Overlay
Let's talk
Emotive Brand
Get in touch: [email protected] 510-496-8888

Hello!

Category: Brand 101

Top Brand Strategy Firm Shares Thoughts on Brand Purpose

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

A brand strategy firm perspective

There’s been a lot of buzz lately around brand purpose – a concept that San Francisco’s Brand Strategy Firm, Emotive Brand has championed from our very beginning. Unfortunately, with buzz, comes confusion. It’s easy to get lost in the vernacular and repetitions and lose the answers to the key questions at hand. Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, offers some clarity, opinions, and answers to questions surrounding the concept of purpose-led brands.

1. What does it mean to be a purpose-led brand?

A purpose-led brand is a brand that is driven by a shared ambition, goal, or reason for being. Being a truly purpose-led brand means so much more than marketing your company’s purpose. I think many leaders have the ambition to be purpose-led, but are unwilling to do what it takes behaviorally to live their purpose. Purpose is something that people can identify with, internalize, and put into action for themselves. Purpose-led companies go beyond the obvious drivers of generating profit and creating shareholder value, and try to connect with people in authentic and emotionally meaningful ways. In 2016, I’m seeing a trend and stronger conviction in the idea that there is room for purpose AND profit, and I imagine we will see more and more leaders move toward this belief as they manage their business. Those leaders who are truly guided by their purpose will see their business gain the benefits of both purpose and profit.

2. How can brand purpose differentiate your business?

Purpose is what people are looking for in their day to day lives. So brands that lead with purpose have a real opportunity to connect with people in ways that matter. Be it to recruit top talent to an organization or to encourage people to choose your brand over another, purpose is becoming a deciding factor in our decision-making. We want to buy into something that makes us feel good. Something that makes us feel like we are a part of something larger than ourselves — larger than a single and fleeting purchase or a uninspired job that pays the bills. Purpose differentiates businesses because it connects ideas, people, activities, causes, and products that make lives matter in new and compelling ways.

3. How do you find your purpose?

I believe purpose finds you. And it is the one thing that drives people to build something that can change lives. Purpose is what drives you. For business owners, it might be the “why” that explains their decision to leave a previous job and create something new – something they believe in, are inspired by daily, something they feel could change the world. Your purpose is what attracts people to help you build it, and people to buy it. It is the common denominator of belief and this sets the foundation for other to be willing to work toward your shared ambition. When you lead with purpose, you can develop incredibly energized followers who share your beliefs.

4. Why should companies be thinking about purpose in the workplace?

There is no doubt in my mind that leading with purpose is what enables a thriving corporate culture. It is what will attract the right employees to you, keep the right employees with you, and more meaningfully engage employees in ways that will help both them and your business thrive. Workplaces automatically become more meaningful when employees share in the purpose of what the company is about.

To take this one step further and drive even more alignment and meaning in the workplace, outline the behavior shifts that employees and departments should work toward to support the purpose. This provides the opportunity for them to understand how their roles matter in the larger scheme of delivering on that purpose. When companies take this step, great things can happen: to the culture, to the bottom line, to how people feel about you internally and externally. A shared and embraced goal creates an aligned and engaged workplace.

5. Are purpose-led brands just the marketing buzzword of 2016?

I don’t think so. We’ve created a proprietary methodology and have been building a practice around purpose-led brands for the past 10 years. I believe purpose-led will become the defacto standard at some point. The world is changing, and people are looking for more meaning in their lives. We built Emotive Brand on this premise. And as time goes on, I think the value proposition, that, people want to work for, buy from, and engage with purpose-led brands, will be the most important way for brands to meaningfully connect with people today and in the future — which will create a win-win for everyone.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Discourse Analysis: A Powerful Tool That Ensures Your Strategy’s Success

Posted on by Taylor Standlee

Missing a Piece of the Picture

A powerful brand strategy that drives business forward requires more than an understanding of what customers say motivates them to engage with your brand or your competitors. It requires understanding the larger cultural forces at play that shape those same motivations and comparisons. That’s where discourse analysis enters the conversation.

For example, in our work with a major cyber security company, analyzing the discourses at play revealed shifts in the larger security conversations happening in our culture. We discovered we were moving from conversations of protection and attention, to those of proactive prevention and accelerated detection, shifting the security landscape from technical to more strategic.

By understanding the larger cultural shifts at play, discourse analysis can help marketers and branders tie their brands to something larger than just products or offerings. What they are really buying into becomes apparent – something more meaningful and resonant in peoples’ lives.

So What Is Discourse Analysis Exactly?  

People’s knowledge of a brand is constructed through the discourses – conversations and communications – that surround the brand, the category, the competition, and the larger cultural context. When these discourses shift, so do assessments of brands and their relevance.

Discourse analysis isn’t a new concept. It’s a proven approach from anthropology and media studies that brand strategists have refined and honed to support brand strategy today.

At Emotive Brand, we use discourse analysis to shed light on how and why people think and feel the way they do about your brand, products, category, and competitors. With a clear picture of the discourses at play, no-go areas are revealed, promising possibilities are uncovered, and teams are infused with renewed energy.

The approach is focused on understanding the ways your brand, your competitors, and your category builds meaning and resonance in people’s lives. In the case of cyber security, we learned that the opportunity to reach consumers wasn’t just about offering walls that provided protection, but presenting an entire immune system that could strengthen, flex, and prevent attack before it was even happening. Here you see how discourse analysis can be an ideal method for uncovering fresh and powerful ways to help enhance your brand’s strength.

Discourse Analysis Delivers

Discourse analysis creates a complete and mapped understanding of how your brand – within its competitive landscape – can sustain relevance, stand out, and mean something more significant to the people who matter to your business.

1. Keeping pace with change

Understanding the changing landscape is hard for any business – but failing to understand it inevitably results in missed opportunities. Discourse analysis helps our clients visualize the emerging patterns and existing norms of their category more clearly, while providing a map that can be updated in the future.

The evidence allows brands to see their possibilities in a new light and understand their competitors – perhaps better than the competitors understands themselves. The approach makes the journey easier for brands and businesses today – helping them chart potential directions, realize a vision, avoid pitfalls, and ensure the brand is ready to seize promising opportunities on the horizon.

2. Standing out

Brands and businesses today can’t just say something different, they have to stand for something more significant. This requires understanding both the status quo and the best ways of meaningfully challenging it. And changing the character or intensity of the conversations a brand leads or takes part in can power it in a new direction.

Discourse analysis builds a deep understanding of what the norms are, and why those particular ideas, practices, and values are meaningful to people in the first place. Once people understand the origins of these meanings, they can better tap into their power – challenging today’s norms in inventive ways that help your brand stand above the competition and go against the grain, while not forgetting why you matter to people in the first place. For our cyber security client, they were able to stand out by offering security that meant something different – something more. 

3. Becoming more meaningful

When you have a clearer understanding of the discourses that surround your category, competition, and brand, you can more meaningfully position your brand to compete. Your meaningful aspirations will be better articulated to the people you want to reach. Your culture will come to life. Values you align with will get lived and confirmed every day. And what’s authentically unique about your brand will shine true.

Your business will be positioned to thrive because your brand will reach a new level of meaning that resonates in all the domains that matter to your success. With more authentic meaning, people will be more engaged, more loyal, and your brand will be more trusted.

Discourse Analysis, Here’s How We Do It

Step 1: Identify the basis of competition in your category

This first phase establishes the scope of the analysis. It usually includes key competitors, the larger cultural context for the category, and key target audiences at play, as well as the brand itself.

Step 2: Collect data and organize evidence

This stage is all about gathering the naturally occurring data – the real world evidence needed to analyze how people and groups talk about what’s important to them with regard to your brand and its competitors. This evidence can come in the form of social listening, news and media coverage, consumer reviews, individual conversations, primary research, ads, packaging, promotional materials, etc.

Step 3: Conduct the analysis and uncover patterns  

In this phase, we use a set of proven tools from social science to identify recurring patterns in the evidence. This includes similarities and differences between the ways people relate to key brand benefits, needs, and desires that surround your brand, the competition, and the category.  The key question at this step is: what are the values and perspectives the category, competitors, and brand rely on to construct meaning and how have these developed over time?

This is the stage of deep pattern recognition and mapping. We reveal insights that help your brand discover the biggest opportunities at play – uncovering which ideas and values are not just culturally of the moment, but show the greatest promise for the future.

Because of discourse analysis, our client was able to promise more than just short-term security. They could offer a long-term, sustainable, proactive, accelerated solution for the future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

 

Why Lack of Internal Alignment May Be Holding Back Your Business

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

When Internal Alignment Is Holding Back Your Business

The sky’s the limit. The future is full of opportunities. Until internal alignment becomes a dark cloud that prevents your business aspirations from being realized.

What happens when the brand is ready to grow and thrive, but there is no internal alignment from leadership about where the business is going? Nothing. The brand is paralyzed by competing visions and nothing happens. And a lack of decision making due to misaligned leadership is a problem that will hold up your business.

Strategy Without Alignment

A brand strategy is hard work and involves a tremendous amount of collaboration. When it’s clear that your brand needs to make a change in order to stay competitive and relevant, a brand strategy will articulate the shifts needed to grow and thrive. A brand narrative will clearly explain where the brand is going – what makes it different and special now and in the future – and gives your brand the launching pad to get there.

But if your leadership team doesn’t share the same vision for the business trajectory, it’s impossible for the brand to embark on the journey of transformation. Oftentimes, it’s not until businesses engage in developing a brand strategy that they uncover the depth of the misalignment. Before any progress can be made for the brand, the business needs internal alignment.

Focusing On Alignment

When you need to create momentum around your brand, internal alignment is the clear answer. The challenge arises, however, when leaders in your organization aren’t willing to share their honest vision for the brand. Sometimes leaders hold on to their vision as a form of intellectual capital – if the vision furthers their personal agenda for success it might be strategic to pursue it in a silo. Or other times, the vision is only shared with a select few as a power play to keep others at bay. Or general poor communication creates lack of trust and therefore reticence towards an open and honest dialogue about the future of the brand. Regardless of why leaders aren’t sharing a common aspiration for the business, overcoming the misalignment for the betterment of the brand’s future is critical.

Leaders Unite

Leaders must have clarity around the brand’s purpose in order to focus on making any strategic shifts. There must be agreement from all the key stakeholders in an organization about what the brand stands for and how that maps to the business. Since getting alignment involves teamwork and breaking down silos, a third party can be extremely useful.

Path to Purpose

At Emotive Brand, we’ve been on the front lines working with disconnected leadership and know all too well the challenge of articulating a clear brand strategy if there are competing views about the business plan. We developed Path to Purpose as way to bring executives together in a collaborative workshop series that aims to identify, articulate, and align leadership around the purpose of the company. By doing so, we help create internal alignment around the business strategy and map the brand strategy to it.

Our workshop paves the way for a corporate purpose statement and identifies the shifts your business should consider making in order to live its purpose more authentically. When you’re ready to push your brand beyond its stagnant state and truly reach its potential, you need a brand strategy with a strong purpose statement. If developing a brand purpose seems like an insurmountable obstacle due to a misaligned leadership group, consider Path to Purpose as the key to unlock your brand’s potential.

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

Six Secrets of Thriving Brands

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

This is the second post in our “Brand Strategy 101” series. Last time, we discussed why a brand is so difficult to define. While a brand might mean different things to different people and different businesses, at Emotive Brand, we think of brand as a driver of business. When a brand connects with the people who matter to your business, the business is positioned to thrive.

But, for a brand to connect with people, some important factors come into play. We have identified six of the most powerful attributes that thriving brands and businesses have in common:  

1. Meaning

Every moment a brand has to interact and engage with people is an opportunity to create an emotional impact. Through these moments, a brand can build deep and lasting meaning. Meaningful brands make promises and keep them. And we believe meaningful brands start with purpose.

2. Purpose-led

Brands that focus on building a deeper, more emotionally meaningful connection with their key audiences thrive in today’s world. When people see that a brand stands for a higher purpose, they pay attention. Purpose-led brands mean more to people because they work for something greater than themselves.

3. Empathy

Empathetic brands have a deep and complex understanding of the people they want to reach, touch, and engage with. Brands that connect in an emotional way – understanding the needs and desires of people – make those people feel like the brand was made just for them.

4. Consistent 

Consistency is what makes brands recognizable and seamlessly integrated into people’s lives. Every detail counts. When a brand is consistent, audiences connect more quickly with it and it becomes differentiated from competitors. Brands that aren’t consistent can’t create the maximum impact. Inconsistency leads to dilution of meaning and as a result, decreased loyalty and engagement. Consistent does not mean static. The most impactful brands are flexible and dynamic, yet still remain consistent, coherent, and powerful.

5. Authentic

When a brand rings true to itself, we believe people can not only tell the difference, they can feel it. And in an increasingly staged and media-saturated world, people are seeking this kind of authenticity in every facet of their lives. So brands that are open and trustworthy attract customers who will stand behind the brand’s purpose. Authentic brands deliver on what they promise. They interact with customers with transparency and integrity – committing to purpose, behaving genuinely, leading with heart, and inviting people in.

6. Emotive 

Brands that are thriving today connect not only rationally, but emotionally – reaching a deeper level in people’s minds and hearts. When brands are emotionally infused, employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Customers become more loyal, spend more money, and are more likely to recommend the brand to peers. These emotionally charged brands convey meaning and evoke emotions that draw the people who matter to their business closer to them – setting them apart from their competition.

Stay tuned for our next installment in Brand Strategy 101.

Why Bring in an Outside Branding Agency?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

In-House Mentality

The age old question of determining if you need to bring in an external branding agency is still relevant today. Whether it’s because of tight budgets, a hesitation about letting outsiders inside your business, or a general ‘we can just do it ourselves’ mentality, many companies look internally to tackle even their largest branding projects.

But whether it’s a repositioning, a new visual identity, or an all-around brand turnaround, this might be a mistake for businesses who really want to position themselves to thrive in a fast-paced, highly-competitive market.

What Value Can a Branding Agency Bring?

There are many benefits of bringing in an outside branding agency.

A fresh perspective: 

It is easy to get stuck in old models of thinking. And those close to the business often have blinders on about what’s not working and what can be improved. As a result, an outside perspective is often key to fostering  innovation, creativity, and problem solving. New questions arise. The conversation changes. People get unstuck and realigned. And key business problems are solved with efficiency.

Expertise and skill:

Agencies bring to bear a diverse array of experiences from many different industries. And this broad perspective is invaluable. Agencies have proven frameworks and methodologies to solve problems and uncover opportunities. As such, they can prescribe the best approach based on your specific situation and needs. And they have a team of professionals that have tackled all kinds of different business, brand, and culture challenges and bring that knowledge to the table for you. And it is this kind of expertise that guarantees a better positioned, more meaningful, effective, and impactful strategy.

The ability to move with speed:

Speed is key to competing today. So if your brand can’t move quickly, adapt dynamically, and fast forward itself towards the future, your business won’t be able thrive in today’s competitive landscape. A branding agency brings a dedicated focus to your project that is just not possible for an internal team that is already balancing a full plate. Also, financial investment in a project makes it more of a priority and guarantees the attention of executives that it needs to get it done.

Readiness for change:

Change is hard. And it’s often difficult for those inside your business to convince others on the inside that the change is right. The external perspective an agency brings along with proven experience could be what is needed to help your team take that strategic step forward. And once the strategy is approved inside the C-Suite, it is time to once again lean on the experience of the agency to develop a plan to successfully socialize it through the rest of the organization.

An understanding of the value of brand strategy:

Investing in a brand strategy means investing in your business. There’s great value in making a purposeful, meaningful brand strategy a core driver of an organization. But key players inside the organization might not hold the same opinion. There is much value to gain well beyond the marketing team. As a result, guidance communicating the value of investing in a brand strategy to everyone within your business is key to the projects success.  Sales, product, human resources, customer success and engineering can all benefit greatly. An agency can help assure that you have the right level of support for it to pay off.

A long-term partnership:

A top branding agency engagement should bring value beyond just the current project at hand. It’s hugely beneficial to have a group of people outside of your organization. These people already understand your business inside and out. And as business progresses and important decisions arise, they are there to seek out for guidance.  A strong relationship with an agency can help build a valuable network that can grow and grow.

Some things are better done together. And building a strong, impactful, and meaningful brand requires all the people key to your success coming together. Invest in working with a branding agency and you will add an entire team that can work alongside yours. Invest in your brand’s success and position your business for greatness.

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

 

Why Purpose-Led Brands Drive Business Results

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

At Emotive Brand, we believe that the root of many business problems is the gap between what the business requires (results) and what people desire (meaning). So when your brand matters to people, they are more likely to do what your brand needs them to do. Operating as a purpose-led brand, business issues become less of an issue because meaning drives results.

Emotive Branding: A Bridge

Through emotive branding, you build a bridge across that gap between results and meaning. And by better balancing the “give and take” of your relationships with people, they are more likely to be open to what you propose, support what you’re trying to achieve, and appreciate the meaning behind what you’re asking them to do.

Here’s why your most pressing business issues today will be less of an issue tomorrow:

1. Brand Differentiation

Emotional meaning is the most compelling differentiator in today’s competitive environment. Yet few brands have woken up to the power of emotionally meaningful connections with people. They continue doing “business as usual” without seeing that beliefs, values, and aspirations of people have evolved. Today, people are looking for ways to create meaning in their lives. People seek out brands that stand up from the crowd and make them feel their lives are more meaningful. They respect, admire, trust, and turn to purpose-led brands.

2. Purchasing Behavior

People love to have choices. They are proactive buyers. They can quickly and easily assess and compare options. They can instantly find the best price. Look-alike products crowd the shelves and catalogs. Google lists thousands of options. TV and web ads vie for attention. But, at the moment of purchase decision, emotion takes over. If people feel there’s something unique and valuable about your brand, that feeling will influence their choices.

3. Price Sensitivity

A strong emotional platform shifts the “what” a person buys away from the purely logical land of comparison shopping and into a place where what one buys is “greater than the sum of the parts”. People seem quite willing to pay a premium if the purchase also comes loaded with emotional meaning.

4. Loyalty and Advocacy

Brands need people who buy again and again; it’s basic economics. Purpose-led brands inspire people to go out of their way in pursuit of their brand. They also turn people into powerful brand promoters who share their enthusiasm and satisfaction with family, friends, colleagues, and strangers on the web. Personal, heartfelt, and meaningful endorsement is far more credible and influential than traditional brand-driven forms of promotion.

5. Internal Alignment and Motivation

Brands are at the mercy of their staff. The most magnificent branding, advertising, publicity, packaging, distribution, reviews, and commentary can be vaporized by a single surly employee. The energy, focus, and dedication of valuable employees can be shattered by an emotionally dead and meaningless workplace. When unified by a clear reason why they are there and how they can make people feel (themselves, colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers, and the communities they serve) employees lift themselves up to the task with purposeful vigor. They move from being reactive to proactive. They collaborate more freely and productively. They shape and manage the way they deal with people so that every exchange is more emotionally meaningful. They find their work gratifying.

6. Social Standing

Regardless of what you make, how you sell it, or who you sell to, your brand has a footprint. Whether it’s a physical building in a community or something virtual, there is an economic, social, and environmental impact from what you do. How that impact is perceived will be clearly different for a person who is emotionally distant from your brand, and someone who finds your brand to be emotionally meaningful. Purpose-led brands never buy an excuse to do wrong things, but they do accrue significant understanding, patience, and compassion should things go wrong.

Purpose-Led Brands Thrive Today

Brands that focus on building a deeper, more emotionally meaningful connection with their key audiences will thrive in today’s world.

Purpose-led brands are better able to address the needs, values, interests, and aspirations of the people who matter to their business. These brands perform better because their emotional impact is reflected at every touchpoint.

Making your brand matter more to people can transform your business and position it for success. Brands rooted in emotion and meaning win big. The business results show it. So behave as a purpose-led brand and reap the benefits.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Win by Going Beyond Features and Benefits

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Convincing minds by capturing hearts: the new brand-building approach

What comes first? The rational decision to take the next step on the path to purchase, or the emotional trigger that gets them started on that path?

Aren’t we humans cool?

We pride ourselves on our cognitive skills, our ability to weigh pros and cons, and our decision-making power. After all, these factors separate us from other life forms.

Continue reading “Win by Going Beyond Features and Benefits”

The Power of Good Research for B2C Businesses: Interview with Emotive Brand Strategy Director

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

As Strategy Director, Taylor Standlee is an expert at identifying business challenges, creating strategic solutions, and driving business growth. Taylor offers thoughts on the changing landscape of good research for B2C businesses today.

How is consumer research evolving?

Businesses are constantly looking for new ways of understanding, reaching, and connecting with the people important to their success. This includes customers, consumers, investors, and employees. And we’ve never had so many tools or so much data at our fingertips. The challenge, as always, is to be smart about how we go about gaining the information that will help a business make better data-informed decisions.

Data is an essential requirement for successful business today – but not all data is created equal. It’s about getting research right.

So how do you get it right?

Getting research right means meeting the research objectives in the most efficient and effective manner available.  This begins with clear, focused research objectives.  The objectives dictate the methods, not the other way around.

There’s a tendency to obsess over the growing streams of real-time data – coming from sales, CRM, social listening, and customer satisfaction surveys – that help businesses identify patterns indicating what’s happening. However, these largely quantitative streams of data are just not as good at answering the critical question of “why”. In the famous words of sociologist William Bruce Cameron:

“Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”

Smart businesses are coming to understand the strengths and limitations of these quantitative tools and we’re seeing a revival of interest in modern qualitative methods as a result.

Can you talk more about the resurgence of qualitative measures happening in research today?

I think we are in a classic ‘lurch and learn’ moment. We see a resurgence of interest among our clients in qualitative methods that are designed to get at the ‘why’. This means depth interviews, ethnographies, and even focus groups that capture rich data on people’s behaviors and emotional needs. These methods help us come to terms with the ‘why’ – generating an understanding of the emotional and rational drivers of engagement, connection, and the behaviors those quantitative measures are so good at tracking.  Since people now demand brands to act more humanly and authentically, while seamlessly integrating into their lives, qualitative research holds profound value today. This is why there’s increased interest in taking new-school informed approaches to old-school methods like ethnographies, focus groups, shop-alongs, and IDI’s.

So what we advocate for is approaching research holistically.  Using all available methods in order to achieve your specific objectives in a way that empowers decision making and coordination with the organization.

What are some best practices for good research?

1) Use research to help align your organization.

Make the findings accessible to non-research experts. When only specialists see it and understand it, you undercut the value of the research. By being transparent and open, findings can help create a shared understanding of the situation. They can also fuel both creativity and collaboration.

2) Socialize the findings in an immersive way.  

Research is most valuable when businesses build a living way for people to interact with the data. The experience has to be authentic and as real as possible. At Emotive Brand, we are creating highly immersive environments for presenting research findings. These environments allow people to interact with those findings in meaningful ways.  Decks and reports just don’t cut it. By allowing people to really immerse themselves in the data, they are better able to embrace the findings and apply them to their own work. They can grasp brand moments, and get into the hearts and minds of the consumers they are building and designing for, marketing towards, or working to connect with and reach. This means higher functioning marketing materials, better designed products, and a business and brand tailored for growth.

What’s the overall payoff of good research for B2C companies?

Good research is efficient, accurate, and acts as an aid to decision making.  It captures the essence of both what’s happening in the market and, critically, why it’s happening.  Success hinges on a rich understanding of people’s lives and decisions. You can’t get around that. Smart businesses are constantly thinking about how and why they matter to the people who matter to their business, specifically consumers. Businesses need to embrace a holistic approach to research that includes qualitative measures and a heightened emphasis on how they present and share findings in order to find success today.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

The Role of Planning, An Interview with Emotive Brand’s Strategy Director

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

As Director of Strategy at Emotive Brand, Taylor works at the intersection of analytical rigor and creative inspiration. An account planner with a background in both research and creative strategy development, his work helps leaders and organizations discover and embrace positive change. In this post, he offers his thoughts on the significant role of planning when it comes to creating a meaningful brand strategy.

What’s your best definition of planning?

I spoke with a guy at NASCAR and when I asked him what he did he said: “I make the car go faster.” Simple as that. I would argue that planning isn’t just about speed. More important, it’s about the ability to adapt. It’s about flexibility. It’s a set of tools, perspectives, and practices that set organizations up for success – that out-adapt and out-mean the competition.

What is the goal of a planner in brand strategy?

The goal of the planner is to help leaders and organizations realize their purpose. Planning reshapes markets and creates more powerful and profitable bonds with people inside and outside of the organization.

In practical terms, it comes down to alignment. The planner asks: what is your purpose and how can we make that purpose meaningful to the people important to your success? To do this, planners have to consider how the brain works, how culture works, how humans behave. It’s not just about the product or benefits. It’s about meaning.

Good planning creates clarity in the face of information overload. It helps people to move forward feeling inspired and fired-up about common objectives that everyone can stand behind. A successful planner makes the complex easy to embrace.

How does planning help change how people see business challenges?

There is always a lot to do. Many of the executives, I’d say most, spend their days in ‘heads down’ mode, dealing with never-ending urgent issues. This can lead to laser focus or tunnel vision, usually both. My role is to help them see where they are and where they are going – making sense of the pace and direction of change in the outside world, identifying the evolution of expectations, and the shifts that will open up opportunities and possibilities.

We are all human, and we are prone to focus within the bubble in which we operate in on a day-to-day basis. It’s habit. Planning opens up the bubble and gives larger context to what’s happening. It opens the aperture so that the people who matter to your business can see the world from multiple points of view. These perspectives help build a new understanding of the challenges and give the organization the available tools to address those challenges.

How does planning play a key role in developing a meaningful strategy?

Planning aligns brand strategy with business strategy, and this alignment promotes more meaningful and inspired strategy. It empowers people to make meaningful, incremental, and disruptive strategic decisions with confidence.

Do you think planning promotes creativity in this way?

Yes, planning is inherently creative. Account planning comes from advertising and this type of planning is three-fold. First, planners work with clients to understand their purpose, situation, needs, and objectives. Second, they place the situation within the broader frame of culture, customer, and category. And third, they work with creative minds to make sure the strategy moves forward as powerfully as possible.

Planning is strategic, and strategy is intrinsically creative. And the first two stages of planning set the stage for creativity. Planning makes innovation less risky.

 

 

Does your Business need an Updated Brand Narrative?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Does your brand need a Brand Narrative?

Your brand does if it faces any of these situations:

  • Differentiation: Does your brand have a sober, unexciting, or blurry identity in an increasingly competitive and perhaps commoditized market? Are you able to cut through the clutter in ways that matter?
  • Growth: Is it getting harder to increase market share, drive sales, and improve profit? Are new markets and products growing quickly enough?
  • Talent: Is it getting increasingly difficult for your brand to recruit the talent you need? Is your top talent leaving? Are competitor’s hiring the talent you hoped to hire?
  • Engagement: Are your employees aligned and heading in the same direction? Is your brand being held back with issues around collaboration, innovation, and loyalty?
  • Complexity: Is your business growing rapidly in both size and scope? Have you just acquired a new company? Do you have disparate product lines and target audiences? Are your brand and workplace behaviors inconsistent and counter-productive?

Of course, a strong Brand Narrative will also help your brand even if it’s operating from a position of strength. Successful brands can further establish their preeminence, forge far stronger and harder to break bonds with both customers, prospects, and employees, and increase the perceived distance between themselves and their near competitors.

A good Brand Narrative adds a bright North Star to your brand strategy. It helps you create brand experiences that change the way people feel about your brand, based on the emotional rewards of your brand promise and the way you strive to make people feel in every interaction.

To learn more about the Emotive Branding Methodology, please download the paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.