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Category: Brand Experience

Emotive Brand and Emotive Branding: Our Origin Story

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands for the Better

The idea of emotive branding—and the creation of our agency, Emotive Brand—flowed from our desire to make a positive difference in the way people and brands interacted with each other. These were our goals:

  • Bridge the gap between commerce and civility.
  • Create brands that people appreciate, respect, and actively seek out.
  • Help employees of brands feel better about their jobs.
  • Make partners and suppliers vie for the opportunity to work with our clients.
  • See communities welcome our clients’ brands with open arms.

As a result of all of this goodwill, our clients’ brands would thrive and prosper.

Realizing the Value of Meaning Something More

We came to those goals through two major realizations:

First, as consumers ourselves, we noticed that only a handful of brands really went out of their way to mean anything to us. When they did make a connection, wow, it was love! We’d go out of our way to interact and engage these brands. We even felt disappointed when we had to settle for something less. We’d get excited when other people started talking about these brands and chimed in with our most recent, “I can top that!” story. These brands had come to mean something to us because they had a clear reason for being and made us feel something good time and time again.

On the other hand, zillions of brands never really hit our emotional radar. These brands meant almost nothing to us–even though we’ve heard about them or even bought and used dozens of the brands regularly.  

A Problem in the “Brand Decks”

Second, as brand experts, we saw firsthand why so many brands fell flat–lackluster and bland–in the minds of customers. As designers, copywriters, and strategists, we work on virtually every aspect of communication from identity to websites to advertising to point-of-sale to employee recruitment and beyond. Behind each piece of work, there’s always a brief, and often attached to the brief is a two-hundred some page PDF titled “About the Brand.”

Reading through many of these so-called “brand decks,” we quickly recognized a problem. In fact, the “brand decks” were the problem.

Traditional brand thinking results from business people from branding agencies talking to business people within client organizations. The language they use is full of industry jargon, client-speak, and solely rational thinking. Everything is expounded upon, nothing is simplified, and little is made human. And after several rounds of review, the final documents show the scars of compromise.

And what do these documents lack? The brand’s meaning as defined by its reason for being (why it does what it does) and how the brand wants people to feel (how the brand connects emotionally with customers). Brand decks, on the whole, left out what matters most to us as consumers and businesses and what we admire most in the great brands out there.

So we asked the question: What if meaning was the entry point into brand thinking rather than an appendage at the end? And that, folks, is how Emotive Brand was born.

Learn more about our methodology emotive branding, how our approach challenges convention, and why emotive branding is a next generation brand strategy.

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

Why Have a Purpose Beyond Profit?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

Defining Purpose

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

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

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

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

Why look beyond profit?

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

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

How does one define a purpose beyond profit?

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

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

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

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

A brand purpose is not a tagline

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

Download and read our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

 

Branding Project: Do You Actually Want Something Bold?



Posted on by Chris Ames

Make it Bold

There is a four-letter word that gets said during every branding project. No, not that one. The word is “bold” and no one knows what it actually means.

Perhaps it’s the word’s own sense of daring and fearlessness that has allowed it to march undaunted into every creative brief and client meeting, even when it is not requested. Enterprise software companies want to be bold. Insurance adjuster services want to be bold. Startups and law firms and logistic companies want to be bold. But do they really?

What it Is and What it Isn’t

Here’s what bold is: it’s uncomfortable. It’s the tallest leaf of grass daring someone to cut it. It will garner you some attention, sure, but it will also get you in trouble. It’s a willing and gleeful rejection of sameness at all costs.

Here is what bold is not: it’s not easy to get approved. It’s not a minor tweak that fears to disrupt existing perceptions. It’s not a new color and stock photo with the same logo.

When a client says, “We want something bold,” nine times out of ten it actually means, “I’m absolutely terrified of change.” Here’s the thing. As much fun as it is to put the blame on the client – and it is very fun – they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. Be safe, be careful, don’t damage the brand.

The magic trick of a great agency is not coming up with a bold idea – it’s finessing the right visual applications and strategic frameworks for that bold idea to survive the cutting room floor. Some of that work simply comes down to educating your client on the branding process in general – what are these assets, what do they mean, how do we activate them?

Keeping Bold Ideas Alive

But the real heavy lifting for getting bold work through the guillotine unscathed starts in the design pitch deck. How do you present ideas? How much narrative, context, and scene-setting do you provide? Do you present the work on a sliding scale of safe to bold? Is it possible to rig the system by reordering the work to trick the client into the “right” choice? (Almost never.)

As far as I can tell, the only surefire way to keep a bold idea alive is to never put the onus of imagination on someone else. If you leave something up to someone else’s imagination, you’re letting them draw the constraints of what’s possible. The client’s version of what’s possible will always be smaller – that’s why they hired you in the first place.

Our design presentation decks are incredibly extensive. Every concept is supported by a narrative, an animated schematic that shows the influences that led to the design, and an ever-growing myriad of creative apps that span print, digital, product, social media, motion, and of course, swag. Even if the assignment is for a short-term execution, our concepts still show how the brand could potentially evolve the design over the next few years.

It’s a herculean amount of work and the inherent risk is that it goes to waste. But in taking the imaginative leap for the client, you inevitably end up further than if you let them define the starting line. If you’re a brand, the goal should be to hire an agency that will elevate your thinking and respectfully challenge what you think is absolute. That kind of agile relationship can lead into some, dare I say, bold territory.

Stay Nervous

Agencies can only do so much. If you really want to disrupt something (and seemingly everyone in Silicon Valley does), then your copy and design should make you nervous. If you’re working with a great agency, that nervousness will be tempered by a process of education and foresight.

Bold doesn’t have to mean reckless. It doesn’t have to mean shock value or clickbait or artificial flavoring. Bold is simply embracing the fact that there’s immense value in meaningful differentiation. Chances are you’re already comfortable using the word. Now it’s time to truly embrace the spirit.

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

The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future.

This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee. 

It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions. 

It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful outcomes from their employee engagement activities, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This paper will suggest that the traditional notions of “purpose”, “values” and “culture” need to be rethought in light of the changing attitudes, expectations and aspirations of both current and prospective employees. It presents the alternative ideas of “ambition”, “feelings” and “behavior”, which are better aligned to the needs of the modern, meaning-seeking employee.

It will detail what composes the ideal master plan for a meaningful workplace and how that master plan can be used to fuel a range of plans designed to engender meaning at the corporate, workplace and individual levels. 

Finally, this paper will point out the need to rethink how to engage employees who are seeking meaning and urges businesses to think beyond mere “internal messaging” programs.

While this series challenges a number of established employee engagement “principles and practices”, it demonstrates how the “meaningful workplace” concept addresses the same business objectives of improved morale and increased productivity and engagement – albeit from a more compelling human perspective. 

Here’s what you can look forward to in the Meaningful Workplace

  1. Context: the workplace in crisis
  2. Understanding what makes something “meaningful”
  3. Toward the meaningful workplace
  4. Employees respond positively to a meaningful workplace
  5. Why people are looking for meaningful workplaces
  6. Why workplaces aren’t meaningful now
  7. Making your workplace more meaningful
  8. “Ambition” is the new “purpose”
  9. “Feelings” are the “values”
  10. “Behavior” are the new “culture”
  11. Making it happen
  12. Going beyond “messages”
  13. A process of self-discovery and self-identification

If you or someone you know is challenged by a workforce in which employees aren’t engaged, productivity is down and morale is low, download this paper. It is a must read for any business today.

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

Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now

Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly meaningful experiences is what really matters right now.

At Emotive Brand, we’ve built our methodology on our belief in the power of emotion. Our methodology has never proved more important or relevant than now. Emotive brands forge emotional and meaningful brand connections by caring deeply about people and aligning their actions and communications to the deep-rooted human needs, desires, and aspirations of all those important to the brand.

We see the keystones of such connections as empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. In our seminal white paper, “Transforming your brand,” we introduce these key drivers of thinking in this way:

“Emotive brand strategies use empathy to better understand and address the needs, values, interests and aspirations of people, both within and outside of your business. As such, we take your brand’s positive attributes and match them against what we know about the ideas and ideals that people care about, connect to, and that can change their behavior. We also encourage our clients to adopt new behaviors that are more empathetic toward both their employees and customers, and to use the insights they gain to identify ways to make their workplace and offerings more personally relevant and emotionally important in the moment.”

Why Empathy?

Empathy is being able to vicariously experience how another experiences something. It’s not actually having the same experience, but rather allowing yourself to see the world from another’s perspective. For example, you don’t have to be blind to understand what life is like without the key sense of sight. Empathy is an innate trait (children are naturally empathetic), and simply needs to be sourced from within. We take an empathetic view of your audiences and then assess how your brand addresses their deepest needs. The results are sometimes unexpected, but always gratifying to our clients, and cultivating empathy is especially essential in navigating uncertain times like these.

Why Compassion?

Compassion is putting the insights you gain through empathy into practice in a helpful way. This is the essence of problem-solving. You come to understand another’s needs and then redesign products, experiences, and communications accordingly. This means greater creativity, innovation, and a continually broadening perspective. We turn to our compassionate nature to translate the unique intersection between your brand and basic human needs into actionable practices that bring the resulting meaning to life.

Why Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of the surrounding world and more alive to its inherent possibilities. It is about having a broader perspective and a universal respect for others. It is recognizing that more unites us than separates us. It is about being humble, feeling connected, harnessing and using energy in new and more gratifying ways. When you employ a mindful attitude in everything you do, you enable a mutually-beneficial balance between your tangible business needs and the intangible meaning that will help your brand thrive in a COVID-19 world and beyond.

Every brand strategy we develop embraces the practices of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. Through this we are better able to match your brand’s attributes with what truly matters to people today on deep and meaningful levels. At the same time, the brand behaviors we develop aim to promote these factors on both leadership and organizational levels.

Making Meaning A Way Of Doing Business

Organizations and leaders are often overwhelmed by circumstances and respond by turning inward both as individuals and on an organizational level. A state of mindfulness enables organizations and leaders to rise above the immediate situation and to turn outward to others on a deeper and more personal level.

Brand behavior that promotes an empathetic, compassionate, and mindful culture helps ensure that your brand will evolve into the most meaningful state possible. As a foundation for your brand culture, these vital traits also make sure that your brand’s meaningful way of being is sustainable and enduring.

As brands seek to confront the challenges of this new world, it’s only natural that they turn to meaning. But it is important to remember that it’s one thing to claim meaning, and quite another to continuously create meaning both within and outside your brand organization. When empathy, compassion, and mindfulness inform the organization, drive its decision-making, and shape its vision, meaning goes beyond being a buzzword and becomes a way of doing business.

Download White Paper

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

Image by Alen Pavlovic

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor

Posted on by Chris Ames

Battle of the Brands

Even for people who spend most of their time online, there are still those moments that remind you just how surreal our current technological moment is. Earlier this month, while mindlessly browsing, I suddenly realized I was six comments deep into a Twitter argument between the social media managers of Wendy’s and Steak-umm. Participating in #NationalRoastDay – an annual tradition of lightly making fun of people and brands – the playful hashtag game quickly turned aggressive when the two companies started vehemently attacking each other’s brand voice and products. Just think how little sense that sentence would make to someone in the olden times of 2006.

How did we get here? Traditionally, creating a strong brand identity online meant ensuring consistency across your various assets – logo, typeface, taglines – and developing a brand voice. As we’ve spoken about before, your brand voice is the purest expression of your brand’s personality. When used consistently, your voice reinforces the emotional impact you’re trying to create with the people most important to you. Just like a human voice, it sets you apart from others and creates a sense of familiarity that people need in order to form a long-lasting connection.

IRL vs. URL

For years, the dissonance between a brand’s voice online and in the real world was pretty slim. And that makes sense because one of the core tenets of brand building is consistency. Yet as time has passed, more and more companies are viewing their online voice as an absurdist off-shoot from their main brand. Denny’s, Wendy’s, Netflix, Chipotle, and MoonPie are classic examples of brands that have fully embraced the surrealism and nihilism of millennial humor.

Though often misunderstood, millennial humor is not so different from the Neo-Dada movement of the 1950s and 60s. The use of collage, assemblage, and found materials is in the same spirit as brutalist meme culture. Dada was formed in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the first world war, so it’s not too difficult to imagine why young people today are responding to a violent and nonsensical world with more nonsense.

Brands are People, Too

The fact that companies are tapping into this vein of humor signals our changing expectations of what a brand is, how it speaks, and what we demand of it. It’s not enough for a product to simply work. The market is way too crowded for that. No, even a flawless product has to be attached to a brand that is whip-smart, well-designed, socially-conscious, purpose-driven, and fluent in the ever-changing language of the now.

When it works, you get something like this:

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - Netflix

Using the structure of a meme where people share the most common misconceptions about their careers, Netflix treats their product like a profession and lists the biggest stereotypes about the platform. It’s self-deprecating, funny, and most importantly, 100% related to their offering. In the comments, the dating app Tinder replies with, “Honestly your Tinder bio looks amazing.” Again, clever, playful, related to their offering.

If you’re still freaked out by the spectacle of corporations pretending to be people for imaginary points on the internet, you’re not alone. But at the end of the day, whether you’re B2B or B2C, every business is human to human. At least until the robots take over, the end result will always be people. If you can find a way to win hearts through humor, they’ll pay you back by voting with their wallets.

Comedy and Marketing: The Best Idea No One Asked For

So, if every brand is human to human, does that mean traditional B2B brands can join in on the surrealist fun? That one’s a bit more complicated. The other day, I enjoyed reading Craig Beadle’s blog post, “Four reasons to avoid comedy in B2B marketing (and how to use it anyway). Beadle is a copywriter at Velocity, a content marketing and strategy firm that clearly doesn’t mind embracing humor. They describe themselves as “an odd bunch of international misfits, huddling together for warmth in a cold, indifferent world,” so it’s clear they can take a joke.

In brief, the post talks about how comedy and marketing are antithetical at the core. Comedy tends to be singular, divisive, and puts the punchline last. Marketing tends to be consensus-driven, direct, and tells you everything upfront. Yet they share a common goal of communicating information in a human, delightful way. There is a sugar-hit of recognition when you “get” a clever ad, in the same way that jokes and riddles are entertaining. As famed ad-man David Ogilvy said, “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” So, let’s look at some funny-thinking B2B brands.

Zendesk

Zendesk makes cloud-based customer service software and support ticketing systems. Are you laughing yet? Nothing about what they do should be inherently funny, but they were able to drill down to one value proposition with real comedic potential: relationships are complicated, and Zendesk improves the relationships between customers and companies. Represented by an astronaut and a deep-sea diver, they created a series of 16-second videos exploring relationship tensions.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - Zendesk

MailChimp

Like many businesses in Silicon Valley, MailChimp is a great company with an awful name. That’s not a value judgment, it’s something they know and have actively leveraged into a massive, self-referential campaign. The “Did you mean MailChimp?” campaign centered around nine ways you could possibly mess up their name, each with its own faux product. The results were brilliant and bizarre creations like FailChips, KaleLimp, and MailShrimp. If humor is about following through on a joke, you’ve got to hand it to them. The FailChip leg of the campaign featured a web page, product packaging, and a distribution strategy for the pre-crushed chips.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - MailChimp

Slack

Slack’s mission is to change the ways teams communicate. There is a lot of comedy in the minutia of office life and working on projects – just look at “The Office.” So, it only makes sense that they went super meta, producing a video about the process of making a video for Slack. Throughout the spot, we see all the points of friction their product solves. The end result is a clever case study, showing a reluctant client slowly falling in love with Slack.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - Slack

What a Time to be Alive!

In conclusion, it’s a super strange time for brands, technology, comedy, and honestly just being alive in general. We know there will always be stakeholders to appease, risks to be assessed, and reputations to manage. But if you find something genuine and funny about your core offering, don’t be afraid to inject your brand voice with a little life. People will forgive a lame joke, but they’ll never forgive a boring brand.

To learn more about how to improve your brand voice, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

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

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Everyone’s Offering ‘A Great Experience’

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping, A Different Type of Research

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

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

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

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

1. Alignment

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

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

2. Respect

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

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

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

3. The Whole Picture:

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

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

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

Qualitative Data, Back it Up

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Nostalgic Brands are Capturing Hearts and Minds

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

A Nostalgic Age

As technologies continue to innovate and find new modes of connection, businesses need to move faster than the speed of light. But while moving forward is key to business success, many brands are looking backwards…and with success. Nostalgia is, no doubt, in. Bath & Body Works just announced the reintroduction of the old scents of the ’90s. The Sacramento Kings have embraced nostalgia with a new logo. Urban Outfitter’s is full of Polaroids, records, and retro cassette players. TV networks are bringing back ’90s favorites like Boy Meets World and Full House, which remind viewers of an age when scheduling a TV date with your neighbor was the norm. #TBT (throw back Thursday) continues to be one of the most trending and repetitively used hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Even Facebook reminds us of what we were doing 10 years ago, today.

The Financial Review’s conversation around this current “Age of Nostalgia” explains it as a backlash against the fast-paced technology and the economic and political uncertainty that has left people feeling anxious about the future. The millennial generation, in particular, is longing for the familiar: the products and brands that remind them of growing up and that elicit feelings of safety, comfort, and happiness. There’s a yearning to bring back the “good old days”. The success of these brand campaigns demonstrates the power of nostalgia: this strong and sentimental longing for the past. People are literally buying into the past.

But if a brand is rooted in nostalgia, how is it positioned to evolve? Successful brands need to use nostalgic triggers to help them progress, while capturing and re-capturing the hearts of their audience. And here’s how:

Short-Term Campaigns

Nostalgia shouldn’t be a long-term strategy. Oftentimes, the most successful brand campaigns are short-lived – little reminders of a brand’s beginning and how far it has come. They make people remember why they fell in love with the brand in the first place and how that love has evolved. These campaigns conjure up happy memories that keep people loyal and connected to the brand.

Crowd-Pleasers

Nostalgic campaigns don’t have to reach the masses. Many nostalgic brand campaigns have been most successful by targeting the millennial generation. Much of the power of nostalgic campaigns lies in how tailored their meanings are for a specific audience. Everyone has different memories associated with the brand from the past, and these independent and meaningful experiences are what make nostalgia hold such impact. Millennials are often the most connected, owning the most devices and demanding speed in every form of media. So these feelings of a slower, simpler times are often felt more acutely within this audience. At the same time, the success of a nostalgic campaign has the most potential within the millennial generation thanks to their connectivity to social media. If anything is going to go viral, millennials need to be part of it.

Rely on Established Brand Equity

In the end, most brands can’t rely on nostalgia alone. Nostalgia is a complex emotion that has to fit into the way the brand already wants to make people feel. Nostalgic triggers should add to the brand’s emotional impact, but not necessarily replace it. The most successful nostalgic campaigns are done by brands that already have established brand equity. It’s not possible to hearken to the past if that past isn’t well known, recognized, and remembered with fondness. Brands that look to the past need something of value to look back on.

Emotional Storytelling

At Emotive Brand, we know that emotive brands thrive. No matter your audience, people want to buy into brands that make them feel something. Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion, some would argue, one of the most powerful of emotions. It is also a complex emotion. Adding feelings of nostalgia into your brand story can make it more powerful, personal, and meaningful to the people who truly matter to your brand’s success. These brand champions are the ones that make your story their own. Nostalgic campaigns are often successful because they hold such strong emotional impact. They make people remember the past with joy, delight in old memories, and remind them of the “old days,” and these positive feelings are quickly associated with and connected to your brand.

The most successful nostalgic campaigns use the past to make people feel joy at remembering those times and simultaneously excited and ready to invest in the future of the brand. They take their audiences on a journey with them, and people delight in the brand as a result. A brand’s nostalgic triggers helps it connect in meaningful, momentous, and memorable ways to the people who matter to their business: past, present, and future.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

 

Could Your Brand Ever Command as Much Loyalty as a Sports Team?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Sports Fan Loyalty

Brand Loyalty – a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

At least once a year, my good friend wears the 40 year-old T-shirt of his favorite sports team. It’s too small. It’s faded and threadbare in places. It’s garish color looks terrible on him. It has a hole in the shoulder. But he loves it. It represents something that matters to him. His team.

40 years ago they won an NBA championship. Who knew at the time that it would take 40 years to get another chance? Over the decades, even though the team had highs and low, he still held out the hope that they could be great again. And he is so proud of his team right now.

The amazing thing is how attached we become to our teams. How does this happen? How is it that we become a dyed-in-the-wool Badger, or an Old Blue, or a fan for life?

Wouldn’t it be great if your brand could earn such unswerving loyalty?

To find out, let’s break down how it happens with sports teams.

Geography – When you live in a town, it’s hard to escape noticing the local team. Brands that have a consistent presence over time get noticed. And when a rival team invades your town, when it’s us against them, you automatically line up on the side of the locals, even if you’re just a casual, fair-weather fan.

Parents – You grew up listening to games on the radio with your dad. You grew up watching games on TV with your mom. Their deep feelings for the team became your deep feelings. Your brand loyalties were embedded early on through osmosis by the people you respect the most.

Friends – It’s contagious. If your friends are huge fans, it’s hard not to get caught up in their excitement. The example of their engagement, commitment and strong emotions rubs off on you. After all, it feels good to be part of the team, especially if it’s with your friends.

The Monday morning coffee break – “Hey, that was some game on Saturday, right?” When people talk about the team on Monday morning, you want to join in. You want to have a point of view. So you get pulled into the conversation, and into fan-hood, without really trying.

Creating Meaningful Connections

So what can a brand that doesn’t hit home runs or shoot three-pointers do to inspire a loyal following? It’s not so different from sports. It’s really simple. It is all about creating meaningful brand connections, as often as possible, to inspire people to go out of their way to support the brand.

Done consistently, that’s how a brand can hit a home run.

  • Geography is like community. If your brand pays close attention to your community and respects their needs and wishes, it will create consistent, meaningful experiences and stick in their minds and connect to their hearts.
  • Parents are like thought-leaders. When a brand leads from a purposeful belief, it can connect with people who share the same ideals. When your brand truly matters, people change the way they think and feel about your brand and you create a long-lasting relationship that can withstand the test of time. Some even call it loyalty.
  • Friends are like word of mouth. A positive word from someone you know is the strongest endorsement. If your brand behaves with emotional integrity and respects each individual customer every time in every brand experience, it can earn the kind of loyalty that friends share with their friends.
  • The Monday morning coffee break is like a conversation with a group of informed colleagues. If your brand performs consistently well with everyone it encounters, the weight of public opinion will be on your side, even when people are from different levels or walks of life.

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty has always come by emotional engagement. Creating meaningful connections and differentiation is where loyalty happens.

Your brand may not inspire fans to get tattoos or wear 40 year-old T-shirts. But it can form a strong emotional connection with people by learning what matters to them, by understanding their feelings and by behaving in a way that shows that you care about them.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Bay Area-based brand strategy firm with an emotive approach to branding.