyed the collaboration, and the chance to help level a playing field tilted for too long.

4. Keep your options open.

Red Hat, leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions.

In an interesting twist, Red Hat’s recent marketing humanizes AI to show its potential flaws and differentiate the company’s offering. The result is a message that connects emotionally—as opposed to relying solely on the kind of forgettable AI technology proof points in which we are all now drowning.

The campaign ties back seamlessly to the compelling, central brand premise—creating better technology with open source. Rather than a bland functional claim, the concept of openness infuses the entire brand with purpose and feeling: Open source, open culture, open to possibilities.

As Red Hat explains on their site, “Red Hat exists not only as an enterprise software company but as a catalyst for change, built on the belief that open unlocks the world’s potential.” We appreciate the tight connection between the functional and emotional, a hallmark of the strongest brands.

5. Own the dream.

Rocket Mortgage, major online mortgage lender formerly known as Quicken Loans.

Rocket Mortgage’s recent rebrand is a dramatic example of leaning into the power of emotion. While homeownership is treated as a numbers game by most companies in the industry, Rocket has opened the door to deeper connection with prospects and customers.

They now show up with warmth, humanity, and recognition that what they offer is more than home loans—it’s the fulfillment of a deeply meaningful aspiration for most people. The brand shift is especially powerful in an uncertain economic climate, when many are doubting their belief in the classic American dream.

Visually and verbally, the new brand tone is clear in a more approachable logo, simpler data identity system, and a voice of understanding and encouragement for customers making big financial decisions.

Even in small moments, Rocket finds ways to engage. The online application funnel feels helpful and human, like when they explain that “prequalified” is just “another way of saying ‘let’s estimate what you could afford.’” After all, in a lengthy transaction as emotional and momentous as buying a home, a little empowerment at each step likely goes a long way.

Why Is It So Hard to Define a Brand?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

Today? Not so much.

Here’s the thing. “Brand” is somehow just as easy to define, but harder to get your head and hands around: It is the system that carries a company’s truth into the market—through positioning, narrative, identity, proof, emotion, expression, and behavior—across an ever-multiplying number of experiences and impressions.

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

That’s why it’s so critical to thoughtfully craft a coherent brand across every surface, so the market can accurately recognize what the company is, what it has become, and where it belongs.

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

Perhaps a strict definition isn’t appropriate for such a dynamic, expansive concept anyway. So here are a few of Emotive Brand’s fundamental principles for fusing conviction and emotion at the foundation of a brand, so what’s true inside a company becomes what the market recognizes, believes, and values.

Build Emotional Impact into your brand’s foundation.

Putting Conviction and Emotional Impact into the Brand Foundation gives you a barometer for decision-making and inspiration for meaningful, inimitable creative expression.

Ask people why they love a brand, and they often struggle to pin it down. They may list logical reasons like quality or aesthetics, but in the end it comes down to a feeling. How does the brand move them? Why do they come back for more of that feeling? What does that feeling mean to them? Brands that create a specific Emotional Impact give people a reason to believe what the company claims is true, meaningful, and worth acting on.

This principle goes beyond relationships with customers. Inside the company, Emotional Impact helps leadership and employees carry one coherent version of the business across teams, decisions, and interactions.

No matter the audience, Emotional Impact gives conviction the force to become belief—and belief turns recognition into commercial action.

Think of your brand as a prism.

You can illuminate the same Conviction, Positioning, and Emotional Impact from different angles to connect with different audiences.

A single brand has many facets. The same strategic source is reflected in different ways to connect with different audiences, whether potential customers or loyal devotees, longtime employees or new recruits, or—at the highest level of expression—the world at large.

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

Lock the core. Flex the expression.

Just like people, your brand needs the flexibility to meet the moment while remaining one coherent company across every surface.

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

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

At Emotive Brand, the Brand Foundation establishes the enduring strategic and emotional source of the brand, while the Coherence Guide translates that source into the recognition the company must consistently earn in the market today. Together, they allow the brand to develop, expand, and respond without fragmenting as the company and market evolve.

Start with what is already true.

The concept of brand can be nebulous, but you can get a foothold by defining the objective reality of what the company has built, achieved, and become—and the conviction leadership holds about why it exists, where it is going, and why it matters.

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

At Emotive Brand, we work with product-proven companies approaching a value-defining moment. They have already built something real; they do not need meaning invented for them. They need the market to recognize what they have become. Why look backwards when you’re trying to shape the future?

Think of what “brand” might mean to an AI-native company whose platform has outgrown the category the market still assigns to it—versus an established company that has evolved faster than market memory can update. One may need to become recognizable before the market has language for what it is creating. The other may need to replace an outdated understanding with a coherent account of what the business has become.

“Brand” is how truth becomes recognizable.

Today’s brand landscape is wide open. But companies are no longer evaluated one interaction at a time. Buyers, investors, analysts, partners, talent, and AI systems assemble an understanding from the entire available record. The challenge is not simply to create more expression; it is to ensure every expression resolves into one recognizable company.

Define what is true. Build Conviction and Emotional Impact into the foundation. Then carry that truth coherently across every surface so the market can recognize, believe, and value what the company has built.

Why B2B Tech and AI Companies Need a Growth Manifesto

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

One of the most important goals of a brand is to drive growth. Focusing a start-up on carving out market share. Positioning a fast-growing tech company to lead its category. Providing a foundation for product or portfolio innovation as a company seeks to reach new audiences. Or helping a global corporation expand its footprint into new geographies. Whatever your aim, brand can accelerate results.

But one of the biggest (missed) brand opportunities is engaging individuals in your organization to see their role in creating the future. When growth is a generic goal, people can assume that someone else is leading it. Disconnected from purpose or vision, growth can feel like a performance driver that serves only the goals of stakeholders. For companies to grow sustainably, positively, and strategically, people in the organization need to feel excited about what growth brings. 

The key to framing growth for your organization is making sure people see business as a process, not an entity. No matter where you are on a growth trajectory, success depends on behaving more like an organism than an organization—continually adapting to changes in the marketplace, the industry, the economy, and the culture. But when change and uncertainty prevail, most businesses are poorly equipped to communicate this distinction to their employees. Conventional objective-setting tools tend to be reactive rather than responsive. And typical brand building blocks tend to define what’s come before rather than guide people to consider what lies ahead.

A new approach for engagement

Emotive has a different approach to helping businesses fulfill their greatest ambitions. Growth is the goal. Emotion is the strategy.

When clients need to realize important outcomes, we work side-by-side with executive leaders to co-author a Growth Manifesto of how—and why—they want to grow. We call this a Growth Manifesto because it serves as a powerful tool for cutting through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization. It connects major initiatives—corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture—in a single, coherent narrative that aligns everyone behind the promise of the brand and the actions required to support it. 

Why create a Growth Manifesto?

Because narratives are fundamental to how human beings share meaning. Stories have the power to move and transform people both intellectually and emotionally. Unlike a traditional plot line—which tends to be self-contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end—this narrative is open-ended. It asks people to see themselves in the situation. It calls on them to imagine what they can do to pursue a higher purpose. It gets people into action by helping them understand the role they need to play on the journey ahead. 

Why do you need a Growth Manifesto when you have a business and brand strategy?

How often does your organization engage in substantive dialogue about what lies ahead? Our experience is that growth conversations begin in past actions, which can be limited by strategies that communicate what you already know—or what you’ve already got—rather than how you intend to do business tomorrow. We also see many organizations that undermine success by planning in silos, despite their best efforts at cross-functional thinking. (Can a marketing team develop an effective go-to-market plan in isolation from the deep thinking poured into a product roadmap? Nope. But it happens all the time.) And a “set-it-and-forget-it” mindset often tanks the desired effect of corporate mission, vision, and values statements. 

The Growth Manifesto does three important things:

  1. It establishes a clear point of view that will influence, guide, and help create your organization’s future. This isn’t a PR exercise. This strategic narrative will have an impact only if it’s deeply felt and true to your business culture. It requires expanding your perspective beyond the products or services you offer, connecting your brand to the broader context of your customers’ lives and to their aspirations.
  2. It ties everything together. All businesses, whether big or small, have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional, people will start quilting their own. The result is multiple, individual narratives in pursuit of different end states—in other words, brand confusion.
  3. It creates structure, not stricture. For employees to be truly invested, your narrative must invite some level of co-creation and adaptive thinking. You must give everyone the tools and direction they require to do their jobs well, without being so prescriptive as to limit their tactical freedom to execute. You must ask every employee to use their imagination as they help build and reinforce your brand. 

The Growth Manifesto isn’t meant as a one-and-done alignment activity. It’s an integrative tool that sets a deliberate direction for your business at a given moment. It’s intentionally designed to flex in response to change. To be revisited and updated over time. To adapt in the same way that your business must adapt to the world.

We know that as competition intensifies and companies experience mounting performance pressure, time horizons tend to shrink and most organizations adopt tunnel vision to focus on their most immediate needs and concerns. The Growth Manifesto allows everyone across your business to keep their heads up, with eyes fixed on the horizon, holding both near-term and long-term goals in clear view. More than just selling products or seeking this quarter’s profitability, a Growth Manifesto gives people the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary.

See how we helped Lookout, a leader in cybersecurity and cloud security, create a Growth Manifesto that aligned its organization around a shared vision for the future. Read the Lookout case study here.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. It’s one of the clearest levers a company has for closing the gap between what it’s actually built and what the market currently recognizes, believes, and prices it as—what we call the Belief Gap. A company can have real product, real customers, and real momentum, and still be misunderstood, undervalued, or compared against the wrong peers if its positioning hasn’t kept pace. But many product-proven companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

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

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

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

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

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

Is Your Brand Positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition? This is where a specific, recognizable pattern shows up: being seen as a follower—where a company has the capability to lead its category, but a competitor with a clearer, more consistently understood position gets the credit for defining it. Leadership isn’t determined by innovation alone; it also depends on recognition.

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

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic north star. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long- and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth. Here’s why that inconsistency matters more than it might seem. When your own leaders aren’t pulling from the same positioning, it doesn’t stay an internal problem for long. Sales tells one story about who you are. Marketing tells another. Your website reflects an earlier chapter of the business, while your investor deck reflects a newer one. None of these stories is necessarily wrong on its own—but none of them is the whole picture, either. From the outside, this is what it looks like to be seen in fragments: the market can’t assemble one coherent understanding of your company, not because anyone lied, but because no one inside is working from the same script.

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

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

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

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

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Making a Perfect Concept Statement

Posted on by Chris Ames

Over the course of a branding project, there are thousands of micro-decisions to make along the way. As much as possible, agencies try to establish a common way of seeing and evaluating work to minimize decision fatigue. In our case, we create an Emotional Impact and a Brand Idea. We start by identifying the precise Emotional Impact we want to create in our target audience and then craft a big idea that brings it to life across business, brand, and culture.

The thing is, as much as you try to establish frameworks and lenses and litmus tests, you can only ask a client to hold so much in their head at any given time. No matter how much groundwork you lay or how many recap emails you send, when you pitch a creative concept you are always essentially starting from scratch. You are always contending with someone’s aesthetic knee-jerk reaction. A gut feeling will always supersede a creative brief.

This is where the power of a perfectly crafted concept statement really shines. When deployed well, a concept statement is a distillation of strategy, a mini-narrative, and a sneak peek of an imagined future, all at the same time.

What Is a Concept Statement?

To put it simply, a concept statement is a small look at a big plan. It is a short description of products, services, or designs that helps people visualize a particular vision of the future. In general, a basic concept statement provides a description of the business, defines the problem, identifies the target market, implies how the product or service will address this problem, and outlines the goals and objectives.

Above all else, a concept statement is a persuasive tool in decision-making. If everything preceding this meeting has been stage-building, this is the last monologue before the audience reviews the play.

Brevity & the Iceberg Theory

Before he was a novelist, Hemingway worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, where he quickly learned that truth often lurks below the surface of a story. This insight would lead to his trademark minimalistic style, which academics have coined as Iceberg Theory or the Theory of Omission. “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” writes Hemingway. “There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”

When writing a concept statement, there is an urge to be as descriptive as possible, explaining every detail and nuance of the design to the client. This is a mistake for two reasons. One, you simply don’t have enough room, as a concept statement should only be one paragraph. And two, there is no mystery, no intrigue, and no magic in an exhaustive explanation. Part of our job, as a firm, is to help our client imagine. Imagine how their brand can grow, evolve, move into new territories, disrupt old spaces, speak, build, and behave in unexpected ways. That means leaving enough room for them to fill in the blank. That means speaking to the potential of what the design could be, as opposed to what is directly on the page.

Show, Don’t Tell

The implied risk, of course, is that you leave something important out. For one thing, you have to trust your reader. They are always smarter and more willing to take bigger risks than you think. And two, that’s where design can help. Through the use of motion, storyboards, and applications, design can help you “show, not tell.” When a pithy concept statement is paired with powerful design, you have everything you need to make the cognitive jump into the future.

Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker said that Hemingway learned how to “get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste in motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth.” Essentially, that’s exactly what a concept statement strives to do:

– Tell the most compelling story in the fewest number of words
– Crystallize strategy down to its purest components
– Amplify emotion
– Address the big picture, stay out of the weeds
– Project an unexpected but implementable end-state
– Merchandize every concept statement with a name and a hook
– Create a whole that’s larger than the sum of its parts

There are a million ways to “sell an idea,” but the best concept statements shouldn’t feel like flowery salesmen’s trickery. They should feel like a natural distillation of a larger story you and the client are writing together.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Is Revenue Hiding in Plain Sight? Six Steps to Refocusing on the Customer

Posted on by Stephen Banbury

Leading a B2B technology and/or AI organization is a lot like trying to change the wheels on a bike while you’re still riding it. Half of the time, you’re rethinking internal systems and how to assemble them in new ways. The other half, you’re just trying to keep the business running and avoid any major potholes. There are many different ways to drive an organization, but if you’re not thinking about customer experience at every touchpoint, it might be time for a tune-up.

Sales, Engineering, or Marketing?

If you’re a sales-led organization, you’re primarily focused on revenue, deals, price, and market share. You empower your sales team, invest in training, and drive a disciplined, well-executed process. At the end of the day, you want them to hit their quotas. This model can be very effective. The challenge is that each individual salesperson often creates their own tools to get the job done. This can result in an inconsistent brand experience, where every customer is getting a different version of the story. Moreover, a sales-over-everything culture can create burnout and impact your roadmap with one-off requirements that can’t be scaled across the customer base.

Hundreds of startups in Silicon Valley are engineering-led organizations, with a heavy focus on sophisticated software, data, and analytics. Code supersedes everything, and every possible process is optimized for iterating as fast as possible. When you move fast and break things, you can create something extraordinary. But you can also fall into the ideological trap of building just for the sake of it. It’s not that you can’t be successful, but you run the risk of creating feature functions that don’t satisfy an unmet, underserved customer need.

Marketing-led organizations are all about researching and identifying products or services that your customer needs and wants. In theory, it’s a fantastic model that is mutually beneficial to both the customer and the organization. Unfortunately, in practice, there can be some barriers to entry. Startups, for example, often don’t have the luxury of being marketing-led, as they need to allocate their resources to engineering and sales. Marketing is something they’ll invest in later when they are doubling down on growth. In addition, it can be trickier to get consensus in a marketing-led organization. Whereas sales and engineering have more objective metrics to fall back on, the success and execution of a marketing-led organization often hinges on whether it becomes an essential part of a company’s DNA.

Customer Experience Is the Best Teacher

While all of these paradigms have their pros and cons, if your organization isn’t focused on customer experience at every touchpoint, it doesn’t matter which function is leading because you’ll be severely limiting your growth. The era of asymmetrical communications—top-down or inside-out, where companies push out messages in one direction—just isn’t working anymore.

Customers are more informed, more dynamic, and have higher expectations than ever before. They are expecting a nuanced, two-way conversation.

Plus, the link between online reputation and business performance is staggering. A recent study of the hospitality industry by Cornell University found that for every one percent improvement in a hotel’s online reputation, its revenue per available room improves by 1.4 percent.

Companies need to be receptive and customer-centric if they want to thrive in this climate. This starts with an authentic focus on providing a superior customer experience backed by real conviction—a clear, authentic belief in why your business exists and where it’s going. Why? Because conviction is not only contagious—it sustains growth. According to New York Times bestselling author Simon Mainwaring, 91 percent of consumers would switch brands if a different one was purpose-driven and had similar price and quality.

The Spirit of Customer-Centricity

Now, you might think that marketing is the only place for such a customer-centric mentality, but that’s not the case. One of the biggest mistakes you could make is thinking that the customer only interfaces with a singular marketing message or website. They interact through the product, through sales, or by phoning client services or tweeting at a support channel. All of those touchpoints have to represent the company and brand in a meaningful way.

If you’re a VP of Engineering, chances are you don’t want your top brains spending a lot of face-time with a customer. You want them in front of the screen where they can put their talent to work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to instill a spirit of customer-centricity in their role.

For instance, product managers should be regularly analyzing the interactions of the customer with the product, as well as talking with customers directly, so they can turn those insights into requirements for engineers. It’s about getting the perfect balance of qualitative and quantitative inputs. If you don’t consistently remind your employees who they are building for, they can lose track of the “Why?”—that larger, aspirational goal of why you’re building products in the first place. Here are some tangible steps every organization can take to create a culture of customer-centricity.

Six Steps to Refocusing on the B2B Customer

  1. Don’t make assumptions about your customers. I’ve been in countless meetings where someone quickly whiteboards a customer journey—all without ever talking to a real customer. When NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton was tasked with reducing crime in New York, he didn’t just read reports—he rode the rails himself. Quantitative data will get you far, but you can’t really put yourself in the customer’s shoes without qualitative data. That’s how you truly get an outside-in perspective.
  2. With B2B, never forget the customer’s customer. When you’re working with a large enterprise, it’s easy to forget the effects your decisions will have on an individual. You must think all the way through the customer journey. Try to create meaningful outcomes at every step in the process.
  3. In the B2B marketplace, you should design with the same love and attention to detail as you would for consumer products. You may think, “I don’t care how it looks, it just needs to work,” but in an increasingly crowded marketplace, creating differentiation through a delightful customer experience is key.
  4. Never underestimate the power of authentic customer stories. They serve as great collateral for sales, marketing, and social media and remind those in your company who don’t get to interact directly with customers of the impact they are making. Currently, 71 percent of millennials report feeling not engaged at work. But if you’re able to create a situation where employees derive meaning from their work, everything changes. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that employees who derive meaning from their work report almost twice the job satisfaction and are three times more likely to stay with their organization to fuel business success.
  5. Consider your partners. Especially if you’re a B2B selling through a channel, you need to be cognizant of the needs of your partners, as well as your customers. How you show up to your customers is incredibly important, and that’s why you must always maintain brand integrity through each and every channel.
  6. Executive alignment is everything. When you get alignment at the highest level, it cascades throughout the whole company, ensuring that all functions are cohesive and on board.

Customer-Centric ≠ Customer-Led

You may have noticed that I have avoided the phrase customer-led. There’s a key difference between being customer-centric and customer-led. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Everything you do should be aimed at creating a fantastic customer experience. Nonetheless, you don’t want people-pleasing to get in the way of innovation. Customer feedback is incredibly important, but it can’t be the only data point. When that happens, it can lead to a dangerous feedback loop that creates tunnel vision. Trust your team, create an environment for risk-taking, and then go test the results.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter conceptually who is driving the company. What matters is that everyone deeply understands the pain points of the customers they serve. Everyone, regardless of role, should have a relationship with the customer.

As a leader, you need to facilitate an internal evolution where employees are not only passionate but can see the real-world results of their work. Belief is one of the most powerful tools in business. When people believe in what they are doing, they work harder, smarter, and with their whole hearts.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

How to Launch a New Brand Category

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Launching A New Brand Category

The decision to join an existing category or to launch a new brand category is not an easy decision. Evaluating your product maturity, the product roadmap, and overall market maturity is critical. Once the decision is made, the strategy shifts to creating the right budget and plan to launch the new brand category. Building momentum is paramount to both the category’s success and, by proxy, your own brand’s position as the category leader.

As we’ve previously discussed, timing is critical for launch. You need to consider factors of competition, messaging, production, and market forces. And when the light is green, launching a new brand category with your brand as the de facto leader means getting buy-in, quickly. Building momentum for your new category, attracting important users and creating buzz necessitates its own strategy, one that has to be developed concurrently with defining and naming the new category.

Why New Brand Category Launches Fail

Just because you have a brilliant name doesn’t mean your category will be adopted. In fact, most fail. Lack of preparation, especially when it comes to budgeting, often results in categories that fizzle out. Businesses are often so focused on designing, manufacturing, and promoting their own product that they postpone the effort needed to market a newly developed category. And before they know it, it’s too late. The new category launch needs to lead your brand into the arena, not the other way around.

Common mistakes for launch include not creating enough context for the category, making claims about the category that fall short, failing to create enough distinction from competitive categories, missing the mark on customer education (people just don’t get it), or jumping the gun on timing. Creating a new brand category requires the same rigor as launching a new brand or new product.

Many of these failures have something in common: the company knows what it has created, but the market doesn’t yet see it the same way. That’s a version of what we call the Belief Gap—the distance between what you know to be true and what the market is prepared to recognize and believe. For a new category, closing that gap means giving people enough context, distinction, and repetition to understand why the category exists and where your company fits within it.

When developing your strategy for launching a new category, these five tactics are key. 

1. Be Consistent with Messaging
Just as you’ve developed and tested messaging around your brand, developing the messaging around your new brand category is equally important. Consistency is everything. In order to build traction, you’ll need competition, influencers, and customers to grab onto a clear and concise message. Everyone needs to be on the same page about what the category is, why it’s better than the alternative, and why it matters. It may be tempting to embellish the messaging with claims that make it sound remarkable, but don’t. You’ll need messaging that is repeatable, authentic, and true to your brand in order to be picked up by your audience. Test the category messaging, and assuming it’s working, stick to it.

2. Generate Competition
It may sound counterintuitive, but when you are creating a category, competition helps legitimize a market and increases the size of the pie. Your brand will actually benefit if others are spending their marketing dollars to help popularize the value of what you are doing. The key, however, is to be first to market (see #1: owning the messaging around the category)—and continue to find ways to elevate yourself above the crowd, while maintaining both a product and thought leadership position.

3. Tap Into Influential Early Adopters
The snowboard surpassed the snurfer as a category when Burton came onto the scene with a posse of well-known surfers and skaters who were early adopters of the new sport. They were not only the target audience for snowboarding. They had enough cultural clout to make snowboarding popular. When launching a new category, finding ambassadors with strong reputations will help raise awareness for and substantiate your category.

4. Popularize
Otherwise known as PR. Keep in mind that the category is the focus of the PR efforts, not your brand. Focus on cultivating buzz around the category in an authentic way. This requires some restraint on behalf of your brand. Drawing too much attention to your brand right out of the gate is a misstep. This is because people won’t yet have a way of talking about it. So create context first. Then, generate conversations around the category with a strong media presence (industry influencers, bloggers, press, and social media should all be activated). The buzz around your brand will follow.

5. Educate Customers
Host conferences and events—both in person and online—that use the category name. Educating customers about the category should be the central driver for marketing. Build your reputation without overselling yourself. Establishing industry user groups with digital meetups is a powerful way to spark conversations and create groundswell with a wide audience. With enough momentum, your brand’s leadership will be in position as a thought leader. And further embedding the category and subsequently your brand in customers’ minds.

The Rewards of a Strategic Category Launch

Identifying a new category and building it from scratch can serve as a powerful path to growth for your brand. And the effort involved pays off. Category creators experience fast growth and receive high valuations from investors. Category leadership is one of the clearest value-defining moments a company can create for itself—a point where the market’s understanding of who you are directly shapes how you’re valued. Creating a new category, your brand will be in a solid position to surpass the competition. Or break into a flooded market. On top of that, your brand will be positioned to own the category as the de facto leader. Category creation is nothing short of a game changer.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Maintaining Brand Relevance in a Fast-Paced World

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand relevance amidst new expectations

In a time of constant change and heightened customer expectations, the greatest danger facing most brands today is loss of brand relevance. People are ultra-connected. Markets constantly shift. New trends emerge. Competitors enter and shake things up. And customers expect more from the brands they buy from. As a result, many businesses struggle to stay relevant—trying to get ahead of competition, adapt fast enough, and maintain their position in the market.

In order to survive, brands need to evolve in a way that differentiates them from their competitors, and at the same time meets the needs of the customers who matter to their business. Oftentimes faced with an issue of relevance, brands struggle between two ends—wanting to gain parity with competitors and adapt to market needs, while feeling worried about losing established brand credibility or diluting their brand image.

As a result, maintaining brand relevance comes down to two courses of action:

  1. Adapting to the current needs of customers in the market, or
  2. Disrupting what people want to buy. Many businesses do this by creating new categories or subcategories altogether—altering the way customers approach a purchase, and making their brand a pioneer in a new category

Sometimes in these situations, brands have to reposition altogether. This is why brands that maintain long-term relevance are often bold, strong brands—constantly moving forward, innovating, adapting, and disrupting, while making sure they stay true to the core of their brand. So how do you know what direction to take? How do you make sure your brand maintains value in a competitive marketplace?

Here are some rules of brand relevance

Be customer-centric. Everything your brand invests in, builds, and brings to market should be designed to meet the needs of your target markets. This includes needs that customers themselves might not yet be aware of. It’s about working to see what others don’t. These kinds of insights can allow you to create brand relevance in ways that your competitors are not. So get in your customers’ heads. Analyze their purchase patterns. Examine the ways they live their daily lives and build a brand that integrates seamlessly into the lives of the people who matter to your success.

Focus on experience. Focusing on your customers means focusing on how people experience your brand. As a result, every touchpoint counts, and relevancy can only be maintained if your brand interacts and engages in relevant ways. It’s not only about a single product. Or a new website. Your brand has to create a holistic experience that is relevant to your target audiences at every point.

Don’t forget what makes you different. Jumping on a bandwagon may be a short-term fix, but it’s not going to help build long-term brand relevance. You have to adapt in ways that still play to your brand strengths and emphasize why your brand is different. You don’t want to lose your brand’s differentiating factors in an attempt to stay relevant.

Create, innovate, and engage. Be open, take chances, and don’t be afraid to push your limits, engage in fresh ways, and find unique ways of meeting your customers’ needs. Don’t put your brand or business in a box. If you do, you will lose any chance of staying relevant in a competitive market. So as leaders, make sure you strive to build a workplace that encourages creativity and innovation. And don’t fear doing something new.

Align decisions with your purpose. Make sure you’re making authentic brand decisions. Trying to stay relevant but not doing it authentically never works. So look to where you want your brand to head. What are your long-term goals and aspirations? How can you maintain relevance while moving towards those goals?

Relevant brands are successful brands

Brand relevance is never a sure thing. Anything can change at any moment. As a result, smart brands understand the rules of relevance, and earn and re-earn their position in the marketplace each and every day. Think of all the brands and even entire categories of brands that have fallen off the map, many of which used to hold immense value for groups of customers. How? Loss of relevance is probably to blame.

Maintaining brand relevance means maintaining the trust and loyalty of your customers. Brands that commit to being relevant brands are focused on and oftentimes ahead of what their customers might expect and need, willing to rise to the top, take a risk, and redefine what they do and/or how they do it, all while staying true to who they are as a brand.

So take time to consider how you can build a more relevant brand. Maintaining brand relevance is the key to remaining valuable to the people who matter to your business and where it’s headed.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Do a Company’s Vision and Mission Statements Have Expiration Dates?

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Vision and Mission

We probably don’t need to convince anyone that having a vision and mission matters. They give you a North Star, help you focus on a goal, and act as a check for your strategic decisions. But how long should a vision and mission stay intact? At what point should you change your mission and vision?

Like many brand strategy decisions, it depends. At Emotive Brand, we believe a company should update its mission when it doesn’t match its strategy. Few would argue with this point, right? What’s more difficult than deciding if you should change your mission, though, is how it should change. When we work with clients, we develop missions that are inspirational, aspirational, and can stand the test of time.

Let’s talk first about the definitions. A mission is a tangible goal that can be used to organize teams around products and services to meet the goal. A vision, in contrast, is a company’s destination and unifying principle.

We like to share NASA’s vision and mission with clients because they both map so well to these definitions:

NASA Vision: “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

NASA Mission: “Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and bring new knowledge and opportunities back to Earth. Support growth of the Nation’s economy in space and aeronautics, increase understanding of the universe and our place in it, work with industry to improve America’s aerospace technologies, and advance American leadership.”

NASA had another mission previously—one we actually prefer to share for its simplicity: “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.” So why the change? The latest mission statement was updated after the 2016 election. The new administration likely wanted to take ownership over the strategy and reflect the Trump Administration’s pro-business stance and an America-first agenda. The vision has evolved, too, but isn’t so far away from what NASA stated as its vision in 2004, “To improve life here, to extend life to there, to find life beyond,” and also similar to what NASA stated in 2014, “We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

While a vision, like NASA’s, usually remains stable for a long period of time, missions change more frequently.

How long can a mission last? Three years is likely too short a time, but 20 years may be too long to keep the same mission. Of course, when your mission no longer describes your business, isn’t believable, or doesn’t reflect the current management’s goals, you’re ready for something new. Changing a mission is acceptable and common. And as the NASA example shows, strong organizations change their missions all the time.

Ready to get started?

Here are some tips to make sure you aren’t revisiting your vision and mission exercise too soon:

Make it Aspirational

We recently worked with a company that wanted to move from a product focus to a solution focus. Even though the shift was still very much in progress, the company already knew the direction in which they were headed. Changing their mission allowed them to be more aspirational and communicate their new focus both internally and externally.

Give Yourself Some Runway

It’s a balancing act to pick a mission that can work for today and tomorrow without cutting off possibilities or narrowing your focus too much. A great mission flexes with the future. For instance, we developed a mission for one of our clients, a new company offering food allergy treatment. While the company eventually may offer its services to adults, today they focus on children. We made sure their mission statement didn’t tie them to a specific audience and kept the door open to a broader market.

Do More than Describe—Create Excitement

Your mission’s goal is as much about describing your company’s reason for being as it is about firing up your employees. Missions that are solely descriptive fall flat. You want to communicate the role you will have—be it the industry leader, the market’s convener, or the company creating the most sophisticated technology. When you put a stake in the ground, you create excitement externally and among your employees.

Keep it Simple

Your mission should always be on the minds of your employees and well-understood by the rest of the world. If it is too long or complicated, it’s hard to remember and support. (Read NASA’s current mission above again if you don’t believe us.) Simplicity isn’t easy. In the process of writing your mission, you’ll likely throw away many, many options but, trust us, it is worth it.

Vision and mission development is hard work. While it is an interesting process and can bring a company together, it requires significant investment. When you create your vision and mission with their utility and longevity in mind, you ensure you don’t repeat the process again too soon. And if you are looking for help, do let us know.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.