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Category: Brand 101

Brand Growth in a Saturated, Competitive Market: Yes, It’s Possible

Posted on by Shannon Caulfield

Brand Growth Despite Growing Competition

Brands saturate our world. They are all looking to innovate faster, compete harder, and disrupt bigger. Why? Competition is tough – from both emerging and established brands. This forces companies to always be on their toes.

But competition isn’t always a bad thing.

Competition is what gives brands the motivation to do better and be better. If your market is crowded, it doesn’t mean your employees must work 18-hour days or that you have to outspend on advertising. Instead, what you really need to do is work smarter.

Here are some ways you can grow your brand even when you’re not the only player on the field.

 

Growing Awareness in a New Category: Make Competitors Your Allies

It might sound destructive, but partnering with competitors can actually benefit your brand – if you do it right. This is an especially good tactic when you compete in a new category. And you’ll likely find willing partners. In fact, 74% of companies are open to supporting opponents as a means for building brand or category awareness. Take kombucha, the drink of choice for Silicon Valley and hipsters everywhere. During the category’s early stages, the awareness rate was only 20%. Companies such as Health-Ade and KeVita went to tea festivals together and handed out samples of their products to spark buzz around the fermented drink. They came together with a shared mission of raising awareness and realized they could make a bigger impact together than separately. In turn, each brand was able to grow over time as the category grew into one of high demand.

Growing into New Segments and Channels: Take a Leap into Something New

If you aren’t ready to join forces with the competition, a co-branding partnership may be the perfect way to step out of your category’s predefined box. American Express and Foursquare, both players in the payments industry, leveraged each other’s reach to solve a unique motivation. American Express used Foursquare’s platform to offer discounts to their cardholders, reach a younger, tech-centric audience, and expand their merchant network. Foursquare leveraged the Amex partnership to push more users to shop via their phones, increasing user traffic. This cooperation gave each brand the data to reach new market segments, expand into new channels and, ultimately, elevated each brand’s position.

Growing Brand Loyalty: More Rewards, More Brand Love

Financial success does not equate to long-term loyalty. The modern-day consumer demands that brands deliver personalized experiences. Loyalty programs, in particular, connect brands with consumers and gives them a reason to stay. When AAA entered the market, for example, their primary value was emergency assistance. While this offering has been well received in the market, AAA established an even greater reason for their users to continue using the platform by offering third-party discounts and rewards. That value goes well-beyond a jump start.

Think Creatively to Grow

If you feel the only way you can compete is with expensive ads and promotions, think again. It takes a little creativity and effort to try unconventional tactics but, we promise, it will be worth it. And we’re happy to help.

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

The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive and Transformational Technologies

Technology is advancing like never before. With disruptive technology advancements in AI, machine learning, iOT, analytics, and so much more, it’s becoming more and more difficult for businesses to keep pace. Industries are being transformed and the world we live in is changing before our eyes. So how can you develop more compelling and differentiated B2B messaging for marketing and sales teams?

As an agency, we work with many tech clients who are in the midst of this change – racing the clock to get to market before the competition. And while many have worked tirelessly to build the best technology in their realm, they struggle with how to position and message their product or solution to their target audiences.

Messaging for Disruptive and Transformational Technology is Hard

Disruptive technologies require a different approach to messaging and positioning. Discussing features and benefits isn’t enough. In order to be truly disruptive, these companies need to change the perception of what is possible. Their messaging needs to articulate why potential customers should believe in their solution and how the technology will enable a different future. As such, B2B messaging needs to:

  • Articulate that there is a problem with the status quo of today
  • Ignite a shift in perception around about why customers should believe in a transformational way of thinking
  • Position the product or solution in a way that both rationally and emotionally articulates the value proposition directly to key target audiences
  • Clearly show audiences how your offering can transform their way of doing business

These are challenges we often see our clients having a hard time knowing how to integrate brand-level messages that center on the “why” piece of messaging the story. Instead, they lead with the “what” and “how.” When things are so complicated and are so transformational in nature, the messaging needs to be holistic in nature and incorporate the entire story – a story centered around the customer, not the technology itself. This departure from product takes courage.

Our role involves helping our clients make the complex simple. We find a way to unpack the technology and what it enables customers to do, and put it in more human terms. We make it easy for people to understand how the technology will help their business be more successful. Even the most innovative technology in the world will never see the light of day if people don’t understand know how or why to buy it.

The Role of B2B Messaging

To be successful today, tech companies have a lot to achieve. Selling product, influencing prospects, inspiring investors, building categories, building market share, and driving revenue. Marketing teams are on the hook to deliver meaningful and differentiated messaging platforms to help support sales and ensure the brand presents a unique offering. This means B2B brands need a strong narrative and compelling messaging in place to cut through the noise.

In our work with high-growth tech companies, we’ve seen first-hand how the role of messaging can drive change. Because of this experience, it has become more important than ever to get it right. There is a growing need to differentiate complicated technology products into easy to see “value” in the form of solutions that meet target audience needs.

Seems easy? Not so much. Much of our work is alongside CEOs who come from strong engineering backgrounds. They feel immense pride in the products they have worked so hard to engineer and develop. And naturally, they want messaging to lead with product. They see features and benefits as the only way forward.

However, we know this isn’t the only way. My background is in selling technology. I know first-hand what sales teams need to be successful, and I see the role of messaging as critical to the sales organization’s success. I have sold technology on three continents and bring this sales-led approach to every client engagement by adding a unique of understanding technology, how to position it, and how to create a brand narrative and messaging – messaging that addresses the big idea of why the technology matters while demonstrating how it solves a customer’s business problems.

That’s why, at Emotive Brand, we believe strong B2B messaging is about hitting the sweet spot between brand, sales, and marketing in a way that excites, resonates, and activates buyers.

Getting it Right

Getting messaging right is a real challenge. Most often, messaging is an output of a larger brand strategy. As such, it has to crystalize what you do, why you’re better, and what you can do that no one else can. It’s not easy to articulate these values to your target audiences in both rational and emotional ways that activate them to do something.

It’s old news that a lot of B2B messaging – especially within the tech world – sounds the same. But there is a larger problem at hand – a problem we’ve seen happening for a while now. A lot of messaging used by B2B companies isn’t aligned with what the customers or the businesses they are trying to reach really value. What companies are missing is the articulation of something more than features and benefits: true opportunity, values, and meaning.

Supporting Marketing and Sales

We’ve talked again and again about the role brand strategy plays in supporting and driving business strategy. So when the time comes in the brand strategy process to develop messaging, it needs to align and support two major functions within a company: Marketing and Sales.

It’s about driving two workflows within a company. Marketing needs B2B messaging to build out a go-to-market strategy and create sales enablement programs. Sales needs messaging to know how to talk to customers, position the product or solution, and close deals. If the messaging isn’t strong enough, marketing teams struggle to fill the funnel and convert leads. Sales has a hard time responding to RFPs and closing deals. In short, it’s detrimental to both teams’ success.

Smart B2B messaging can drive marketing and sales forward, positioning you to better reach and connect with the businesses who matter to your success. To do so, make it:

1. Customer-centric

A shift needs to happen from product-centric to customer-centric. This means increased focus on articulating the valuable, unique opportunities you can offer your target audiences. In the B2C world, it’s easy to focus on consumers.

The mistake a lot of B2B companies are making today is thinking that the businesses they are trying to reach are only making rational business decisions. And while B2B does require a high level of rationale, it’s important to remember that there’s also a lot of emotions at stake for B2B buyers. Many businesses today feel that they have an important to role to play. They are mindful of cost, aware of how things are going to play together, and passionate about finding the right solutions fit to their business.

2. Research-led

In our client work, the tightest and most meaningful messaging we’ve developed for clients has involved some level of research – both quantitative and qualitative.

There’s a lot of value in talking to people one-on-one. It gives our team the ability, as a third party, to gain direct access to customers, prospects, and even lost deals to understand the audience’s needs first-hand. This level of empathy enables B2B messaging that can truly connect with people – with their rational needs on the right emotional dimensions. That’s why getting to the heart of their motivations, pain points, and needs is critical and can be the difference between thriving and failing.

3. Top-down

Like many strategic elements, messaging has to start at the top. This means the leadership teams must be involved. Moving messaging beyond features and benefits is a process, and key leaders have to buy into a more customer-centric approach or it will never be fully embraced. 

Once top execs are on board, they can work to align the sales and marketing teams at the highest level. This reinforces the messaging systems you’ve built by ensuring that people are talking about your business in ways that align with it across people and platforms.

The sales force is then equipped to utilize the B2B messaging in powerful, dynamic ways. They become more willing to provide feedback to marketing about what is and isn’t working. The collaboration between these two groups makes both the messaging stronger and the impact of the brand stronger. Driving ROI and sales.

B2B Messaging as a Driver of Business

Messaging can drive brand awareness, equity, and buying decisions by bringing your value proposition to life for your key audiences. With strong B2B messaging in place, your business can then develop a powerful corporate narrative that brings all aspects of the business, brand, and vision together.

In B2B, messaging can be a vital solution in humanizing your brand and business. It can make it easier for your sales and marketing team to connect with your future clients in important ways that will fuel your business forward. The transition from solely rational to a blend of both emotional and rational can be a challenge. When you take the lead and embrace the process of identifying what really matters to your audiences beyond just the functional elements of your product, sales will take off, marketing will start to pay-off, and your business will be positioned to stand out and thrive.

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

Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Category As A Frame Of Reference

A brand’s frame of reference is the foundation of its positioning. It will determine the points of parity the brand has to meet in order to be considered a legitimate player, and highlight opportunities to differentiate. As such, your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. As UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff explains, a frame of reference is absolutely essential, get it wrong and your difference may be ignored: “Framing provides a mental structure that shapes the way we see the world. If a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored.”

It’s human nature to want to fit things into a category. The more innovative and disruptive your offering is, the more it needs a frame that people can relate to. If your brand can’t easily be defined, people often push it to the margins and leave it there. This is because its complexity is easier to ignore than to figure out.

People hold on tightly to their established understandings of what a category is and what it offers. Choosing the right category is about defining, or framing, what people are buying in such a way that your value shines through. The goal is to identify the best category that will help your customers “get” your value and make it relevant to them, while putting your competitors at a disadvantage.

When Your Brand Category Isn’t Serving Your Brand

If you are looking to grow your business, make sure the brand category you align with is still the right one for the brand. For some brands, the category they originally aligned with stops serving their needs. If you meet any of the following criteria, it might be time to break out of your current category and become a new breed of category creators developing new markets with innovative technology and products.

  • You are altering your strategic direction and your business model is shifting.
  • Your product or offering is misunderstood by prospects and partners.
  • You have created a significant innovation or proprietary advantage.
  • Competition is stifling your ability to grow.
  • Your current category prevents your key differences from standing out as ‘must haves.’
  • Your category is in crisis or has fallen out of favor.
  • You are ready to extend your brand beyond current customer segments.

It’s Time to Create a New Brand Category

Creating a new brand category might be the best way to position your brand for success. But, creating a new category is incredibly hard. For most companies, it’s hard enough to explain what your product does and how it’s different from your competitors. And the task of explaining and defending a new product category can be too much for many companies to take on.

However, the rewards of creating a new category are great. High0companies that created their own category accounted for 74% of incremental market capitalization growth from 2009 to 2011. Category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors than companies bringing only incremental innovations to market.

Category creators must be fearless and confident in their ability to lead the category, build momentum quickly, and maintain a reputation as the category leader over time.  Before creating a new category, consider whether your business has the resources and time available. Don’t just define a new category for your brand, but brand the category itself. In the end, creating a new category can be transformational for your brand and business if you do it well. Look for the best practices for defining a new category and what mistakes to avoid in our upcoming post.

Category Creators

This is the 1st in a series. Check to How to Create a New Brand Category, Naming a New Brand Category, and Launching a New Brand Category by downloading our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies.

What Brands Need to Do Right to Nail Their Digital Strategy

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotive Brand Experts #5: Michael Beavers

Continuing our Emotive Brand Experts series, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else – and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today.

Michael Beavers is a Silicon Valley-based digital strategist who works with leading technology enterprises, consumer brands, and startups. A veteran from both sides of the client and agency relationship, he’s worked with Google, Yahoo!, Intel, and many others.

***

How do you define digital strategy?

Digital strategy describes the intersection of business strategy, insights about the human beings who interact with your company, and the systems through which they do so – then translating those insights into design and engineering implications. Your brand is represented online through a wide variety of channels. But there’s a big difference between delivering a brand message and thoughtfully delivering services and information that make the claims of a brand true. The services you create through every interaction with your customer are how your brand is perceived against the claims or characteristics of your brand.

Where do you begin as a digital strategist?

Regardless of the size of a project, I begin with inquiries about everything I can about a company. What do they do? For whom? Why?

I like to sit down with various stakeholders and examine what they do, why they do it, what digital things they depend on: websites, digital campaigns, ads, enterprise software, emails, everything. I also try to understand the company’s mix of enterprise software and IT environments that enable all of these tactics.

Often the digital goals expressed by my client need to be shaped further or altered beyond their original form. Then I shape both into something everyone can agree to before we put our goals and assumptions to the real test with customers.

How have you seen digital strategy change over time?

Gosh, what hasn’t changed? Devices are constantly changing, and not just the way we code for them. Technology is a scaffold for human behavior. What’s interesting is that human behavior changes that scaffolding, but the opposite is also true. Companies have a responsibility to make claims about their brands, back them up with great human and technology-enabled interactions that should never manipulate customers, but respect and shape how they behave with your company.

The early days of the commercial Internet were about experimentation and the organizational stuff companies have to offer. There was a middle phase where a lot of companies take a more manipulative view of consumers, which everyone sees through. I’m encouraged, however, as I see more companies view themselves as complimenting who they are and what’s great about themselves through software and services delivered through UIs across all devices. Everyone is now a software company, and some are acting like it.

What are some common missteps you see in the field?

Most of the time when a company is funding a web project with a marketing team, they think too narrowly about the user experience and what web teams rely on to inform that experience. Take any website from any global brand. Is it enough to organize the company’s information logically and push a beautiful design to production as quickly as possible? Maybe…but probably not.

What’s logical to internal stakeholders is the result of years of living inside of a company’s culture, its operations, and its organization. If that’s the basis of your user experience, you may simply be exposing your org chart and dysfunction. That’s not good enough.

A great strategy reflects the company’s goals and challenges but leans heavily on insights about customers and their worlds and contexts under which they experience your company. From a digital perspective, that’s what “brand” is.

The best way to inform your brand is through studying customers and users with minimized bias. When web teams at companies understand the value of research, the differences in customer satisfaction and brand perception is significant.

My very favorite question during strategy formation is, “How do we know?”

How do you discover that? Through personas?

Oftentimes, yes. Personas can be very helpful, but there are bad anti-personas out there, chiefly from marketers understanding personas to be assumptive bio-sketches of who they imagine their customers to be.

Personas were originally an advent for software design. But they’re useful for marketing and messaging, so it is common to place a “target segmentation” lens on personas for messaging. This has deleterious effects on how qualitative research is funded and how protocols get designed. Those outputs are rarely suitable for designing great digital experiences.

When informed with real observed data, personas are powerful informers of a digital experience. You can convey messaging in any number of ways, but above everything, you must give people something to do that is in line with their tasks and contexts.

This is the difference between marketing with digital “stuff” and marketing software or UI-led service delivery, which make brand claims real.

It is important for brands to update the axiom of customers always being right: the customer is always right to do what they do, so we should understand what it is that would help them believe in us as a company.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen over the years?

I think the biggest change is unfolding before our eyes today in our national politics; specifically, the interdependencies of social media, ad networks, monetizing news content, and foreign operatives exploiting things that we all depend on to stay informed and go through our days.

The distribution of content and opinion through news and personal social channels has never been this intertwined. Because makers of the commercial could not foresee foreign interference, the Gutenberg press of our age has gone awry.

It breaks my heart to see but I’m also encouraged by what I see in the design and engineering community. Discussions about signaling meaning and trust, design and engineering ethics, and consumer awareness of security have never been greater. So that’s the new current situation and context for all digital strategy.

A company trying to sell more stuff to the right people has to understand how to be authentic. It must align its values to those of its customers, and make it real through trustworthy commercial interface products.

Brands must also now deal with the proliferation of the marketing technology stack. It encompasses everything: hosting, content automation, marketing automation, CRM suites, analytics, social media, and case management.

The implication is that marketers have a lot more to manage now. The complexity and scale of marketing has increased exponentially, and customers interacting with your digital experiences bring heightened skepticism and service expectation. Staying on top of those skills is really challenging. That’s why it’s often helpful to have expert outsiders, people willing to gently bust the silos and mixed contexts that hinder great customer experience.

What advice would you give to fellow digital strategists?

The best advice I can give is to stay curious and have fun with this stuff. Try to dig into as many tactics for understanding as you can but don’t over-index on any one skill. It will be different tomorrow anyway. Be at least categorically familiar with various web technologies, marketing automation, analytics, and how to read and interpret how they report insights you can use to form your strategy.

Know yourself. Are you a T-shaped professional and embrace your natural curiosities? Are you comfortable exposing your areas of ignorance to understand them better?

Do you think in both short and long-term frames? You may already be a great digital strategist, even if you don’t have an engineering or design background.

Spend time figuring out those worlds. Designers and engineers are ultimately the people who you serve through your strategy. Your communication should be an organized vessel of clear insights and objectives. Their work is what makes the brand real for customers. They need your help.

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

Brand Differentiation: Where Do You Even Start?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Differentiation

In B2B marketing, creating brand differentiation is a critical output of all marketers whether you are managing a B2B or B2C brand.

When your brand is truly and meaningfully differentiated, it works as a magnet to attract new customers and employees, as a glue that keeps people loyal, and as a warm glow that means people always come back for more. So how do you differentiate your brand?

The problem for most brands is that they have yet to find a distinct place in the whirlwind of modern commerce. These brands are being buffeted by the winds of change and the waves of disruption. Every day they go further astray, lost in the vast “Sea of Commodity”.

And what do they find, if they actively seek out a point of brand differentiation that is based only on what they do and how they do it? Often, they don’t find an inch of difference between what they do and what their competitors do. They find themselves speaking the same language as everyone else. They use the same visual language. And realize that they market themselves in a carbon copy fashion.

Start with “Why”

The modern answer to the brand differentiation quandary lies in the question, “Why?”. As Simon Sinek puts it,

“People don’t buy ‘what’ you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it”.

This is increasingly true and with little wonder. Think for a moment how difficult it is from your brand’s perspective. Now, think about how difficult it is from your customer’s perspective.

All of us are inundated with marketing hype and claims. Not only in your category, but in every aspect of our lives. Our natural response is to turn off as much of the noise as we can. We do this by applying filters. Brands work as filters when they help us latch onto something important and meaningful. Once that connection is made, we can then forget about the rest.

But if your widgets are the same as the next guy’s, it’s going to take something truly significant to become the most trusted and respected widget seller.

How do you define your “Why”?

The answer is to explore and define your brand’s “why”. Deep in what you do and how you do it, lies a number of truths about your intentions and outcomes.  These positive character attributes can fuel the thinking that will lead your brand toward meaningful (and profitable) differentiation.

By giving your brand a “North Star” to aim for, you elevate the spirit, ambition, and drive of your brand and everyone connected to it. A purposeful brand promise is the best way to forge your brand’s North Star. When well crafted, and built through the principles of empathy, purpose and feelings, a promise allows everyone vital to the brand’s success to see the ideal it sets as their own and enables them to be an active part of it.

When this brand promise is translated into new forms of behavior, both for the brand as an entity, and for the people in the workplace, amazing and differentiated things start to happen. In the effort to fulfill on the brand’s promise, a new mood and spirit drives business relationships, product development, marketing campaigns, customer service, etc.

  • Senior management makes more aligned and purposeful decisions.
  • Managers create more productive and gratifying work situations.
  • Product designers stretch their skills and imagination.
  • Marketing teams build consistent brand experiences and stronger messaging.
  • Customer service teams work with greater empathy and compassion.

All these changes push your brand in the direction of its brand promise. As a result, your brand, business, and culture will thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

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Building a Brand Awareness Campaign: How to Get It Right

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Big-Fish-Eat-Little-Fish World?

The brand world follows the food chain – little fish look up to the big fish, everyone wants to be on top, and low visibility is often equated with eventual extinction. Every brand wants to be the next Nike or Apple, right? The thing is that those big brands – those top-of-mind, always relevant brands that even your grandma knows about – are rare. And if you’re a brand that’s still trying to build awareness, simply imitating what they do isn’t always the right strategy.

Brand Awareness Issues

At Emotive Brand, we’ve worked with a lot of brands who share a common frustration. They’ve put so much into building a business, product, solution, service – endless hours, heart, and soul. And it’s great. The problem is that no one knows about it. No one understands the true value that brand can offer, or no one seems to care. That’s where an awareness campaign comes in to help.

Creating a Brand Awareness Campaign

Brands look to an awareness campaign to drive awareness, spark engagement, and ultimately, foster loyalty. If you get your awareness campaign right (it’s hard!) your brand and business can grow in meaningful and impactful ways. Here’s our advice.

1. Turn Your Audience into Your Advisor

You don’t have to have millions of loyal fans lining up at 3 a.m. for your latest product to know who your brand-lovers are or what they care about. As long as you find someone who loves your brand, you can learn and gather deep insights about how your brand fits into their lives. And from there, you can find people just like them – people who have the potential to fall in love with your brand.

2. Locate and Listen to Your Brand’s Heart

Getting to the core brand truths that will drive your campaign requires getting to the heart of why people care about you – both functionally and emotionally. Although most brands focus on the functional, if you really want to grow your brand, understanding what emotional role your brand plays in people’s lives has unparalleled value. These insights will inform how you build a relationship with your target audience moving forward.

3. Create Consistency, Create Trust

Once you identify your target audience and why they should care, you can figure out how to meaningfully connect with them and stand out in a way that consistently reinforces those key truths. A campaign is a perfect opportunity to introduce your brand in a way that resonates and draws people in. Setting the tone for the future, you can begin to build consistency and trust with the people who matter to your business.

4. Timing Is Everything

A mistake lots of brands make when creating an awareness campaign is generalizing time. How much does coffee matter to you at 10 p.m.? Have you thought about your car insurance today? A lot of brands think of themselves as lower-involvement brands because people don’t care about them all the time. But what about 7 a.m. when you have to get to work? Or those moments just after a fender bender? What really matters is finding those higher-involvement moments and pinpointing when they occur. When you isolate the occasions when people care the most, you can recreate campaign moments in which people will be most emotionally poised to connect with you. This helps make it real and motivates people to take action.

5. Nothing Beats Authenticity

People can smell inauthenticity from miles away. As you’re establishing yourself in the market and gaining awareness, it’s super important that you be authentic and true to who you are. The way you reach out to people needs to ring true to your core truths. Don’t grab people by imitating the big players. Grab people by being particularly emotionally relevant to them and genuine about what your company is really about.

Lower Awareness Brands May Not Be at a Disadvantage  

Being poised to grow, ready to exceed expectations, and eager to connect with people is a powerful position to be in. Many brands would do anything for a blank slate – another opportunity to make a perfect first impression.

Keep this in mind: while those big brands enjoy their position at the top, most people don’t feel delight in aligning with a massive company that everyone already loves. What many people crave is the thrill of discovery. Like stumbling upon a great unknown band or artist, there is a joy in unearthing a great unknown brand.

So focus on leveraging your position into an opportunity for people to explore and try something new. A lot of our clients struggle to see the tremendous emotional impact their small (but mighty) brand already has. As an agency, it’s our role to bring this potential to the surface, find those passionate brand advocates, and unearth the powerful core truths that will drive a campaign that can sky rocket brand awareness.

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

Mistakes to Avoid When Preparing for a Branding Project

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

All Signs Point to a Branding Project

There are a lot of common signs that indicate it may be the right time for a branding project. Maybe your business has experienced high grown and you are ready to reposition to prepare for your next round of funding. Or maybe it isn’t growing fast enough and you need to find a way to differentiate your brand to compete more strongly. Perhaps your competitive set has changed and with it, the industry has evolved opening a new category for you to shift into. With markets and categories shifting so quickly, many organizations are left feeling lost as to how to capitalize on those shifts and changes. A branding project can be a great way to re-energize perceptions about who you are, what you offer, and how you do it better than anyone else.

However, a branding project is no small undertaking. It requires commitment, dedication, and large-scale planning.

Before you launch into a branding project, consider these common mistakes.

1. Poor alignment around objectives and expectations:

If your business is considering investing in a branding project, it’s integral that you create alignment and clarity around the objectives of the project. Why is now the right time for an updated brand? What has changed? What can you expect as a result of this work and investment? And most importantly, how will you measure success?

Without clear objectives, time is wasted moving towards ambiguous goals. And time is of the essence. A rebrand won’t happen overnight. So plan ahead, anticipate the needs of the business, and determine what you need to be successful in the future is key.

2. Underestimating the power of planning:

Resource management is vital to the success of large scale projects like a rebrand. Too often organizations fail to see beyond the early planning stages and end up without the necessary resources to see a project through and beyond the launch. Don’t underestimate the time or financial and human resources that will be needed to do the job right. With an appropriate budget in place, a project of this scale then requires consistent planning, dedicated scheduling, and a team that is going to fuel the project forward.

A solid project plan is critical. Highlight major sales and marketing events to ensure you will have what you need when you need it. Block out Board Meetings and other critical business meetings. And if you have an upcoming conference and major events, block those too on a project plan. Meetings need to be nailed down. Clear timelines need to be established, people need to be held accountable, and strategies should be developed for keeping things on track. Once you allow a project to fall behind schedule, you’ve set the precedent that the project is not important and people will fail to treat it as a top priority. As soon as that happens, you start to waste those precious resources you worked so hard to put in place at the outset.

3. The wrong drivers:

Businesses often make the mistake of putting a team in place to manage a project like a re-brand without fully understanding the demands on their time. A project of this size can’t be something that your people do in their spare time or something that requires senior executives to sign-off on every single aspect before things can move forward. This means identifying and empowering someone internally and realigning their current responsibilities or consider bringing in an outside resource while designating a smaller internal team to help support this lead. And this internal team should not only represent marketing – sales, HR, and product teams can also be valuable drivers as long as the people you choose are clear on the strategic vision for the business.

Above all, make sure your project team is prepared and empowered to make smart, fast decisions. Getting hung up on small things and trying to please everyone is only going to stall the project and dilute its impact. It’s about making the agile, strategic decisions that position your business for success.

4. Thinking it’s all about the website:

A rebrand is not just about a new website. A project of this scale represents a much deeper, and extensive move in a different direction for your business that will impact all aspects of what you do and how you do it. The brand has to be embraced in the hearts and minds of the people who work for you and who embody what it means to do business with you. Any change has to start on the inside before you can expect it to be felt on the outside.

So yes, the website is an important touchpoint for the brand and often the first brand experience a prospect or customer might have with you, but your branding efforts can’t start and end there. Your new brand strategy must guide all of your marketing efforts, every interaction people have with your firm, as well as influence the way you do business.

5. Leaving people behind:

Change is difficult for people to digest. Most importantly, in order for change to work in your favor, you need to get people behind your new strategy. Pacing out how you introduce the new brand can make it more digestible to people. As well as help align everyone behind the direction your company or firm is taking.

In the end, people – no matter what role they play – want to know what a rebrand means to them. What changes should they expect and when? How do these shifts impact their own work? Daily and long term? What are the new expectations for them?

With shifting expectations, you need an infrastructure in place to internally manage performance. Figuring out how you are going to hold people accountable for shifting behavior is key.

Keep it Going

So you’ve decided on a rebrand. You’ve allocated time and resources. You’ve assigned a team. You’ve created a strategy and strategic materials. You’ve rolled the new brand out internally and externally with success. But the branding project isn’t over.

In fact, you’ve just started. Launching a brand is one thing, but maintaining it and keeping it doing its job is another. Make sure you are dedicated to building on your brand strategy overtime if you want your brand to do the work it needs to moving forward.

When you commit to the cost of a branding project, you must also commit to investing in your new brand in the long-term.

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

Disruptive Brands: How to Challenge the Status Quo and Succeed

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive Brands Are In

We’ve talked some about disruptive brands, why challenging the status quo and presenting information in a fresh way is an important driver of successful businesses today. Millennials value disruption more than any generation before. Many brands and businesses today are thriving because they aren’t afraid to do something new and make a splash. Companies everywhere are trying to figure out how to be the next Uber, AirBnB, or Amazon of their industry – innovating faster than their competition, hiring the most creative people out there, and doing something that’s never been done before.

Innovation and creativity are becoming more and more valued by employers today. Businesses realize they need new perspectives and people who are unafraid of bringing new ideas to the table, in order to drive their business into the future.

The Challenge of Always Challenging

Although disruptive brands are at the center of much of the media around successful business today, it’s not an easy job being a truly disruptive brand or business. Challenging the status quo and succeeding at it is a challenge in and of itself.

A new, change-driving idea isn’t enough. You have to actually make that idea come to life, and that’s a huge task. There are a lot of disruptive companies with innovative ideas who simply don’t make it.

For some, it’s overwhelming and seemingly impossible to prioritize ideas – focus isn’t appropriately distributed and impact gets diluted as a result. Succeeding at being a disruptor requires intense resiliency. Timing is always a challenge, as is getting others on board. Some visionaries have trouble seeing the value of incremental change and quick wins, coupled with their larger vision and greater creative energy. Others underestimate the importance of having a strong and unified team to make their vision a reality.

In the end, successful disruption requires not only a desire to challenge the status quo, but a clear vision, comprehensive research, planning, backing, and endless perseverance.

So successfully challenging the status quo hinges on:

1. Balancing vision with the now

Implementation is hard work, even with a clear vision of what’s ahead. It’s important for disruptors to remember the value of incremental change and quick wins. In the end, it’s all about balancing long-term goals with short-term practicalities. Your larger vision should be what drives everything. But disruption doesn’t happen overnight. It takes planning and prudence to make it work. Big ideas need small ideas to back them up (and sometimes, check to see if they are even feasible). Big steps and big splashes need preparation.

2. Building a stable, resilient team

Balancing these two ways of thinking – small and big – requires a team of diverse thinkers and doers. Because disruption is all about change, building a cohesive, supportive, and aligned team is key. In fact, disruptive thinking itself often thrives in collaborative settings filled with different perspectives and ways of seeing. You need people who are willing to challenge each other – different backgrounds, different strengths, and yet a unifying charge to create and produce change.

Working as a team helps advance ideas for change. When a group feels like they have joint ownership over an idea, it’s more likely to become a reality with everyone rallied behind it. Even someone who challenges the idea can bring up important flaws and help frame the concept for people who might doubt its impact.

3. Knowing your market inside and out

One of the main challenges of behaving as a disruptive business, is the entrance of new competition. When a new idea catches on – and it often does like wildfire – you find others piggy-backing on some version of your idea. Suddenly, you don’t stand out as much. Think Uber and Lyft. Being there first can be both a benefit and a barrier, and differentiating and continuing to say something that resonates and keeps you ahead of the curve hinges on knowing your market inside and out. How can you continue to offer something different? How can you continue to challenge the status quo?

In-depth research and awareness of your audiences and potential competitors is key. Being one step ahead of the game can go a long way. And staying fully informed is key to making sure you have the right timing with the right people – a large part of the equation.

4. Fostering a culture formed on disruption

It’s important to consider how you can maintain the disruptive spirit of your business, even years down the road. Building a culture that is open to fresh perspectives, change, and embraces people who ask questions, challenge ideas, and show an innate curiosity, is key.

Disruptors are often restless. If you want to be a truly disruptive brand, you have to embrace this restlessness. Allow employees to find novel ways of creating, thinking, and learning. New information always drives new perspectives. Be transparent and create a culture of trust where people feel comfortable challenging each other and voicing their opinions in constructive, productive ways. Be open to seemingly bad ideas as well as the good ones. Work with each individual to make sure their voice is heard – helping them learn, grow, and continue to challenge even their own thinking.

Keep Disrupting…

At the end of the day, being an authentic disruptor isn’t dependent on a single idea, product, or breakthrough. True disruptors and truly disruptive companies continue to think and are, in essence, constantly and continually disrupting.

These companies build their entire culture around innovation and new thinking. They constantly work to recreate the chaotic, creative, disruptive, and innovative spirit that led them together in the first place.

Companies who continually challenge the status quo are never satisfied. These brands and businesses are open to change and thrive off of it. The status quo is always changing, and with their oath to challenge it, so are they.

Competitors might (and most likely, will) enter and adapt a version of their original idea. But the winners will always be one step ahead – never part-time, never half-in, never done. True disruption is about constantly shaking things up – challenging even the status quo you yourself have created.

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

Read our recent post on Messaging for Disruptive Brands

Mistakes to Avoid When Activating Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Activating strategy is an integral part of moving your brand and business forward. Your brand strategy is a road map for success that positions your business for the future. It’s the set of tools meant to bring your brand to life and move your business forward.

Activating strategy means you need a strong go-to-market plan in the hands of a motivated, aligned marketing team to steer how the brand looks, behaves, and speaks – inside and outside your business walls.

Strategy is Set. So, What’s next?

 The value of a strong strategy can’t be fully realized until the strategy comes into real life execution. And often times, strategy never fully moves forward. There are lots of reasons for failed execution. And without a plan for really implementing your strategy and bringing your brand to life, any strategy (no matter how good) loses its value.

So when developing a brand strategy, one should always be simultaneously asking “What’s next?” This purposeful mentality helps ensure that the brand strategy is carried through, and all the strategic hard work pays off for your brand and your business.

How Activating Strategy Can Go Wrong

So ensure all the work, time, and resources you dedicated to creating a powerful strategy for your brand pay offs for your business in the end. We’ve identified some common mistakes to avoid when activating strategy:

1. Inviting too many stakeholders to the table:

Activating strategy with swift, efficient, and peak-impact is hard when there are too many stakeholders involved. Making things happen shouldn’t be that challenging. Often, large organizations struggle because too many people are involved, and too many levels of approval are needed to move the strategy forward. It’s important that leadership gets aligned from the start about who the key decision makers are and how the chain of command will be structured to ensure a smooth roll-out. This is often a question of pinpointing who’s in charge. Getting approval to move something forward shouldn’t be a matter of jumping through loops.

2. Poor communication between key stakeholders:

Even with a narrowed down group of key stakeholders, when everyone is on a different page about what’s happening and when, activating strategy is difficult. If stakeholders span across departments (as they often do), make sure there is constant communication between individuals. Work as a team and schedule meetings, create calendars, and document progress so that everyone can get aligned.

3. Forgetting to delegate:

Any leader knows that it’s hard to give up power. But part of being a successful leader is being able to delegate, giving work to the right people at the right time. Let people help you meet your goals and objectives, and make them shared goals and objectives. Trust that your people can help bring the strategy to life, bringing them along on the journey. In fact, taking it all on is not realistic or conducive to how the strategy should be brought to life. Delegating from the start helps get everyone within your organization on board with the strategy. This means a better lived brand promise and a better understanding about where your brand is headed, for everyone within your organization. This means people are more engaged, fired-up, and involved in the future.

4. A timeline that isn’t working:

It’s easy to get ahead of yourself. You’ve created an exciting strategy and everyone is ready for it to come to life. But creating an unrealistic timeline for execution isn’t going to help you. So make sure you’re realistic about how long goals and objectives are going to take. Do your research, add time in for mistakes, and accommodate for blips in the road. Set realistic expectations that keep everyone in line. Furthermore, ensure that your timeline is actually followed. Hold people accountable for deadlines and stay true to your allocation of time. Following a timeline will help move the project forward at the right speed for strategic execution success.

5. Always shifting strategic priorities:

Strategic execution is not a time to be going back and forth or flip flopping from decision to decision. Stick to the strategy you’ve created and stay true to your plans. Often times constantly shifting priorities are due to previously mentioned problems like lack of communication between stakeholders, or putting too many people at the table. If priorities do shift, take the time to explain the shift to everyone involved. It’s important that the process is fully understood by everyone working towards the project’s success. A brand strategy is a time of change, make sure this change is clear, directed, and not diluted by unnecessary shifts in plans.

6. Lack of budget:

This is one of the most common mistakes we see during strategic executions. Often times, people don’t realize that investing in brand strategy is only step one. It’s easy to underestimate and overlook the resources needed to actually execute the strategy you’ve worked so hard to create. That’s why planning from the start of the strategic project is key. As a result, when you invest in a strategy, make sure you consider what resources you’ll have available to execute.

And be realistic: change comes with a price-tag. A new visual identity that refreshes your brand and moves it into the future needs a brand logo, photography, all branded material, and a new website. Creating a knock-out visual identity is great, but until it actually lives in the real world it’s not worth anything. Make sure you have the resources allocated for every aspect of the strategy to pay off. So you don’t have to change everything overnight, but you do need to consider what your business can afford to change before you embark on a new strategy.

We know that the best and most meaningful strategy in the world can only make a positive impact on your business if it’s implemented thoughtfully and effectively. Managing and executing change is no easy task. In the end, a go-to-market plan is essential to bring the strategy to life. Avoid these common mistakes when activating strategy and help transform your strategy into a successful, living reality for your brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

The Role of Insights in Brand Strategy

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

The Role of Insights

As a strategist at Emotive Brand, Carol Emert leads client engagements with a focus on close collaboration, deep insights, and compelling storytelling. Her passion is to deeply understand the unique truths of each client – their goals and vision, challenges and opportunities, people and purpose – and create strategy that propels them toward their highest aspirations.

In this post, she offers her thoughts on the powerful role of insight when it comes to creating a resonant and meaningful brand strategy.

What’s your best definition of an insight?  

Insight is, by its nature, tricky to understand and therefore hard to define. Insights aren’t linear, like data or information. They are triangulated from information and other inputs – notably emotions – to then come up with something new.

Information is 1+1=2. Insight is 1+1=3, and the 3 literally feels different.

In branding, insights inform the core truths of your brand strategy and work as the foundation on which everything else is built. 

What is the goal of a strategist making insights in brand strategy?

There are probably infinite truths about any brand. The role of the strategist is to figure out which ones are the most important to the brand itself and at the same time resonant with its stakeholders. Good insights make sense both intellectually and emotionally. Once you find a powerful insight, you’re playing in very rich territory for the brand.

How do you get to an insight?

To drive brand success, the most powerful insights are the ones that triangulate powerful core truths about the brand itself, its target audience, the competitive landscape, and the broader cultural context. So strategists need to immerse themselves in the brand, its key audiences and the greater fishbowl it is swimming in, whether that context is business, technology, pop culture, or what have you.

To understand the brand itself, a strategist will investigate its origins, its history, its products or services, what its people and internal culture are like, what its highest aspirations are, and how it speaks and acts in the world.

For target audiences, it’s important to uncover peoples’ key challenges and aspirations that are relevant to the brand, their met and unmet needs (both functional and emotional), their perceptions of the brand and its competitors, and how the brand might best fit best into their needs and aspirations.

How do insights help change how people inside the brand see their business?

When we present clients’ brand story to them, it’s like we’ve articulated something that maybe has always felt true, but has never been fully expressed. It suddenly crystalizes what really matters about their brand and business – and this clarity can inspire action, excitement, a unified vision, and really power the brand forward.

Can companies do their own branding? What do you think is the value of an external agency?

It makes sense that the people who know a brand best should be the best at articulating it, right? But, my experience has been that many companies struggle to brand themselves.

There are a few reasons. For one thing, companies already have an emotional investment in who they think they are. Everyone will know how the CEO thinks about the brand, too, and inevitably that’s going to unduly influence the thinking.

Instead of unearthing real insights, company insiders will typically be operating on the more superficial level of information. As a result, they fall short of the depth and richness they know their brand story should have. When you look at internally developed brand strategies, they typically feel rather flat and obvious instead of rich and insightful.

Essentially, it usually takes an outsider to get a clean and unbiased view of the brand and then tell its story in a really powerful way. 

What are the key characteristics of a person who is good at unearthing insights?

The most important is empathy. Understanding emotional truths requires being emotionally attuned to the situation and the people. If there is no emotional attunement, there will never be an emotional insight.

You have to be a truth-teller, willing to put aside your own ego and ideas, and prioritize finding the truth no matter where it lies. This requires not bringing too much of your own filter and biases to it too.

At the same time, you must be analytical. This isn’t an exercise in just feeling. You have to be moving down a path of useful insights that lead to meaningful brand strategies that help your clients realize their highest aspirations as a brand and as a business.

When you strike that balance between empathy and analysis, you can create rich and compelling brand strategies that are absolutely game changing.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.