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Category: Brand 101

Strengthen Your Health Care Brand During Your Digital Transformation

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Room for Digital Transformation for Health Care Brands

You’ve probably had a friend tell you about her amazing physician. But did you ever hear anyone brag about their health insurer? Unlikely.

Overall, individuals are pretty happy about the quality of care. What they complain about is customer service. According to the Advisory Board, the top patient complaints include: communication (53%), long wait times (35%), medical practice staff (12%), and billing (2%).

Fortunately, powerful organizations—companies who see shortcomings in today’s system—recognize the room for improvement. The triumvirate of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase say they want to disrupt healthcare and we all eagerly await their solution.

Of course, the existing system operates at a disadvantage to the growing cohort of startups. These companies have no legacy technology baggage and are digital-first. Fitbit, Apple, and Omada Health offer individuals new ways to manage their overall fitness and health. Others focus on corporations and companies—the major healthcare payers – that watch the costs of care for their employees rise exponentially. For example, Collective Health helps self-insured companies manage their healthcare investment and support operations. Another, Lyra, helps companies and their employees connect directly to mental health providers.

Don’t Wait Around for Transformation, Start Strengthening Your Brand Now

Not all health care companies have the luxury of starting with an all digital approach. In fact, the biggest, most important players don’t. It’s why traditional healthcare providers, insurance companies, hospitals, and clinics are all in the midst of a digital transformation. This doesn’t mean, though, that they—or you—should wait until after a transformation is complete before you start making changes to your brand.

Take the opportunity to strengthen your brand so your customers are still there when you make that transformation a reality. Here’s how.

1. Make the Process Feel Good

A great place to start when looking to build a better process is to think about how you want to make people feel. Maybe your customers now feel frustrated? Unconfident? Even anxious? How can you make them feel optimistic? Even calm and confident?

The midst of a transition is the perfect time to start thinking about this. Focus on building a more frictionless process and making quick changes across the board that make for a more positive experience.

Ask questions like: How can we make it easier for customers to access the information they need? How can we better understand how they can prevent illness? Get in touch with a doctor or nurse when they need? Or even pay a bill more quickly and easily? Can we communicate with less complicated, more human language? Can we better train our people to act with empathy and patience?

It’s these small changes that will help build the frictionless experience people now demand from the brands they pledge loyalty to. And making the experience feel good can sustain your brand and ensure you keep your customers while you’re in the midst of a digital transformation. They’ll be committed to you, and delighted when you do transform.

2. Behave Consistently

It’s great when a health care brand says they “care about their patients”. But when a customer calls and has to go through multitudes of layers just to get a terse answer to their question and can’t even understand the coverage they signed up for months before, the brand loses credibility.

So while you’re in this transition, ask yourself what promises you make your customers. Are you living up to those? How can you better behave at every touchpoint? How can you really act like you care?

People don’t want the health care brands they buy into to be unpredictable. And businesses in the middle of change tend to let all rules go to the wayside. Just because you’re in the middle of digital disruption, doesn’t mean you don’t need guidelines for the present. Behave in line with your core values and make sure your behavior at every touchpoint lives up to what you promise the people you want by your side when you do transform.

3. Employees – Activate Small Wins

As your company invests in cutting-edge technology, dedicates time and resources to innovation, and prepares itself for a digital transformation, it’s integral that employees know and understand what’s important right now.

Leaving employees behind for a future state that is yet to come is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. When you are clear and transparent with employees about what they should be focusing in on and why, they can activate small wins.

It’s easy to think that change comes in one fell swoop. But small, incremental changes can make worlds of difference—especially in struggling industries with low trust, low convenience, and low brand loyalty. Employees are the people who are going to build that trust, leverage that convenience, and help build loyalty. Look to them and communicate with them about what matters.

There’s Always Need for Improvement

Health care is ripe for disruption because people want something more. Whether it’s a frictionless experience, a more empathetic brand, or a clearer and easier way forward, you can start delivering people what they want while you’re in the midst of a digital transformation. Ask yourself what should happen while you wait. What can you do to make improvements today?

Consider how you can better behave, better connect, and better build meaning with the people most important to your business. And dedicate time, energy, and resources to making those changes. Small changes can bring big rewards. By focusing on what you can change now, you’ll be more ready for digital disruption later—with a better process, a better way of communication, a better strategy, and better people behind you.

If you need help creating and implementing strategic change, please reach out.

Other posts you may enjoy on the subject are Digital Health: A Future With Millennials, and Why Digital Health Brands Need a B2B2C Strategy

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

Return on Meaning: Five Evaluation Criteria for Your Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands Rooted in Meaning Win Big

Return on meaning for businesses and brands is a compelling notion. In today’s world, it’s important to reconsider the ways you matter to people that are authentic to your brand’s purpose in the larger world. Now is the time to return to core human needs and evaluate where your brand fits in. This is why savvy leaders are taking a different approach to brand strategy. They are embracing the ideals of purpose, empathy, and meaning. They are creating newer, deeper, and more enduring connections with the people vital to their brand’s success, both within and outside their organizations.

In this approach, the keys to success are honesty and authenticity. In other words, the meaningful claims your business makes needs to be absolutely true. They also need to be seen as empathetic in order to resonate with the people involved.

How Do You Identify the Roots of Your Brand’s Meaning?

Consider how your product, policies, and procedures add to individual and collective well-being, both for your customers, your employees, and the communities and world around you. We suggest you explore these five areas as you pursue what matters most about your brand.

1. Human Safety/Security

In what ways does your brand help people feel more comfortable in the world, improve their sense of protection, or otherwise reduce feelings of insecurity?

2. Human Connectedness

In what ways does your brand give people a stronger sense of community, provide better ways to connect and communicate, or otherwise reduce feelings of disconnectedness?

3. Human Personal Growth

In what ways does your brand help people grow in body, mind, and spirit, or otherwise reduce feelings of meaninglessness? And inspire action and growth?

4. Positive Social Contribution

In what ways does your brand improve collective well-being across society or otherwise reduce social decline?

5. Positive Environmental Impact

In what ways does your brand work to ensure better lives for future generations or otherwise reduce negative environmental impacts?

Your brand may not be able to draw upon all five of these roots of meaning. At the same time, it may have multiple ways of creating meaning based on a single root. Regardless, the test is always how true the supporting evidence is and how well you see it through the eyes of others.

A Refreshing and Gratifying Audit

You should feel proud and gratified after such an audit. At its best, an exercise like this will reveal how your brand generates meaning in ways you never before considered. When you use these meaningful attributes to shape your brand strategy, amazing things happen. Suddenly, you’re able to elevate your story, connect on deeper levels, and fundamentally change the way people think, feel, and act with respect to your brand.

As such, more positive energy is created within and around your brand. This energy attracts the prospects you need to grow and move closer to your vision for the world you do business in. It gives your current customers good reasons to become long-term loyalists and advocates of your brand. It draws in the recruits you need to grow and innovate. It aligns, engages, and motivates your employees. It gives your leadership new depth and purpose.

Return on Meaning: A New Path Forward

By identifying your brand’s deep-rooted meaning, you set the stage for a more competitive presence, a stronger organization, and a better future. This is because meaning naturally generates more meaning. As you embrace the meaningful goodness of your brand, you and your team are inspired to build upon it and to develop new roots of meaning.

Step back from your daily pressures. Walk in the shoes of others. Go back to the basics of core human needs. Gaze deeply into your brand and let it reveal the roots of meaning that will help your brand thrive now and over time.

Download our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Are you interested in learning more about how your brand can have a stronger return on meaning? If so, contact us at Emotive Brand.

Making Everyone a Brand Champion

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Developing brand champions is critical

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

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

Brand behavior

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

Workplace behavior

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

Making everyone a brand champion

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

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

Brand behavior is much more than a set of rules

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

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

All together now

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

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

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

When Your Values Aren’t Really Values

Posted on by Chris Ames

Beware of Generic Values

In the inboxes and Slack channels at Emotive Brand, there is a video that often gets shared before we embark on a brand video. It’s called “This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve,” and it’s a hilarious satire of when you try to make your brand stand for everything, it ends up standing for nothing. “Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement,” the narrator says, in a salt-of-the-earth grumble, “are all words we chose from a list.”

Company values not only shape the external identity of your organization, they act as an internal compass for your current and prospective employees. When done properly, values can be the engine of a thriving work culture, attracting and retaining top talent. On the other hand, when a list of generic, vaguely positive words are selected from a hat, your culture greatly suffers.

If Everyone Is Innovating, No One Is

A research group at MIT conducted a survey of more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database. Eighty-five percent of the S&P 500 companies have a section—sometimes even two—dedicated to what they call “corporate culture.” Above all else, the most common value is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%).

“When we try to correlate the frequency and prominence of these values to measures of short and long-term performance,” the study says, “we fail to find any significant correlation. Thus, advertised values do not seem to be very important, possibly because it is easy to claim them, so everybody does.”

So, what does this all add up to? In short, there are two types of values for a company: universal and particular. Both are important in building a thriving company culture, but in terms of what you advertise and how you use these tools, the approaches differ widely.

The Universal and the Particular

Universal values are the table stakes to get a prospective employee in the door. Is there really anyone that doesn’t want to work at a place that values equality, respect, honesty, teamwork, or innovation? How you deliver and bring these values to life is incredibly important, but it’s something that can be elaborated on in an employee handbook, workshop, or leadership training.

At the end of the day, the only place that universal values really need to live is in the actions of your people. Your website is some of the most valuable real estate for your brand. Writing the word “INNOVATION” in all caps is not going to persuade a senior engineer to apply for a job. Do you know what will? Your technology portfolio.

In contrast, particular values are the principles that could only be held by your company. They should be written in a tone and manner that feels authentic to who you are. Here’s how Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO of Airbnb, explained it in a lecture at Stanford.

“Integrity, honesty — those aren’t core values. Those are values that everyone should have. But there has to be like three, five, six things that are unique to you. And you can probably think about this in your own life. What is different about you, that every single other person, if you could only tell them three or four things, that you would want them to know about you?”

So, let’s look at Airbnb and see if it passes the test. Here is the first value from their career page:

Be a Host. Care for others and make them feel like they belong. Encourage others to participate to their fullest. Listen, communicate openly, and set clear expectations.

First of all, notice the language. Being a host, of course, is integral to Airbnb’s platform. It embodies a sense of empathy while, most importantly, being particular to the company. It’s not that no other company in the world could value these things—caring, belonging, encouraging others—it’s that no other company in the world could have written it exactly this way. Think of how easy it would have been for them to just write the word integrity. Instead, they drilled down into the emotive core of their service and discovered something real.

Core Values Act as a Lighthouse

That’s the beautiful thing about well-written, emotive values. Once they are set, they act as a lighthouse for recruiting like-minded people. As Jim Collins writes, “you cannot ‘set’ organizational values, you can only discover them. Executives often ask me, ‘How do we get people to share our core values?’ You don’t. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren’t predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere.”

So, next time you sit down to write or refresh your company’s values, please resist the urge to paint with broad strokes. Ask yourself, what do we truly believe in? What do we do better than anyone else? What are the real, grounded ways that we are impacting the world? What changes are we looking to make and how do we want to get there? Paradoxically, the more specific you get, the wider net you’ll cast. Or as James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”

If you’re looking to make your brand values act as a guiding light for recruiting and retaining top talent, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

When Designers and Developers Collaborate, Everyone Wins

Posted on by Jonathan Haggard

A great developer recognizes and enhances design decisions. A great designer understands the technology they are designing for. Both developers and designers need to have an intimate understanding of each other’s fields in order to produce better experiences for brands.

In order to deliver a bespoke experience for a brand, a collaborative environment needs to be fostered.

How to Actually Collaborate

A key element to facilitating design and developer collaboration is reshaping the reviewing process. The traditional way is to do a bunch of design work upfront, get client approval, polish the entire project, and hand it off to a developer completely “designed.” This often results in quite a few design decisions being compromised because of poor documentation, developer interpretation, or non-feasibility.

The new way of doing things is beyond agile—its actual collaboration.

Collaborate

Setting a frequent and casual cadence of check-ins between designer and developer not only speeds up each other’s workflows, but it also allows each party to influence each other’s practice. True collaboration is a developer showing a designer an interaction that is 50% of the way done, so that the designer can fiddle with the code in order to make it perfect. True collaboration is also a designer showing the developer what they are thinking for design early on, so that the developer can raise any flags or offer suggestions to improve the design.

Using contemporary tools is the best way to achieve this type of working relationship. Gone are the days of sharing Sketch files over email and setting calendar events where eight people on the agency side show up to have a formal conversation with a developer.

Today, we use Figma so that the developer can see and modify the designs as they are being worked on. We use Slack to keep in communication on a regular basis and have video/screen share calls when reviewing things that keep updates frequent and easy.

Building Collaboration via Overlapping Skill Sets

To actually collaborate with someone, having overlapping skill sets is key. If each party has an understanding of the other’s expertise, they can make decisions together confidently. This also establishes trust between one another. For example, if a certain interaction is going to be too time-consuming to develop, the developer can offer a suggestion that is rooted in the agency’s design expertise. This is great when needing to come to a consensus on changing a piece of the design to fit the timeline since we can trust that the developer’s suggestion is going to be feasible. It also gives designers a new model of interaction to design against, so we can refine the design accordingly.

Building Collaboration via Remixing

When you have two parties with overlapping skill sets, the other party will often take the idea you have designed and enhance it.

Internally, we used our knowledge of front-end development to deliver custom interactions to our developer Cory, and he would surprise us by making them even better in his implementation. This type of relationship is critical in creating a site that expresses the brand to its fullest potential.

To be technical, our original design intended to use CSS to pin one part of the design while the rest scrolled. The developer went even further and added an overlap to the pinned area once a certain scroll threshold is reached.

This design was enhanced in implementation because the developer split up a Lottie animation and CSS animations that aligned perfectly with the timing. This needed to be implemented this way because the text needed to be editable in the CMS.

Start Today

The best way to build a culture of true collaboration is to start actually collaborating with people today.

Are you working on a document that you are trying to perfect before sending off? Get on a screen share and get input from a developer.

Do you work with a team that has a skill set you don’t have? Start learning their skills, gain empathy for what their jobs are, and bring them into the conversation. Show that you care about their craft and that you’re willing to learn outside of your role in order to make something better than you could have done alone.

Did someone send you a project to execute? Think creatively about it and enhance it beyond what they were expecting. Those little one to two-hour experiments add up over time and really improve the quality of what you’re working on.

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

Igniting Growth and Pushing the Envelope for SaaS Brands

Posted on by Joanna Schull

SaaS Brands

These days, it’s a SaaS world and we’re just living in it. From infrastructure and identity to platforms and productivity, Everything-as-a-Service continues to reign supreme. But what does it take to succeed and become one of the SaaS brands that can achieve the annual recurring revenue (ARR) required to drive predictable growth in an ever-crowding market?

According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud services are predicted to grow by 17% this year, from $227.8 billion in 2019 to $266.4 billion in 2020, with revenue forecasts for SaaS brands (cloud application services) expected to reach over $116 billion alone.

And while, as the SaaS market may seem mature after nearly two decades, according to a study by Synergy Research Group, it still only accounts for about 20-25% of total enterprise software spending, meaning there’s plenty of room for growth for both established players and new market entrants. There are challenges, but there are also plenty of opportunities to rise above the fray.

The Market Is Crowded and Continuing to Grow

According to a 2019 survey, data provided by Chiefmartech identified over 7,000 solutions in the marketing segment alone. This market saturation can lead to a lack of differentiation between SaaS brands and ‘buyer fatigue’ from an overwhelming number of choices and plans to consider. This is only likely to increase as investors continue to seek (and see) favorable returns on investments in the SaaS space, spawning multiple versions of even niche solutions.

Ease of Switching Can Lead to Churn

Another impact of the crowded marketplace and sheer volume of offerings is the ease of switching from one SaaS solution to another. SaaS brands, by the nature of the offering, are more scalable and easy to implement vs. traditional on-premise software solutions that require purchasing hardware, installation, and ongoing maintenance and management. Couple this with the fact that many SaaS offerings are nearly indistinguishable from each other and you’ll find the reason the average mid-sized organization is seeing 39% change in their SaaS stack from year to year.

The Target Audience Is…Everyone

Because SaaS has low barriers to adoption relative to traditional IT solutions, it’s increasingly common that the purchaser of a SaaS solution is not from within the IT organization, but is instead in another part of the business with a discretionary budget to spend. As a result, SaaS brands need to remember that their brand needs to be able to communicate beyond a strictly IT audience.

Expectations Are High

The consumerization of IT and what’s known as the ‘Amazon Effect’ continue to raise user expectations as they expect B2B and SaaS solutions to deliver the same level of customization, user experience, and ease of use as they experience from B2C companies and their daily consumer electronic experiences. As a result, SaaS solutions need to over-deliver on overall usability and the customer experience in order to attract and retain active users and preserve AAR.

To overcome these challenges, smart SaaS brands are adopting business and brand strategies and practices from the B2C world and adapting them to the B2B SaaS world.

1) Define the position you want to own in the market.

To stand out in a crowded market, SaaS brands must clearly define what position they want to hold in the market and in the minds of their target audiences. Being clear about how your SaaS offering is specifically differentiated from the rest of the competitive field is the starting point for driving preference.

2) Build a rational and emotional connection.

Like B2C brands, SaaS brands must communicate what the brand does, how it does it, and why the brand matters. At Emotive Brand, we think about this in terms of building a rational and emotional bond with customers—enabling people to know what you stand for, why your brand is different, and feel an emotional connection to your brand. The rational connection may drive initial purchase and adoption, but it’s the emotional connection that builds long-term preference and stickiness.

3) Invest in customer experience.

Create a customer experience that measures up to expectations set by leading B2C brands. This means paying attention to all touchpoints, from the sales process to product functionality and usability, to ensure that each and every interaction reinforces the connection with the product and the brand.

4) Differentiate with design.

Another way for SaaS brands to stand out is by investing in design. A distinctive and ownable visual identity can help differentiate from competitors and build recognition with purchasers and users. Of course, the focus on design needs to extend beyond branding and visual identity to include UX and product design to create an experience that keeps users engaged and utilization and renewal rates up.

As businesses continue to look for ways to streamline and simplify how they use and deploy technology to meet specific business needs, the SaaS market will continue to grow. The crowded market presents opportunities and challenges. Claiming a clear position in the market, building an irresistible brand that champions superior user experience, and differentiating with stellar design can help SaaS brands achieve the growth and recognition they need to succeed.

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

What Makes 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 four emotions we want to evoke in our target audiences, and then craft a big idea that brings these emotions 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. They are short descriptions of products, services, or designs that help 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 an agency, 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 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
– Crystalize 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 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 agency in Oakland, California.

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

Posted on by Stephen Banbury

Leading a B2B 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 a clearly articulated purpose. Why? Because purpose 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, they might be 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, 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 onboard.

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 agency based in San Francisco.

Unifying Vision, Mission, Strategy, Brand, and Culture

Posted on by Chris Ames

It’s very difficult to work hard when you don’t understand what you’re working toward. We’re all capable of putting our heads down and grinding it out – but that behavior generally leads to burnout, apathy, and updating your LinkedIn.

A recent study from Reward Gateway, a global employee engagement company, which surveyed 1,500 workers and 750 senior decision-makers across the U.K., U.S., and Australia has revealed that only 25% of employees feel completely informed about their employer’s corporate mission and only 32% of employees feel completely informed about the values of the organization they work for.

When you compare that to the fact that 89% of employers say it’s absolutely critical to the success of their business that employees understand their mission, vision, and values, it’s clear there’s a major disconnect here. So, where is the divide and how can we close it?

The False Divide

In hiring and HR, we often talk about the difference between hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are the concrete, measurable skills that make you a great fit for a specific position: coding, budgeting, IT. Soft skills are harder to measure – they’re the interpersonal skills like communication, empathy, and leadership that would make you a great fit anywhere.

Some companies make the mistake of dividing their work into these rigid categories. They think, “Hard skills drive real growth: our business strategy, our R&D and M&A roadmaps, our sales playbooks. Soft skills are merely nice-to-haves: our culture, our brand, our employee engagement.”

The truth is, a company divided cannot stand for long. Vision, mission, strategy, brand, and culture are inextricably connected, and all parts must work in concert to drive growth for your business. These strategic pieces must be thought of as one moving piece. Sales needs strategy to sell, marketing needs brand to have an impact, culture is the bedrock upon which all strategy lives or dies, mission keeps us grounded, and vision keeps us inspired. Beyond paying the bills, people need to understand why they get up every morning to come to work. There’s nothing soft about soft skills.

The numbers speak for themselves. A strong, well-defined, and positive culture increases employee engagement, job satisfaction, and well-being. A Business 2 Community report stated that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202 percent. Yet, only about 25% of employees said their organization has a strong culture based on core values and a similar amount said they trust their leadership at the executive level.

Unite Your Communications

On a very basic level, employees need a singular and regularly updated “space” to access communications about mission, vision, and the future of their company. That could be an intranet, a newsletter, or an in-person town hall. Ideally, this is a place where they can also voice their opinions and contribute to the shared meaning of the company.

Whatever the medium, the key is consistency in timing and aesthetic. Too often, employees are bombarded with irregular and disparate communications from different departments. Because they receive the communications in a silo, they think about them in a silo. There’s real power in bringing everything together in an integrated, holistic way.

Taglines vs. Tools

The fun thing about marketing is that everyone hates it – unless it’s really good. The distance between a mission or vision statement that feels like a “useless tagline” vs. a “useful tool” is a deadly gulf. There’s no surefire formula for bringing strategy to life in a meaningful way, but there are a few best practices that any company can glean:

Keep things human. If the goal is for every employee to be able to see themselves in the mission, then it needs to be written in a simple way. For example, the mission of TED is refreshing in its purity. It’s simply: spread ideas. It’s a perfect demonstration of how they serve, and their vision elevates this through the belief that ideas change attitudes, lives, and the world at large.

Be as transparent as possible. Mission and vision statements tend to be crafted by a small executive committee – and that makes sense. But even if all employees can’t actively participate in the shaping of the strategy, providing transparency into the decision process creates emotional buy-in for the end result. People are curious. They want to know the driving forces behind decisions and how they ladder up into something bigger. If you hand them a new mission statement with no context or transparency, it doesn’t mean anything.

Reward and model good behavior. If you’re asking people to make shifts in how they think and act at work, there should be systems in place to encourage those behaviors. Everyone wants their team to be more innovative and think beyond daily cycles – but nobody wants to allot the free time it would take to make that a reality. Some of Google’s most iconic products started off as side projects, a fact realized by their 20 percent rule, which states that employees should be able to devote one day of their work week to any project they like. Everyone wants their employees to engage more with internal communications – but it’s difficult to produce fresh and engaging content on a scheduled basis. After all, you can’t fault employees for not being up-to-date if things are regularly updated.

Vision, mission, strategy, brand, and culture are different blocks of the same blueprint. Creating the perfect house to hold these elements together can be difficult, but it’s critical if you want to drive growth home.

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

Brand, Purpose, Culture: The Triple Threat For Business Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

In Tandem

We talk a lot about how businesses today need a strong brand, a clear purpose, and an inspired culture. Each of these brand components are playing a greater role in business success today. Sometimes it appears that if you just have one, you might be able to turn your business around. But this is no longer the case.

Without all three – brand, purpose, culture – working together and driving one another, rising to the top is not a possibility. Simply embracing purpose is no longer enough to stand out. Even the most talented people aren’t going to drive you into the future without a clear vision of what that future is. Likewise, a highly strategic and perfectly designed brand won’t succeed without purpose-led people who can bring it to life.

Purpose, Delivered

Purpose is only powerful when it is really brought to life – when it acts as the underlying driving force behind the business. And what brings a purpose to life? Your people. The culture you build. Your employees united around a strong, clear, aspirational future with a clear outline of how to get there.

A vague purpose is no purpose at all. Neither is a purpose that doesn’t dictate your leadership’s behavior and drives best practices that trickle down. So businesses who want to compete today don’t just have to lead with purpose, they have to deliver on that purpose – following through with every brand touchpoint, living their promise, driving towards their greatest goals, and bringing their employees together every day.

It’s in the Data For Business

When we look at the data, we see the role of purpose having more and more of an impact on business results. According to recent Gallup research, 88% of millennials claim they would remain at their jobs for more than 5 years if they “were satisfied with the company’s sense of purpose,” but only 27% report feeling satisfied with their current company’s values. And this low rating directly impacts business with low employee engagement, low retention rates, and increased difficulty attracting the right fit of talent – top concerns for execs today.

Linking Together Brand, Purpose, Culture

Strong cultures can’t happen in a silo. They require shared accountability and leaders who behave in purpose-led ways that set an example for the rest of the business. And although building a purpose from the ground up is always the easiest practice, it might not be an option for many businesses today. That’s why leaders need to understand how brand, culture, and purpose have to work together to position the business for success.

Although purpose has been accepted by many businesses and brands as a strategic priority, many are struggling to directly link it to their company’s culture. Because of this, purpose can’t do the job it needs to do. First off, HR, not always seen as strategic, needs to be involved. As people demand more transparency, more authenticity, and more purpose from the businesses they want to work for, HR needs to have a seat at the strategic table – helping build a purpose-driven culture that can come alive and drive the business forward.

It’s all about strong leadership, clear vision alignment, joining forces at the strategic table, and figuring out how to communicate an inspiring vision to employees. Because when employees understand why the brand truly matters – what is driving the behavior of the company and its values – they can then align themselves in ways that help the brand outperform the competition and position the business to thrive.

Into the Future

Brand, purpose, and culture are critical to the success of your business. Investing in your brand is a good first step into driving your business and its people in the right direction. But when you invest in your brand, you also have to invest in your culture and never stray away from the power of purpose. Understanding the ways in which culture and purpose are linked, and how they drive your brand forward, is key.

Getting aligned around purpose and delivering on that purpose at every touchpoint should always be a strategic priority. Infuse it into your culture and help it motivate your people forward. Your company culture – when truly led by purpose – can bring any strategy to life, position your business for growth, and situate your team and your brand to thrive no matter the obstacles ahead.

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