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Category: Brand 101

Mind the Gap: Bridging Strategy and Design

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Here’s a simple truth I’ve learned working at both design-led and strategy-focused agencies. Strategy and design work best when they work together – from beginning to end.

The problem is that strategy and creative are often regarded as separate instead of complementary disciplines. They have separate teams, separate processes, different skillsets, different client interactions. They approach problems from different angles. They may sit on different floors, different buildings, or even different firms. And, typically, the biggest communication between the teams is a handoff from one to the next.

Great Strategy Doesn’t Always Lead to Great Creative

Sometimes, strategy is too cerebral. Sometimes, it tries to appease too many business needs. Sometimes, it just isn’t bold or incisive enough. And if strategy doesn’t strike a strong emotional chord, it often ends up sitting on a shelf­ as an academic exercise that people don’t know what to do with.

But when creative lacks strategic direction, although it may be beautifully designed and visually stunning, it risks addressing the wrong problem, the wrong audience, or the wrong objective. And if designers can’t find inspiration in the strategy, they will search for it somewhere else.

A Collective Endeavor

Bringing strategy and design together means thinking of it as a collective endeavor, not a linear process. It sounds easy in words, but putting it into practice takes commitment from everyone involved. As an agency who has been fusing design and strategy from the start, here’s how we do it.

  1. Bring design and strategy together, from the outset.
    We involve our design team in client interviews, workshops, and presentations, even when creative is far away from starting. Being integrated into early-stage strategic work helps designers understand the project and the process deeply. Our strategists work side by side with designers on creative – brainstorming, concepting, and elevating the design with on-strategy copy.
  2. One table, one team.
    We bring the entire team together around one table throughout the project. Each mode of thinking informs, respects, and challenges the other. A difference of perspectives and backgrounds elevates all of our work and challenges us to push our limits.
  3. Strategy guides, creative expresses.
    There’s a yin-yang to the process. Even when the two are in balance, we designate clear roles for everyone. We play to the strengths of each individual and build the team around people, not necessarily roles.
  4. Enjoy the journey.
    One of the great joys of a project is seeing a brand come to life strategically and experientially. Understanding how strategy and design build off each other to create that magic is energizing, and what ultimately brings us into work every day.

Smart Clients Want Both

For our clients, the results of this approach are energizing and empowering. Campaigns have a greater impact because they connect strategically and emotionally. Brands have a cohesive expression and articulation across every touchpoint. Identity projects, websites, and product launches are smarter because they tie together rationally and emotionally. When strategy and design both emotionally connect, great brands come to life in new, exciting, and surprising ways.

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

How to Launch a New Brand Category

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Launching A New Brand Category

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

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

Why New Brand Category Launches Fail

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

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

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

1. Be Consistent with Messaging

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

2. Generate Competition

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

3. Tap Into Influential Early Adopters

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

4. Popularize

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

5. Educate Customers

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

The Rewards of a Strategic Category Launch

Identifying a new category and building it from scratch can serve as a powerful path to growth for your brand. And the effort involved pays off. Category creators experience fast growth and receive high valuations from investors. Creating a new category, your brand will be in a solid position to surpass the competition. Or break into a flooded market. On top of that, your brand will be positioned to own the category as the de facto leader. Category creation is nothing short of a game changer.

This post is the 4th in series on brand category creation. Learn When to Create a New Brand Category, How to Create a New Brand Category, and Naming a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Maintaining Brand Relevance in a Fast-Paced World

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Relevance Amidst New Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some rules of brand relevance.

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant Brands are Successful Brands 

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

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

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

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

Brand Relevance Is The New Differentiation

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We believe brands need to stand out, not just by being different, but by being both personally relevant and emotionally important to people.

We came across this statement by Elliot Schreiber, Ph.D. on his blog “Brand and Reputation” that sums up the key difference between “differentiation” and “relevance”:

Relevance is More Important than Differentiation: Business strategists, Marketers and brand managers have been fixated on differentiation. Customers, however, are drawn to relevance – the things that “connect with them emotionally”. As I explain to my students, differentiation is all the people you date; relevance is the one you marry because you cannot live without them. It is emotional and irrational, but the bond is strong. Consider all of the competitors who worked on their versions of the iPad that would be different, faster, etc. Regardless of what was introduced, the customer preferred the iPad. It was the most relevant product on the market.

When a brand seeks a meaningful position through personal relevance and emotional importance, it starts by discovering what makes it potentially relevant and then focuses on evoking the emotions that will support, extend and highlight that relevance.

That’s the role of the emotive branding process: why + emotions = meaning.

For more information on our brand strategy methodology take a peak at our methodology.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design consultancy.

The Value of Investing in Your Brand to Drive Long-Term Growth


Posted on by Chris Ames

Attention Span Is Dead, Long Live Attention Span

For years, we’ve been told that our attention spans are shrinking. There is so much information, so many channels and devices vying for our attention, that we couldn’t possibly focus on anything for too long. Combine that with economic pressures, shareholder expectations, and the race to keep up in the digital age, and you get something called short-termism.

Fueled by our fixation on metrics, short-termism is a concentration on quick wins to move the needle. It posits an immediate, attention-grabbing impact over strategically driven, brand-building initiatives that have a higher long-term ROI.

Shorterm-ism Is Shortsighted

This type of thinking is contagious because for those who are tasked with moving the needle – whether it’s sales, marketing, or social media analytics – the pressure to demonstrate an uptick in growth is relentless. While you may signal towards growth in the short-term, this strategy erodes the underlying brand equity and robs you of a chance at something sustainable.

Beyond being unsustainable, it sets up a false dichotomy – that short-term growth and long-term brand building are mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Investing in your brand is the easiest way to drive – and most importantly, maintain – growth.

Play the Long Game

McKinsey’s research covered more than 600 large and mid-sized publicly listed companies in the U.S. over the preceding 15 years. They found that firms with long-term strategies had 47% more top-line growth than other companies, 36% higher earnings, and added an average market capitalization of $8.67 billion.

Similarly, a U.K. study by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), which analyzed 500 effectiveness case studies over 20 years, showed that long-term campaigns were three times more efficient than short-term campaigns, three times more likely to drive market-share improvement, and 60% more likely to deliver profit improvement.

Brand Building Is Worth the Burn

So, if long-term brand building is much more conducive to growth, why do so many people fall for the trap of short-termism? Because brand building is difficult. We demand everything from brands. Consider this excerpt from Barbara E. Kahn’s book Global Brand Power:

“A brand must be elastic enough to allow for reasonable category and product-line extensions, flexible enough to change with dynamic market conditions, consistent enough so that consumers who travel physically or virtually won’t be confused, and focused enough to provide clear differentiation from the competition. Strong brands are more than globally recognizable; they are critical assets that can make a significant contribution to your company’s bottom line.”

That’s a tall order, but it’s a necessary one if you truly want to grow. A focus on long-term brand building doesn’t mean you can’t have quick wins. Sometimes, quick wins are necessary to boost morale or capitalize on a time-sensitive trend. It just means that each endeavor needs to ladder up to larger brand strategy.

In a conversation on brand building, Angela Richards, KFC’s Group Marketing Director, discussed the importance of creating lasting emotional connections, even when the immediate goal might be a short-term tactical one.

“We have a really big innovation funnel and a really strong retail calendar, but for us more recently, that functional retail calendar has morphed so the brand directs the retail calendar – and the brand’s job is to create that emotional connection,” she said. “It’s okay now to say we are less reliant on new product development to drive those sales, because that emotional connection of the brand leading the retail calendar is driving core sales and core growth.”

The Magical 60:40 Ratio

The big challenge for CEOs and CMOs is finding the perfect balance between the short and long-term. Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned IPA study highlighted the fact that long-term brand building campaigns and short-term activation campaigns worked best in synergy. Strong brands had better results from their activations channels and strong activations, in turn, drove more sales for the brand. On average, they found that “effectiveness seems to be optimized when around 60% of the communications budget is devoted to brand building, and around 40% to activation.”

Whether it’s the mad rush to keep pace with the digital era, the lure of immediate ROI, or simply a lack of education around the importance of brand building, many companies are sacrificing an enduring market share for quick wins. As McKinsey and IPA have demonstrated, correcting this balance is essential if you want your growth to last.

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

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

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Everyone’s Offering ‘A Great Experience’

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping, A Different Type of Research

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

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

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

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

1. Alignment

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

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

2. Respect

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

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

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

3. The Whole Picture:

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

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

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

Qualitative Data, Back it Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Vision and Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready to get started?

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

Make it Aspirational

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

Give Yourself Some Runway

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

Do More than Describe – Create Excitement

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

Keep it Simple

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

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

 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

A Corporate Narrative: Convincing the Skeptics

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

The Case for a Corporate Narrative

CEOs often doubt the necessity of a corporate narrative. As a marketing or salesperson, you see messaging and storytelling as strategic tools. But what if they’re only fluffy buzzwords to whomever signs the consultant’s check? How do you convince someone who sees the world in revenue and profit to invest in a positioning process?

You speak their language and you support your arguments with numbers.

We’ve listed some quantified benefits of a corporate narrative to convince even your toughest negotiators:

1. Drive Corporate Value

McKinsey & Company found that companies with strong reputations generate 31% more return to shareholders than the MSCI World average.

2. Engage Employees

A company with a strong narrative boasts more engaged employees and typically finds it easier to hire, motivate and retain talent. According to a Watson Wyatt study, companies with high employee engagement outperform those with low engagement levels by 186%.

3. Connect in B2B

Again, according to a McKinsey & Company study, enterprise organizations now view a corporate narrative as a “central rather than marginal element of a supplier’s proposition.” In fact, B2B companies with clear narratives perform 20% better than companies with weak narratives.

In addition, strong narratives influence enterprise buyers’ decisions. A study found that B2B decision-makers are 10% more likely to consider solutions from companies that the market understands and feels connected to. The top 10 connected companies demonstrated a 31% greater growth in revenue than the 10 least connected organizations.

4. Command a Price Premium

The impact of a strong, clear master narrative is the ability of the company to command a premium price. A recent study indicates that brands that provide remarkably clear and unexpectedly fresh experiences garner greater customer loyalty and increase revenue. The same research revealed that 63% of customers are willing to pay more for simpler experiences.

5. Bolster Reputation

Corporate value is closely tied to a company’s reputation. A powerful narrative works to enhance reputation and serves as a promise and acts as a kind of insurance when a company is unable to deliver on this promise. Companies with stronger reputations even get the benefit of the doubt by investors in a crisis versus those who don’t, 54% vs. 20% of the time.

Additional Benefits  

Furthermore, companies with strong narratives have an easier time launching and driving the adoption of new products. Kasper Ulf Nielsen, an executive partner at the Reputation Institute, said, “People’s willingness to buy, recommend, work for, and invest in a company is driven 60% by their perceptions of the company and only 40% by their perceptions of their products.”

You know that a strong narrative will differentiate you from the competition, motivate your stakeholders, help you attract customers and employees, and, most importantly, increase revenue. But when your colleagues make decisions with data, you can explain the process ad nauseam without convincing them to move forward. So give them the data they need. End your frustration and, instead, use the evidence we gathered to make your case.

You’re welcome.

Emotive Brand is a Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Educate, Activate, Accelerate: Three Tips for Bringing Design to Life

Posted on by Chris Ames

Working on a brand project can feel a lot like being back in school. You do your homework, you research, you drink coffee late into the evening. And just like graduating, there comes a crucial moment at the end of the journey where the agency hands off the assets. This hard-earned diploma might be a new visual identity, a new website, or even just a new logo. As far as the SOW is concerned, the “work” is over — but of course, this is where the real work begins: activation.

Sure, you may have a framed degree on the wall, but if you’re not taking active steps to bring those lessons to life, all you’re left with is student debt. So, how does a company truly activate its new design assets so that they become something useful?

We spoke with Senior Designer Robert Saywitz on the subject, and in his mind, you need to educate, activate, and accelerate.

Educate

“First things first, a general education of branding and design will lead to an appreciation of the process. Because of time constraints, many clients don’t understand the amount of work and thought that goes into creating something so simple. This misunderstanding can lead to conflict or mismanaged timetables down the line. One of my favorite quotes is from Charles Mingus. ‘Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity,’ he said.

A quick primer creates a shared understanding that leads to a stronger partnership. When both parties understand what’s happening, the dynamic changes from the mechanic who knows everything to a shared sense of involvement. In addition, it gives the client a framework for evaluating the work you create. It’s so easy to get hung up on terminology if you’re not familiar with things like wordmarks or typefaces.

When you take the time to equip your client with the right context, you empower them to take ownership and feel more invested in the brand. People can’t invest in the brand if they don’t understand it.”

Activate

“Often, a client isn’t exactly sure what they need. So, when the time comes to hand off the assets, they might request a super minimal brand guidelines document as the end deliverable. It’s only as you go through the design rounds together that they start to think critically about what they actually need. Suddenly, this simple PDF they requested starts to grow. You start to ask, ‘What would be the most meaningful way to bring this to life for each department?’ Maybe it’s sell sheets, marketing collateral, or even an entire microsite that serves as a brand hub with templates, assets, and explanations.

At the end of the day, activation will only ever be as meaningful as you make it. Design assets can be a thing that sits untouched in a folder on a server, or valuable tools that solve real-world needs. The biggest mistake I see is when an agency rushes to hand everything over. Activation is not some tiny part of the pie, it’s a process that should permeate to all aspects of the brand. From brand guidelines to workshops to education sessions, there are many ways to activate your brand internally.”

Accelerate

“When everyone is educated and bringing the brand to life, things accelerate fast: design has the assets they need, sales understands the story, messaging is aligned and consistent with the aesthetic, everything is unified and connected. Your brand starts to work for you instead of the other way around.

As an example, my first experience with jetBlue incorporated this type of holistic design thinking. From the moment you walk into the terminal, you’re greeted by their specific color palette and clever messaging that guides you through the experience. Every interaction is purposeful and deliberate — the messaging on the walls, the napkin at the airport bar, the uniforms of the flight attendants and how they interact with you, the graphics on the actual plane — it’s all connected and telling a singular story. People are being walked through an experience with a level of care and detail that goes beyond mere functionality. It’s an end-to-end experience where design elevates the highest possible value of a brand. When it feels like a single hand crafted every touchpoint, people fall in love with your brand. A company is a complex thing, but peoples’ experience of the brand should be a simple, unified interaction.

When you’re firing on all cylinders, everything becomes a useful tool. Assets, guidelines, strategy, writing, the tone of voice, it all gets funneled together and draws people in. That’s why it’s so important not to bifurcate the process. You don’t want to simply hand off a document and say, “Hey, good luck.” Educate the key players, make them understand and fall in love with the story — so they are compelled to go tell it themselves.”

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

5 Common Mistakes in Brand Design Today

Posted on by Paulina McFarland

The Brand Design Journey

If you’re looking for a brand design or redesign, you’ll need more than a logo or a new website. Brand design is bigger than that. Designing a brand entails designing every moment and experience people have with your brand. It’s about every touchpoint, and these days nothing goes unnoticed. Brand design reflects how your brand looks and how it feels.

This means colors, graphic language, typeface, photography, and your logo. In the end, brand design is what brings the brand to life. It’s what makes your brand recognizable and powerful to the people that matter to your business. Because developing your brand design is no easy task, it’s easy for businesses and the people behind them to fall into common design traps. So before your brand engages in design work, consider these five common mistakes, why they are problematic, and how to avoid them.

1. Designing for tomorrow and not today

In a world where digital innovation and advancement is critical to a brand’s survival, brands need to be designed for new technology. Fluidity and flexibility is key here. The digital landscape requires adaptability. And in order to maintain brand relevance, brands need to anticipate how they will compete in the future market. Stagnant brands simply don’t create powerful brand experiences. Every touchpoint and interaction counts. Designers who want to design a powerful brand with a strong emotional impact, one that will stay relevant over time, and drive business in a sustainable way need to design with the future of the brand in mind. This means taking an adaptable, dynamic, digital, experiential, and always forward thinking approach that aligns with the brand’s vision and aspirations.

2. Playing lookalike

Differentiation in branding is of great importance. Yet many brands take the safe route. And as a result, brands end up looking similar to competitors or adapting to the short-lived design trends of the month. Even though design is supposed to help brands stand out, the design landscape continues to be filled with brands that quite honestly, look and feel the same. And sameness doesn’t move a business forward. Designing a brand requires taking risks. It takes courage. You have to be bold. And we know it’s not always easy. Challenge yourself and your clients to design brands that aren’t afraid to say something different. 

3. Forgetting about guidelines

Your agency or company could build the most prolific visual identity, pick the perfect colors, or create a logo that could change the entire game. But the fact is, a brand can’t come to life if the visual identity isn’t rolled out correctly. Businesses often overlook the importance of brand guidelines because they aren’t easy to create. No one wants to create or read a manual. However, people need a roadmap for keeping the brand consistent and powerful. Brand guidelines give businesses the tools people need to bring the brand to life, keeping it clear, consistent, and recognizable. Brands without brand guidelines often end up inconsistent, valueless, and unable to grow. If you want to make the brand rollout a success, you need guidelines.

4. Overcomplicating it

Simplicity and clarity is key for brand design. Complicated brand design ends up diluting the brand’s overall emotional impact and making the brand less recognizable to the people who matter to its success. However, it’s important that when straying away from overcomplicated you make sure you understand your audience and don’t dumb it down for them. Simple doesn’t mean banging your audiences across the head. Working as a team and eliciting feedback at multiple points of the process can help move the design towards clarity and simplicity.

5. Ignoring Strategy

Tying strategy with design is one of the most important things a brand can do. Use strategy as a guiding map for how the brand should come to life visually. Even though strategists and designers often have different toolboxes, marrying the two skillsets and ways of thinking can help build a more impactful, purposeful brand. Often times, clients want design that has nothing to do with the strategy that’s been developed. Make sure you explain the impact that strategically informed design can create, and demonstrate the power of strategically informed design. By bringing design and strategy together, your brand becomes more valuable and impactful.

Brand Design for Maximum Impact

Design a brand that engages your target audience and generates demand. One that will be able to adapt to digital advances, increased customer experiences, and heed off competition. Use your visual identity to help your brand stand out and highlight what makes you stand out. Keep it simple. Use your strategy to lead you in, and don’t forget to create the guidelines the brand needs for a successful rollout. If you avoid these five mistakes, the brand will be more powerful to its audiences, and more able to move business forward. The brand design will support the brand as it grows and prospers in a competitive design landscape.

Read another post from our design team: Brand Identity: What’s Your Type?

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