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Category: Brand 101

Why Have a Purpose Beyond Profit?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

Defining Purpose

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

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

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

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

Why look beyond profit?

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

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

How does one define a purpose beyond profit?

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

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

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

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

A brand purpose is not a tagline

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

Download and read our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

 

Building Brands with 5 W’s and an H

Posted on by Joanna Schull

The other weekend I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park with a friend and her stroller-bound daughter. It’s been quite a few years since my own kids were young, and while the experience was familiar I could also take it in from a fresh perspective. As we walked along the shores of Stowe Lake, her daughter gave us a lesson in how children take in the world:

“Mommy, why is that bird sitting on one foot?”
“Where do you think the geese sleep at night?”
“How did the big rock get all the way up the hill?”

While this form of inquiry is familiar in children, it’s also a big part of how we learn as adults. Anyone who has ever taken a journalism course has learned a version of the 5 W’s and an H. It’s a trusted framework for news, research, and storytelling. But it’s also an intuitive way to think about how to connect with your customers, understand what they need, and find new ways to deepen your bonds with them.

Ask “Who?”

Who are you for? Who are you not for? This might seem obvious at first, but it’s something that’s not always thoughtfully re-examined as part of a brand strategy refresh. In B2B brand positioning, this might mean deciding to focus on a new primary target within the organization (e.g., shift from selling lower in the org to higher). In B2C brand positioning, this might mean getting more specific about who you serve: for example, shifting from being “For Travelers” to being “For Business Travelers” or “For Vacationers with Children”’). This clarity brings a great deal of focus, not only in shaping your brand but your entire product offering.

Ask “What?”

Knowing your customer means being clear on what matters to them. What are the gaps in the current experience? What are the greatest pain points? What is wrong with the status quo? These ‘What’ questions can lead to the insights required to refresh a non-differentiated product or redefine the status quo within a category. (For a terrific example of the latter, look at AirBnB’s recent relaunch — instead of asking people “Where do you want to go?” they’re asking “What kind of experience do you want to have?”, effectively shifting their value from functional to experiential.)

Ask “When and Where?”

This isn’t what you might think. ‘Where’ is not where your customer lives or where you might reach them with messages or marketing. This is “When and where should you show up in customers’ lives?” Should your brand be omnipresent or appear only when the context heightens your relevance? This can apply to how your customers encounter your brand’s halo in the world (e.g. advertising, sponsorships, or social good), how frequently you communicate with them, and the brand experience of interacting with your products and services.

Ask “Why?”

Asking ‘Why should customers prefer us?’ is asking why your products or services are different and better than your competitors. Or why, when given a choice, customers should choose to do business with you (even at a premium). Maybe you’re easier to do business with. Or perhaps you have brand values that align with your customers’. “Why” should identify the advantage that differentiates you and makes you unique.

Ask “How?”

Your secret sauce shouldn’t be entirely a secret
Finally, it’s time to ask “How?” Not “How do we reach people?” or “How do we execute our strategy?”, but “How do we want to make people feel?” Do you want them to feel safe? Smart? Secure? Joyful? Inspired? Accomplished? When you think about your customers through this lens, you identify your brand’s emotional core, adding an additional dimension of differentiation, and a unique way to forge deeper, more meaningful connections with your customers.

In short, it’s all about asking the questions that will let you understand who your customer is, what they need, and how your business can not only meet those needs, but create an emotional connection with them while doing so.

Not Another Outdoor Brand: The Appeal of Meat Eater

Posted on by Emotive Brand

In our last blog post, Joanna Schull explored an approach to companies that are creating their own categories. Today, we’ll talk about what happens when a brand takes an existing market category and turns it on its head entirely. When this happens organically, as part of a larger vision, the results can surprise and excite.

Sandwiched between the romcoms, reality shows, and “Steamy Thrillers” of Netflix, you can find Meat Eater. In its tenth season, the show centers on hunting and fishing across multiple continents. There’s a clue to Meat Eater’s ambitions in its name: a determination to bring the drama of chasing animals back to its ultimate purpose of consumption. The show’s logo, in which moose tines transform into dinner forks, echoes this idea.

At the center of Meat Eater is Steven Rinella, a lanky, 48-year-old Michigan native and lifelong hunter and fisherman. Rinella is the series’ narrator, founder, and nucleus; around him orbit a rotating cast of characters: old friends, hunting guides, the occasional celebrity. Rinella’s spare commentary and self-effacing humor let the drama of the show unfold around him, and much of Meat Eater’s appeal is in watching him watch the rugged country he hikes through, waxing philosophical as he gazes through binoculars. 

Lesson 1: Differentiate from those in your market category.

Meat Eater’s depiction of a life in the wild isn’t radically new. All good hunters and anglers, by definition, need to be both cooks and conservationists. But conventional hunting TV shows rarely go beyond treestand grip-and-grins, leaving crucial parts of the story untold and making it inevitable that a new voice will stand out and get noticed.

The show’s pace is set by long, meditative shots of the natural landscape, punctuated by Rinella’s observations on the behavior of the animal he’s after, the ecology of the larger region, or both. Stalk sequences are predictably thrilling, but they’re not a given: Rinella and his crew will release episodes whether they find success or not. After a rifle shot, the depiction of field-dressing game is unflinching, but the camera’s gaze doesn’t linger there. Instead, in a stylistic shift, we’re off to a cabin or country kitchen, where Meat Eater reveals itself to be a cooking show.

Lesson 2: Change the category, challenge expectations.

Outdoor sports programming. Nature documentary. Cooking show. Meat Eater combines and confounds all three. Is it a Bourdainian foodie epic with a really long intro? Or a carefully considered attempt to reclaim hunting culture from the likes of Ted Nugent? Encountering the unexpected creates interest, and keeps your audience hooked.

Here, Rinella deftly breaks down game into roasts, medallions, and burger patties, showcasing recipes (Kung Pao Bear, for one) you won’t find on the Food Network. Meat Eater’s host is as comfortable with a cast iron pan as he is with a rod or gun, and it’s telling that the majority of his published books are cookbooks.

Along with the cookbooks, the Meat Eater media brand comprises spinoff shows, podcasts, and a website with a broad scope of articles (sample titles: How to Make Ramp Powder, Live 7-Foot Sturgeon in Car Trunk Leads to Massive Poaching Ring Bust). There are partnerships with apparel brand First Lite and rifle maker Weatherby, as well as an ascendant sub-brand, Wild and Whole, that caters to foragers and homesteaders. 

Lesson 3:  Know your audience.

Bowhunters, committed locavores, and environmental activists. Seeing the Venn diagram plot of these people is one thing; seeing how they can be the same person is another. The COVID-era explosion in outdoor exploration is nudging separate interest groups together in fertile and synergistic ways. Acknowledging an audience is about more than setting up a big tent: it’s about understanding inclusivity by way of the common thread that can tie people together.

America’s most famous chef may not be a hunter, but America’s most famous hunter is certainly a chef, as well as a citizen scientist and creative writing MFA (University of Montana, natch). Standing at the intersection of environmentalism, guns, ethical consumption, and animal welfare, Meat Eater straddles a political tinderbox, yet it manages to be a whole that outshines its parts. It’s proof that reimagining what category you’re in – and who your audience could be – can transform your business.

Eight Questions to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excuse Me, But Can I Get A Little Transformation With My Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

Change. It’s a bitch. It’s also axiomatic in our industry. Whether you’re a startup emerging from stealth mode, an industry disruptor going public, or an enterprise business in the middle of a merger, every organization is learning to succeed amidst exponentially complex, relentlessly rapid change.

We get it. These growth moments force business leaders to rethink everything from value chains to backend technologies. They sometimes require reorganization. And they almost always mean revisiting the brand strategy that got you from where you began to today. More importantly, they force a conversation about where you’re going — how to position your business for what’s next and build a flywheel for growth.

But there’s a catch. Sustained growth isn’t just about getting from Point A to Point B. It actually requires continuous transformation. And very few organizations are good at adapting quickly. Or consistently.

Emotive’s experience working with clients at all growth stages is revealing: leaders believe that designing for the future is critically important, but day-to-day responsibilities almost always supersede forward-looking ambitions. They’re simply too hard to push forward without a strategy that’s actually built with transformation — and the whole organization — in mind.

So what do we usually advise?

1. First, figure out how you’re actually going to design your strategy as a process. Will it be top-down or bottom-up? Top-down means that vision flows from executives to managers to on-the-ground employees. It’s efficient, but there’s often loss of clarity and context by the time it trickles down. It produces a lot of questions: How is this relevant to what I do every day? Is what I do everyday going to change? Do you want me to behave differently? Bottom-up invites participation from people closest to customers first. The work still starts at the top, but it begins by developing open-ended questions that engage employees, asking them to co-create the storyline with leaders.

2. No matter what process model is right for your organization, someone needs to be in charge of change. Maybe it’s the CEO if you’re a smaller startup. Maybe it’s a Chief Brand Officer if you’re a larger, enterprise business. Regardless, great brand strategy is only as effective as how it cascades out and across an organization. And that requires a person or team that’s actually in charge of transformation — operationalizing strategic change for the business, including its people, behavior, and culture.

3. Challenge assumptions. If you want different results, you have to disrupt ingrained ways of doing things. Learn how to make new choices, even if they’re uncomfortable. This is especially true for the leadership team, but applicable across the organization.

4. Unleash strategy from the c-suite! Real change requires that everyone across the business adopt a growth mindset, which in turn requires shared context and understanding of the path forward. If that knowledge gets trapped at the top during the strategy process, it makes execution harder, if not impossible.

5. Communicate the hell out of what you’re doing. No matter what your strategy design process, the majority of execution happens deep inside an organization. If you want the whole business to succeed, everyone has to be a full participant, engaged in the activities of change, not just the recipient of a blueprint or — worse yet — an executive slide presentation. Generate curiosity and buzz along the way. If everyone is rolling up their sleeves together, there’s a collective sense of what’s possible. This makes it a lot easier to move the whole ship in the right direction.

Of course, these are just rules of thumb. Every organization has to define what’s required to meet its own greatest vision of success. Developing effective brand strategy is an integral starting point. Don’t give short shrift to the intentional transformation design necessary to bring smart strategy to life.

Ensuring Our Clients’ Success: Change Management and How We Help

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Helping Our Clients Be Successful

As a brand strategy agency, it’s our job to ensure that our clients are successful. The strategy and strategically-informed design we create is meant to position our clients’ business and brand to thrive.

But at the end of the day, it’s not just about how smart or groundbreaking the strategy or design is. There’s a lot of planning and change management that goes into making sure the project is successful and followed through from start to finish in the most impactful way possible. Operations and project management are key to any brand strategy project. Helping a client manage their project, aligning our teams together, and pushing a project forward on schedule is no easy task.

In our experience, change management and ensuring our clients’ success hinges on:

1. Developing a relationship

The first step is all about building a relationship. We’re all human after all. As an agency, we put people first. That’s at the heart of Emotive Brand and what we believe business should be—human. You have to get to know the client and the client has to get to know you. It’s all about trust and respect. Any project will have ups and downs that require give and take, so it’s important to establish common ground. What makes shifts and obstacles down the road easier is when both the client and agency feel like they’re on the same team.

The benefits of building trust are unending. We want people to come to us and say: “We have this doubt. We need help with this. How would you approach this?” And it’s easier to get people to let you guide them and be open to your advice and strategy if they trust you.

It all starts with focusing on the relationship. Creating an environment where you can—if need be—deliver bad news, or say no. Creating an environment where you can celebrate successes and also power through obstacles, together. Face time is important here. Whether its virtual conferences, workshops, meetings, these are often appropriate and convenient tools for communication—especially given our current circumstances. It’s key to understanding people and the cultures they work in. It gives context to people and how they think and work. It changes the relationship for the better and helps collaboration flourish more naturally.

When former clients still call us to check in, to ask how we are, and seek our advice long after a project is over—that’s a success to us.

2. Establishing the expectation of accountability and ownership

Planning, creating calendars, establishing deadlines, setting up check-ins, all of these planning tools are key. But they only really work if people actually show up and deliver what’s expected of them, and this all hinges on accountability. Setting expectations about availability and respecting each other’s timing from the onset is just as important as doing what you say you’re going to do.

As the agency, we create standing project management meetings with our clients to make sure that everyone knows what’s expected of them and to help everyone stay accountable. These meetings are a platform for discussing key milestones, workshops, deadlines, etc. We’ve found that projects get stalled when people feel they are too busy to meet with you. This is why having these meetings is so important. Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s time matters. But by being clear about expectations and deadlines, we get the project done with the least amount of time wasted.

When we figure out how to manage the project together and are aligned around key dates (board meetings, all-hands meetings, etc.) we can more easily build a schedule around an already existing workflow—capitalizing on opportunities when people are already going to be together, which is especially important for global clients.

It’s also important to establish who the key decision-makers are at the outset: who owns the project and who ultimately has the ability to move the project forward. We have to get to the heart of who these people are so we make sure they are there for key moments of the process.

When a project gets stalled because the schedule isn’t followed, the impact gets diluted. There are large stakes. That’s why planning out the resource requirements and establishing accountability from the beginning is so integral to the overall project success—setting up what you need, when you need it, and from whom you’re getting it.

3. Working proactively, always anticipating

Change is hard for anyone, but anticipating the challenges of change is what’s going to make it possible. It’s all about bringing the right people into the process at the right time. There are times when we have to add in minor steps within the process because we anticipate a roadblock ahead. For example, doing a pre-presentation to an executive in order to get them on board and comfortable ahead of a bigger meeting.

It’s also helpful to draw from past experiences in order to anticipate and read the signs of what’s ahead. Every client is different, but we learn different things from each experience. We’re always thinking about the questions: “What would help this process? What would help to get this person on board? What do we need to do to move this forward? What needs to happen next?”

It’s all about being proactive and being a step ahead. That’s what helps make hard transitions smoother. That’s what makes preparing for change feasible.

4. Rigor and flexibility

For a process to create an innovative, change-making strategy it needs to be coupled with rigor and order that ensures trust and confidence.

There’s got to be a process, but you also have to be able to flex within that process. No two projects are the same. Different forks always appear in the road, and often, you have to pause or stop and reflect. Sometimes, you just need more time. Other times, you need more people or even a different direction. We see deliverables shift based on needs. The solution might change but, whatever the change, being flexible within the rigor of the process is key.

Along the journey, you always uncover new things. Listening—really listening—to the client’s needs is key. And needs are ever-evolving. Flexibility comes from learning and adapting to these evolving needs.

Ensure the success of the project and position your client to thrive. That’s the goal, and we are always striving towards better ways of helping our clients reach their goals.

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

Investing in Brand: It’s Never Too Early

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Many of our clients call us after they’ve got a working product or once they embark on a sales effort in earnest. They see branding as an expensive and time-consuming exercise that they’d rather postpone.

In almost every case, we wish they’d reached out sooner.

Branding is not a one-time exercise; your brand is a muscle that you strengthen over time. Most high-growth tech companies go through several brand iterations over their life cycle. Knowing that, we believe it’s never too early to invest in your brand.

In fact, when you invest in branding early in the life of your company, you’ll tap the benefits of a strong brand—market recognition, customer loyalty, and sales growth—even earlier.

Raise Your Next Round of Funding

When you fundraise, especially for an early-stage company, you need a compelling story. It’s more important than your logo and a critical part of your PR. Seriously, how can you ask for millions of dollars when you can’t explain it effectively? This is why when we create a brand, we often include a narrative that an organization can rally around internally and use as the basis of its pitch.

Unite Leadership and Employees

A brand development project has an added benefit of internal consensus building. When clients tell us they want a brand strategy, we often discover that executives’ goals are not consistent. Again, it’s a part of the process. Some people will have to give up their sacred cows; others will finally be able to share a revolutionary idea. In the end, teams gain alignment.

Get the Attention of Gartner

What could be better than a mention in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant? Many of the high-growth tech companies we meet are disrupting existing categories or even building new ones. When you show a new and better way of doing things, a strong brand makes you credible and attracts analysts’ attention.

Plus, when you launch or relaunch with a killer brand in a new category, you give newcomers a standard to emulate and make it easier for these competitors to enter.

Learn More About Your Market

In addition to internal interviews, we reach out to your prospects and, if appropriate, customers. We hear their thoughts about the market and also pressure-test your initial brand positioning and messaging. This forces you, via our work, to “get out of the building” and test your hypotheses right away.

Honest feedback is priceless. Because we are not the ones building the product, external stakeholders feel more comfortable about sharing their positive and negative reactions. And, by testing your brand with the market pre-launch, you gain reassurance that your messaging will stick.

Better Return on Your Marketing Dollars

Speaking of marketing, that function is rarely an early investment at startups. But, eventually, you’re going to focus on this effort. How great would it be if your first marketing hire received a one-pager with your brand architecture when they arrived at the company?

Brand positioning and messaging are also the foundation on which you build your brand’s look and feel—everything from your logo to your website. When your website doesn’t reflect your brand, your market will have little impact or longevity.

A strong brand will boost the effectiveness of your public relations. Every time a company communicates publicly before they’ve developed their brand, they end up continually recreating their story. Build the brand first and you’ll have a better ability to sustain a consistent message in the market.

Helps You Attract Talent

It’s a sellers’ market for talent; great employees can pick where they want to go. A strong brand raises your profile and intrigues your prospects. And your recruiters will thank you for making their job easier.

Is it ever too early to focus on your brand? Should you wait until you have a product? Perhaps, but we’ve had clients that, in the process of brand development, actually realize they need to adjust their focus and pivot to a slightly different product or service. The process of creating their brand makes their company stronger. If you think you’re too small to have a brand strategy, it’s time to reconsider.

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

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

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

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

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

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

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

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

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

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

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

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

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

 Download White Paper

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

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Mission, Vision, and Values: But First, Executive Alignment

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Start with Executive Alignment

Vision, mission, and values give a company direction. They describe what a company stands for and what it doesn’t. Solid mission, vision, and values statements give guidelines for a brand’s behavior, help distinguish a company from its peers, and serve as a foundation for the brand’s ultimate personality. Without them, a company is rudderless.

So, when’s the right time to write these statements? Some companies don’t launch before they have a mission, vision, and values. Others develop them when time allows. With COVID-19 changing so many things from the way we show up to what gives us meaning in our work, now is a perfect time to embark on this exercise.

Though timing varies, the most important element in creating your mission, vision, and values is executive alignment. I promise it will be the hardest part of the process, but if you miss it you’ll end up with meaningless fluff. Start with alignment and the wording of the mission and vision almost takes care of itself.

Here are the steps to get you there:

1. Get your executive team on board

Include your executive team from day one. Yes, another project that takes time away from your “real work”. We get it. Mission/vision work doesn’t feel as urgent as launching a new product on time or making this quarter’s sales goal. But the longer you delay, the longer you have to wait for the impact. And if executives don’t take ownership of the project, they won’t have respect for the work that comes out of it.

2. Put it all out in the open: one-on-one interviews

Once you’ve got your executives’ attention, gather feedback from each exec individually. When we work with clients on mission/vision projects, we start by interviewing the key internal players. (If you are doing this project on your own, someone on your team, preferably a neutral player, could handle this step.) Big picture, you want to know where they think the company should go in the future and how it will get there. Again, 2020 has likely thrown a wrench in what you had previously planned for the business.

You also want to gather opinions on the current business and service offerings, market and competition, trends and regulations affecting the market in the short and long term, and current and future target customers.

3. Tackle the big issues and hot topics: executive alignment

Coming out of the interviews, you’ll have a list of statements that cover the kind of future that people in the organization desire for the company, how comfortable they are with change, and where they want to focus first.

For example, in a recent engagement, these were a few of the statements we generated for our client:

  • “We need to change the status quo.”
  • “Our vision should be internally vs. externally focused.”
  • “We’re more comfortable as an ingredient brand than an innovator.”

4. Expect disagreement

If you are like most companies, people won’t always be in agreement. So rather than be frustrated by this, see it as your opportunity to find alignment.

Bring everyone together into one room—even virtually. Remember, people own what they build. Put each statement on a poster with an “agree/disagree” scale and ask individuals to use a post-it to show how they relate to the statement. When everyone is done, it’s time to discuss. (Pro tip: Google Jamboards combined with Zoom are a great way to do this virtually.)

Second, pull out from the interviews the “hot topics”, the issues that are holding the company back. If the team doesn’t address these issues, they’ll destroy the company.

We recently worked with a disability insurer. Their hot topics included things like the following:

  •  “Startups have already moved into term life and car insurance and erased the middleman. How will we prevent this from happening to us?”
  • “We’re in the midst of digitizing the underwriting process. How does this project and that one overlap?”

 5. Follow the Critical Path

Get everything out in the open before you start building a vision and mission. It can be painful and frustrating to hash out these topics but it’s an essential step in the process. You learn where people sit on every important issue and you figure out the hurdles you need to jump over to get to the mission and vision development stage. Only then can you decide together where the company is headed.

Speaking of the critical path, don’t focus on marketing before you have set your vision and mission. People get excited when they hear about a new strategy. They want to get started. We recently worked with a company that lacked a strong, energizing strategy. The marketing department recognized this more than any other part of the organization. They realized that the company was moving in a new direction and was so eager to communicate a new mission and vision that they put something in place before the executive team reached alignment on the mission and vision.

When we talked to the executive team about the mission and vision work we planned to do for the company, though, many felt uncomfortable with the marketing work communicating the new strategy. Misalignment all around.

Alignment Drives Business

Put in the hard work to get everyone around the table aligned on the path you’ll take. Focusing on alignment will pay off in the end. It will save you time, frustration, and energy, and allow you to better focus on what really matters—what will drive your business and brand into the future, with everyone on board.
If you need help building alignment, please reach out.

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

Brand Campaign: Emotional vs. Emotive Brands – What’s the Difference?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of an Emotional Brand Campaign

Have you seen a brand campaign lately that made you laugh? Cry? Smile? There are a lot of campaigns out there that pull at people’s heartstrings. And often the most shared campaigns are the ones that rely heavily on emotional content.

As a result, a lot of brands today are hyper-focused on creating emotional advertisements. People rely quite heavily on emotions to make decisions. Anyone in branding today knows this, but just because your brand produces one emotional campaign, doesn’t mean it’s positioned for long-term success. Today, to really connect meaningfully with people, your brand must be emotive, not just emotional.

The Requirements of Emotive Branding

Emotive brands are rarer than emotional brands for many reasons. Emotive brands don’t just create emotional ads. They forge meaningful – and valuable – emotional connections at every touchpoint. They are consistent with the emotions they elicit and make sure that these same emotions ring true through everything they do. Every touchpoint counts: the tone of voice your employees have on customer service calls, how your packaging and website make people feel, how people within your office talk with one another, how leaders welcome new employees, the emotions customers have when they first visit your store, office, warehouse, etc.

Being a truly emotive brand requires building an emotional experience that resonates with the customer at every point of their journey, which is no easy task. It requires a strategic mindset and complete alignment around what emotions your brand wants to elicit and how you plan to create and foster those emotions across all platforms, touch points, and brand engagements. When brands do figure out how to successfully behave as emotive brands, they are able to connect more meaningfully with their audiences. This means people are more likely to remain loyal and engaged, and ultimately feel bonded to the promise of the brand in the long-term.

An Emotive Brand Campaign Must:

1. Behave authentically:

Some emotional brand campaigns feel as if they are trying to elicit emotional responses purely to leverage their own business. These never work out in the end because they feel inauthentic. Being credible and authentically bonding with people through shared values, attitudes, and behaviors has more long-term hold today. Especially since consumers are more distrustful of businesses than ever before. Make sure the emotions that your brand is trying to elicit feel true to who you are as a business, what you promise people, and where you see your brand going. Your brand must behave authentically at every touchpoint in order to create an emotional impact that sticks with people in the right ways.

2. Focus on consistency:

Consistency doesn’t mean boring or always predictable. Building guardrails for emotions can be particularly helpful here. Give your brand room to play, experiment, and be innovative without confusing consumers or behaving in ways that are off-brand and dilute your emotional impact. This means diving deep into what kind of relationship you really want to build with people, whether they be your employees, consumers, other businesses, or competitors. How can you connect in ways that feel consistent, but still flex to people’s unique needs?

3. Build meaningful experiences:

Every brand moment is an opportunity to build further meaning and should be approached as so. Whether it’s an internal meeting, an external presentation, a small or big event, a phone call, an email, or a board meeting – there is always space to convey the unique meaning of your brand and evoke the feelings that are distinct to it. Truly emotive brands are continually thinking of new ways to reconfigure, reshape, redefine, and enhance these brand moments – infusing emotions and meaning at every moment in subtle, yet powerful ways. This requires creativity and dedication to making every moment meaningful.

4. Be human:

As technology advances faster than ever before and digital becomes the new norm, being human is even more important for brands looking to connect with the people who matter so much to their success. A key part of behaving as a human brand – relatable, connected, lovable – is being emotive. Humans are both rational and emotional creatures, so connecting on a human level requires both the rational and the emotional. Marrying these in an authentic way is what gets people on board. Behaving as a human brand today means being flexible and dynamic. It’s about being in-tune with how your brand is making people feel, and being able to adjust accordingly.

More Than an Emotional Fix

Emotional brands may give consumers a 30-second emotional fix, but emotive brands forge meaningful connections that withhold time, shifts in the market, and even new competitors. Our work developing brand campaigns has proved time and again that emotive brands are better positioned to behave authentically, meaningfully, and humanly – and as a result, better positioned to thrive. No matter if you are a B2B or a B2C brand, your success hinges on how you connect with the people who matter to your business. These connections must be meaningful. Learn more about the power of emotive branding to power your brand campaign and create a more emotive, and therefore meaningful brand campaign.

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