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Category: Brand Fundamentals

Creating a Brand That Resonates: 3 Grammy-Worthy Lessons from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.”

Posted on by Nick Ott

Is your brand telling a story for now or a story forever? Take a lesson from pop music and learn how to create a brand that lets your customers feel like they “can be someone.”

Imagine a slightly different 2024 Grammy Awards. In this one, there’s still a comeback performance from a reclusive 1980s star, but instead of Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” alongside Luke Combs, it’s Billy Ocean singing “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.” Can you picture Taylor Swift singing along rapturously to his lyric: “Lady driver, let me take the wheel”?

Probably not, but why? Both “Fast Car,” and “…Get into My Car” were released in 1988 and Ocean’s was the bigger single that year, number 15 on the year-end singles charts versus 76 for “Fast Car.” So, why was it Tracy on the stage in 2024 instead of Billy?

Emotional resonance
While Billy Ocean still has his fans (I’m one), his singles are largely characterized as novelty hits: bright, catchy, quick hits of dopamine. If “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car,” were released today, we’d say it was written with engagement in mind. It could inspire a TikTok dance.

“Fast Car,” on the other hand, has only grown in popularity, becoming a staple cover of artists spanning generations and genres, all of whom want to do what that song does uniquely well: connect emotionally with their audience. It communicates the eternal human desires for escape and rebirth—desires that are universal and enduring. It gives a voice to people with those desires. In this respect, Tracy Chapman is capable of speaking for them on an emotional level.

At Emotive Brand, we create brands that aspire to deliver the emotional resonance “Fast Car” delivers, and believe there are a few things that any company can learn by connecting the songwriting process to the brand-building process.

1. Consider the emotional needs of your customers (not just their material needs)
“Fast Car” is a song with a story: its protagonist is a woman stuck in a cycle of poverty and struggling to care for an alcoholic father. While many people can empathize with that, not everyone can see themselves in it. “Fast Car” feels universal because it tells us the emotional needs of its protagonist, not just her material ones: wanting to belong, wanting to “be someone.” Nearly everyone knows what that feels like, regardless of circumstance.

Brands should do this too, regardless of industry or offering, because one way or another, to some degree or another, every buying decision is an emotional one. No matter how rational or materialistic your customers may seem at the moment of decision, they are human beings with human needs, goals, and emotions. If your offering helps your customers cut costs or make a business process more efficient, perhaps your brand is helping them advance their career or gain the respect of their peers. As we’ve recently said to one client, “even CFOs have feelings.”

2. Make your story timeless
A good story can always grab attention, but to endure, it needs to resonate beyond the moment. Tracy Chapman’s own brand was that of an “activist” singer (her second single was “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”). She could have written “protest songs”: straightforward stories about the specific political and social issues of her day, but songs like “Fast Car” offer a different perspective, framing social issues through the lens of perennial, emotional desires.

Similarly, while your product or service may be meeting a need that is very much of the now, your customers’ most important needs are their aspirations: longer term goals that are often both primal and enduring. You do your brand an enormous disservice if you don’t identify those aspirations and connect your offering to that distant horizon. If you make plain to your customers how you can help them reach their goals, your brand can truly resonate.

3. Share the spotlight
As we’ve seen, for most listeners of “Fast Car,” the song isn’t about Tracy Chapman, or even about an unnamed protagonist; it’s about them. Instead of putting the spotlight exclusively on the singer of the song, “Fast Car” lets listeners hear themselves within its lyrics and makes them the hero of a shared narrative.

There are few more important lessons for any brand to learn. Even with a truly revolutionary, world-shaking offering, a brand is almost always better off being an enabler of heroic change than the hero or heroine making that change. Iconic consumer brands (and iconic musicians) have understood this for decades, but many B2B brands still struggle with it.

Today, many brands are built like a Billy Ocean hit, with more hook than pull. Whether that means confusing their product with their brand, or hyper-focusing on the tangible benefits they offer at the expense of the needs of their audience, they tell a story exclusively about themselves, and one their customers can’t see themselves in. But if you can create a brand like “Fast Car,” tapping into near-universal desires for things like belonging and significance, you’ll forge emotional bonds with your audience that will endure beyond that first attention-grabbing moment.

The No Predictions Blog Post for 2024

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

Welcome to 2024. Have you already been bombarded with every person on LinkedIn’s latest and greatest predictions? The blog post titles can practically write themselves at this point. Artificial Intelligence: Everything You Need to Know in 2024, 10 Predictions for MarTech in 2024, What to Watch for in Social Media in 2024, and our personal favorite (and actual title), What’s Ahead in 2024? The Cookie Cutters May Tell!

Well, here’s some good news. We’re not here to add to the predictive noise by adding our own set of predictions for branding. Nope, we’re not going to do it. And this is why. As best as we can tell, there is a fair degree of unpredictability afoot in almost every important realm–the economic arena, the political atmosphere, the climate, the global stage. Making predictions, though enticing (and popular), feels foolhardy and a little bit inconsequential. So instead, at the head of this new year, we offer you some evergreen branding principles. Some hard-learned truths and tips that ensure that any brand creates resonance, builds trust, and ultimately, grows businesses. We’d put our money on these ahead of any predictions.

1. Find your highest possible ground
When it comes to finding the right altitude for your brand, it’s NEVER wrong to shoot for the stars. It may feel comfortable to stay within your comfort zone (yes, we see that roundabout logic) but if you want to break through, you’ve got to push out and reach higher. What can you say about your brand that is truly unique to you? What is the most elevated way of talking about its benefits to customers beyond the ever-popular “efficiency, speed and confidence”? Can you push it a tad further and still be believable? Seriously, this is your baby—let it soar.

2. Tell the truth, even if it’s ugly
We all have our warts, even our brands. The thing is, warts caked in make-up don’t fool anyone. And neither do your brand’s less appealing features. Find a way to reveal your warts in a truthful, perhaps charming or self-deprecating manner. Your customers will appreciate you not trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and will probably be more inclined to believe what you say about your best features because they’ve come to trust your honesty.

3. Anticipate (and embrace) a dialogue
It’s 2024. It’s a whole new world. When Web 2.0 emerged and enabled people to contribute their voices through social media, brand owners were given the shock of their professional lives. All of a sudden, customers were starting to take control of the narrative. A brand was no longer just what the company said it was, not if somebody disagreed with it. And so began the brand dialogue. Today, more than ever, especially with the advent of AI and an ever more vocal and self-empowered customer base, brands need to not just expect a dialogue, but to create its conditions so that customers feel welcome within the conversation.

4. Make the brand everyone’s business
When your company decides it’s time to refresh your brand, make sure that it’s not just the marketing department that feels implicated. Over the years, we’ve seen countless rebrands happen not just because a company feels like it needs to (re)establish its value proposition to the marketplace, but because it is an organic and systemic way to reinvigorate and realign the company itself. Get Finance, Sales, Customer Success, Operations, Engineering and Product involved—the rewards of making your brand relevant and important to every employee within every function are exponential.

5. Be consistent, and stay the course
A/B testing is great for your product but not really for branding. It’s tempting to try a few things and see what sticks. The problem is, the more messages you have in the market, the greater the risk for confusion or dilution. You really only get one chance to make the impression that’s going to stick, so once you find your highest possible ground (see #1) and everyone is bought in (see #4), go in deep and hard on that brand message. Don’t take your foot off the gas or get distracted. Soon, you’ll know if you’re on the right track.

We’ve got a few more good thoughts up our sleeves but we’ll leave it here for now so that you have time to go and read some Predictions blog posts (we read them too, for laughs). Give us a call if you want to hear more. Emotive Brand is a kickass branding firm that does really good work for brands everywhere.

Rebranding in 2024? Move Fast to Go Slow.

Posted on by Bella Banbury

As 2023 winds down, odds are you’ve already set your goals for 2024 and are taking these last couple of weeks to tie up loose ends and get ready to take a running leap into Q1. But before you turn out the lights on the year, we have one piece of advice: if a rebrand is something you’re considering before the end of Q2, the time to start is now.

“Starting now” doesn’t mean kicking off the project. But it does mean you need to socialize the endeavor with your leadership team, clarify the goals, secure budget, identify internal teams and resources, define the brief or create an RFP, find the right agency partner that can deliver the work based on your timing and budgets, and get all the appropriate agreements in place. All of this takes time—time you don’t want to steal from the strategic work that goes into the rebranding process.

Make the time to go slow
A rebrand is never a cookie-cutter project (and beware of those who claim otherwise). Because brand impacts every part of your organization, the process is as much about building internal alignment as it is about creating a new story, identity, or positioning. You need to make time to explore the implications that moving in different directions can have on your business. You need to create space to surface philosophical differences and provide the frameworks for getting people on the same page. You need to understand what different teams require of the new brand and how they can put it to use. The more deeply you can dive into these conversations, the better chance of seeing the essence of your company come to life in stunning language, arresting design, and experiences that set you apart.

When you need it yesterday
Over the years, we’ve seen the New Year brings a desire to make things new, and 2024 will be no different. Maybe a competitor that jumps into January with a refreshed brand or a story that tilts the playing field away from you. Maybe a new opportunity asks you to rethink your positioning or dial up your differentiation. Maybe a new round of funding translates into headcount and the need to elevate your employer branding.

While you can address things like product positioning or messaging updates with short-term solutions, bigger brand-related conversations beg for deeper consideration. You can certainly shore up your website copy and discuss new features and functionality without needing a brand overhaul. But when your company is ready to go to market in a new way, it’s time to take a deep breath and start planning for a rebrand.

The cost of delay
The longer you wait to get the gears in motion, the harder it can be to reach your organization’s goals. Sales kick-offs, trade shows, customer and investor roadshows, and other activities can put your project on the back burner. And, like someone showing up to the Oscars in an outdated outfit, you’ll be missing opportunities to attract the attention you need to grow.

Here’s the good news: without making any big budget outlays, there are steps you can take right now to ensure you’re in control of the timing for when you update your brand:

Lay the Groundwork
Start the internal discussions with your key stakeholders to build alignment on goals, expectations, timing, and budgets.

Identify an Agency
Research potential agencies that align with your business, your vision, and your values. Look for an agency that knows your space and has worked with companies at your stage of growth.

Prepare an RFP or Creative Brief
Detail your branding objectives and requirements, including timelines, key deliverables, events you want to leverage for a brand rollout, and your desired budget. The more complete the story you tell about what you want, the easier it will be to find an agency that can deliver.

Select an Agency
Meet with your top agencies, review their proposals, and meet their teams. A branding project will span months, and chemistry is crucial to ensuring good communication and a positive engagement style throughout.

Procurement & Planning
Onboarding an agency, finalizing SOWs, and scheduling planning sessions all take time. Depending on your organization’s procurement process, account for this time accordingly.

Preparing for Kick-Off
Gather all the necessary materials that will help your agency hit the ground running, including documents, product demos, and research. Identify key stakeholders early to avoid project delays during interview scheduling.

If you are planning any brand initiative in 2024, we can’t overstate the importance of starting the process sooner rather than later. When the process gets underway, you’ll undoubtedly encounter challenges you hadn’t predicted and twists and turns that you’ll be grateful to have some extra time to address.

If you’re contemplating going on a rebranding journey and are looking for guidance, Emotive Brand is here to help. Let us know how we can help you get ready to jump into the process.

Telling Your Story of Growth: The Power of a Strategic Narrative

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

One of the most important goals of a brand is to drive growth. Focusing a start-up on carving out market share. Positioning a fast-growing tech company to lead its category. Providing a foundation for product or portfolio innovation as a company seeks to reach new audiences. Or helping a global corporation expand its footprint into new geographies. Whatever your aim, brand can accelerate results.

But one of the biggest (missed) brand opportunities is engaging individuals in your organization to see their role in creating the future. When growth is a generic goal, people can assume that someone else is leading it. Disconnected from purpose or vision, growth can feel like a performance driver that serves only the goals of stakeholders. For companies to grow sustainably, positively, and strategically, people in the organization need to feel excited about what growth brings. 

The key to framing growth for your organization is making sure people see business as a process, not an entity. No matter where you are on a growth trajectory, success depends on behaving more like an organism than an organization—continually adapting to changes in the marketplace, the industry, the economy, and the culture. But when change and uncertainty prevail, most businesses are poorly equipped to communicate this distinction to their employees. Conventional objective-setting tools tend to be reactive rather than responsive. And typical brand building blocks tend to define what’s come before rather than guide people to consider what lies ahead.

A new approach for engagement

Emotive has a different approach to helping businesses fulfill their greatest ambitions. Growth is the goal. Emotion is the strategy.

When clients need to realize important outcomes, we work side-by-side with executive leaders to co-author a strategic narrative of how—and why—they want to grow. We call this a Growth Manifesto, and it serves as a powerful tool for cutting through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization. It connects major initiatives—corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture—in a single, coherent narrative that aligns everyone behind the promise of the brand and the actions required to support it. 

Why create a strategic narrative?

Because narratives are fundamental to how human beings share meaning. Stories have the power to move and transform people both intellectually and emotionally. Unlike a traditional plot line—which tends to be self-contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end—this narrative is open-ended. It asks people to see themselves in the situation. It calls on them to imagine what they can do to pursue a higher purpose. It gets people into action by helping them understand the role they need to play on the journey ahead. 

Why do you need a Growth Manifesto when you have a business and brand strategy?

How often does your organization engage in substantive dialogue about what lies ahead? Our experience is that growth conversations begin in past actions, which can be limited by strategies that communicate what you already know—or what you’ve already got—rather than how you intend to do business tomorrow. We also see many organizations that undermine success by planning in silos, despite their best efforts at cross-functional thinking. (Can a marketing team develop an effective go-to-market plan in isolation from the deep thinking poured into a product roadmap? Nope. But it happens all the time.) And a “set-it-and-forget-it” mindset often tanks the desired effect of corporate mission, vision, and values statements. 

The Growth Manifesto does three important things:

  1. It establishes a clear point of view that will influence, guide, and help create your organization’s future. This isn’t a PR exercise. This strategic narrative will have an impact only if it’s deeply felt and true to your business culture. It requires expanding your perspective beyond the products or services you offer, connecting your brand to the broader context of your customers’ lives and to their aspirations.
  2. It ties everything together. All businesses, whether big or small, have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional, people will start quilting their own. The result is multiple, individual narratives in pursuit of different end states—in other words, brand confusion.
  3. It creates structure, not stricture. For employees to be truly invested, your narrative must invite some level of co-creation and adaptive thinking. You must give everyone the tools and direction they require to do their jobs well, without being so prescriptive as to limit their tactical freedom to execute. You must ask every employee to use their imagination as they help build and reinforce your brand. 

The Growth Manifesto isn’t meant as a one-and-done alignment activity. It’s an integrative tool that sets a deliberate direction for your business at a given moment. It’s intentionally designed to flex in response to change. To be revisited and updated over time. To adapt in the same way that your business must adapt to the world.

We know that as competition intensifies and companies experience mounting performance pressure, time horizons tend to shrink and most organizations adopt tunnel vision to focus on their most immediate needs and concerns. The Growth Manifesto allows everyone across your business to keep their heads up, with eyes fixed on the horizon, holding both near-term and long-term goals in clear view. More than just selling products, or seeking this quarter’s profitability, a clear strategic narrative gives people the ability to see, believe and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary.

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is your brand positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition?

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic northstar. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people important to sustain its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Verbal Branding: Because Words Matter

Posted on by Jim Humes

If you were to open up a brand and look inside, beneath the logo and colors and typefaces, the images and illustrations, the interactions and experiences, you’d find language. It’s because the basic building blocks of brands—the ideas, emotions, aspirations, values, and promises that create value and differentiation—emerge from the words we use to express them. And for a brand to truly resonate, it needs to embody a coherent set of language (verbal branding) designed to create meaning.

So, what is verbal branding exactly?

Verbal Branding is the practice of using language to focus and amplify how brands create connections. You might think of naming and nomenclature as the tip of the Verbal Branding spear, with messaging, copywriting, and your outward-facing communications following along (here’s more on what goes into a Verbal Identity). These are all part of the practice, but the roots of Verbal Branding reach far deeper. In the same way that the brands are inside-out representations of an organization, Verbal Branding considers the language an organization uses to either fortify a position or drive change. (A wonderful distillation of this idea resides in Paul Pangaro’s classic piece on language and organizations).

For example, when a company undertakes the work of articulating its Purpose, it’s engaged in a verbal exercise where mood, tone, associations, nuance, culture, and historical context all inform language choices. Some words can ignite change, while others maintain the status quo. Some words can make people angry. Or apathetic. Or inspired. It’s not the actual word they’re responding to, but the meaning they bring to it. The same thinking goes for articulating the Vision and Mission of a company or codifying its Values. These discussions about language establish the source code for how a brand should show up externally.

Verbal Branding can make an impact on even more mundane parts of your brand. Employees at a healthcare company might be confused when attending a meeting in a conference room named “Mike Tyson.” Organizations that prioritize lasting customer relationships might think twice about branding their SKO “Piranha Week,” as it’s only a matter of time before the metaphor of being skeletonized in a murky river makes its way to prospects.

Why it Matters

What makes Verbal Branding so critical to brands, and also challenging, is that language embodies both literal and emotional meanings. “Sunlight” and “Sunshine” both refer to rays of light, but we tend to measure sunlight and feel sunshine. Writing code gives a set of instructions for what action you want a CPU to perform while writing narratives gives people instructions on how to embrace the feeling, beliefs, and possibilities underpinning your brand. Maybe most importantly, Verbal branding creates the linguistic framework for the stories your brand gets to tell—the metaphors and allusions, the voice and imagination. And stories, more than messages, are what people remember and repeat. Code gets executed. Stories live on. 

Verbal Branding can be a secret weapon for a brand because, when done well, it connects everything you say internally with how you show up externally. It builds internal alignment around language, which reinforces your external positioning. It helps everyone tell the same story about what you do, how you do it, and why it matters—which, when you’re trying to reinvent a category, offer up a compelling vision, or break through to a new set of customers, is essential to creating clarity, focus, and trust.

This Is Not Another Blog Post: The Power of Differentiation

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Somewhere in a humid conference room right now, someone is adding the phrase “disrupt the status quo” to a bulleted list titled “our values.” Can you smell the whiteboard marker? Can you hear the crackled audio of the one remote employee dialing in to suggest that we “shatter the status quo,” since the word “disrupt” is so overdone?

I’ve been there, you’ve been there, you might be there right now. One thing we all know deep down as we finish our third coffee of the morning: this is not how you differentiate your business, brand, or culture in a meaningful way. You can’t just say, “I’m not like those other guys.” You have to prove it out in market.

What Is Differentiation Strategy?

In short, differentiation is about eradicating sameness. It’s an approach that a business takes to develop a unique product, service, or experience that customers will find better, more distinctive, more memorable than the competitors. It’s how you cut through the noise. If successful, it allows the business the opportunity to raise awareness, grow like crazy, and even charge a premium.

Especially in today’s business environment, where since the start of this sentence seven more data companies just materialized, differentiation is everything. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to build great technology. You have to tell great stories, provide incredible experiences, meet the customer where they are, and look good while doing it.

What Are You Making?

The best way to implement differentiation is through invention or innovation. Your product is your shaping clay, and if you’re working with something novel and exciting, you already have a massive head start. Plant-based protein company Beyond Meat is a good example of this. As one of the IPO darlings of 2019, they have experienced exponential growth as a result of being the first entrant in the market. But with Impossible Foods close behind, and juggernauts like Nestle and Tyson developing competitor products, that head start will not last long.

What Are the Options?

Once you have a product, the next chapter of the story is how it’s made, how it’s bundled, how it’s deployed. Across multiple industries, differentiation strategy can be executed at the product level, too. Think about the difference between taking a cab and calling an Uber. If you take a cab, you’re taking a cab. That’s pretty much your level of choice. If you call an Uber, you can select between an UberX, Comfort, Pool, etc. The end result is the same—getting you from A to B—but the experience of Uber embodies more choice and control, further differentiating themselves from competitors in the eyes of the customer.

How Much Does It Cost?

Money shapes our expectations. When I order the second-cheapest bottle of wine on the menu, it is a strategic decision to be disappointed—but only a little bit. Price segmentation is one of the biggest differentiation weapons a brand has, and a powerful lever to pull for margin growth. Are you about luxury or accessibility? Is this an exclusive, premium experience no one else can offer? Is your mission to provide access for all, or empower a small segment to do incredible things? Every decision narrows your focus more and more.

What Does It Look and Feel Like?

This is the bread and butter right here. Everything we’ve mentioned so far has been rational pursuits, the “What?” part of our brain that compares utility to cost. And that’s incredibly important because that opens the door. But how a brand makes you feel is that irresistible, magnetic force that pulls you through the door by the heart. Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform that resolves employees’ IT issues. On its face, IT management doesn’t seem like an emotional decision—but after scrolling through page after page of IT companies, each with similar offerings, how do you make a decision? A bold voice, a clear story, sleek design, interactive UI, a beautiful visual identity—this is what’s going to grab your attention and not let go. Your branding helps you attract the right people—whether prospective customers or employees—and hence plays a crucial role in differentiation.

Where Can I Buy It?

To butcher a Pepsi slogan from 1985, choice is the choice of a new generation. The ways in which we buy are changing all the time, from in-store, to online, to in-app, to subscription models, to droned directly to you straight from your vocal assistant. Your differentiation strategy should extend to your commerce experience, giving customers smart, easy, flexible ways to buy and be sold to.

What Happens After I Buy It?

The end of the purchase should not be the end of the customer journey. That would be the equivalent of being invited into someone’s home and then immediately saying, “Well, I best be going.” Now that you have this connection, you need to foster it by supplying continual value—before they even think to ask for it. That could be in the form of content through a newsletter or granting early access to products and experiences. With “Fans First” emails, Spotify gives access to presale tickets and exclusive merchandise not available anywhere else. You’re being rewarded for using the product, which only encourages you to engage more.

Why Does It Matter?

If there’s only one question you answer on this list, make it this one. For a moment, ignore price, ignore product-market fit, ignore the logo. Why does your brand matter? Why should people care? Why do your employees get up in the morning every day to come to work? What does a world without your brand look like? Why is it absolutely critical that you’re successful in your vision?

Your “Why?” is the ultimate differentiating factor. There will always be copycats and under-sellers, but articulating and delivering on your purpose is the hardest thing to replicate. If you pursue your “Why?” relentlessly, strategically, and passionately, everything else will fall into place.

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

HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Finding the Right Fit: HR’s Number One Challenge

HR and Marketing? The role of HR has evolved significantly in recent years. Attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is a high priority for executives, and most companies place this responsibility on HR. According to PwC 18th Annual CEO survey, a full 73% of respondents are concerned about the availability of talent – a 10% increase from 2014. Executives worry that it’s getting harder to recruit and keep the people who are both skilled high-performers and ‘fit’ within their organization’s culture. And without top talent, maintaining a competitive advantage, adapting to industry change, and growing business is nearly impossible.

Fierce marketplace competition makes it difficult for candidates to know if they are a good fit for the brand without some guidance. Ensuring employee ‘fit’ means your brand needs to know why it matters. That’s where an employer brand comes in. Your employer brand must do the hard work of being clear and consistent about its promise (EVP), communicating an authentic, meaningful brand experience across all touchpoints. When done well, an employer brand helps attract the right talent, allows prospects to self-select for fit with your organization, and increases the likelihood that they will develop into long-term, low-churn, high-producing members of your team.

The Heat is On

Today, HR is tasked with creating an employee experience that markets the business to recruits and employees. Crafting a relevant and resonant employer brand involves aligning your organization’s aspirations, values, needs, and wants with the people you are looking to recruit and retain—no easy feat.

The pressure to create a unified, engaging experience for employees and prospects is real. And, launching an employer brand often involves obtaining budget from a CEO who may not see its value. What’s more, building an employer brand can become nearly impossible if the corporate brand is outdated, or worse, non-existent. When HR operates in a silo, getting budget and approval can be an uphill battle.

We’ve worked with a number of clients with varying global challenges around recruitment and employee engagement and there’s one thing they all agree on: successfully building an employer brand can’t be done in isolation. Engaging and partnering with marketing from the very beginning is essential.

Five Ways to Create a Successful Partnership Between HR and Marketing

  1. Designate an owner. Clarifying ownership is key. There is no better steward of an employer brand than the CEO, but gaining alignment from the rest of your leadership team, including key stakeholders, securing budget, and taking the project to the finish line won’t happen without a designated decision maker from either the HR or marketing team. 
  1. Map the employer brand to the corporate brand. Even if the corporate brand looks outdated or lacks relevance, the employer brand needs to build off of the brand’s foundation, otherwise it is confusing to your employees and the marketplace. Use what assets the brand has and build from there. If your corporate brand has a brand promise, find a way to use that as your North Star. The authenticity of the employer brand depends on HR and marketing working together to create an employee experience that is true to the brand.
  1. Get a commitment from key stakeholders. Getting the leadership team invested in the employer brand is more than just establishing a committee where people can voice opinions. It’s also important for each leader to understand the reach of the employer brand as a key influencer of your brand’s image and reputation. Leadership needs to have skin in the game from the start. This up-front work will help you and your marketing team move quickly with alignment and see the project all the way through.
  1. Build a coalition. Once you’ve got your employer brand strategy in place and support from the key stakeholders, you’ll need advocates from both marketing and HR to roll-out the employer brand. Unfortunately, there’s no “launch” button for your employer brand. To make the biggest impact, you’ll need a team dedicated to the project who have always been part of the journey. Marketers know how to drive and measure audience engagement, create engaging experiences, nurture audiences, and tell a story that keeps people interested and engaged over a long period of time. And you don’t just need the marketing execs on board, you need the whole marketing team.
  1. Don’t forget purpose. Your employer brand needs to be rooted in purpose and meaning in order to emotionally connect to and successfully recruit and retain the type of talent best suited for your business. HR understands what matters to employees, but marketing knows how to capture their attention, authentically win them over with purpose-driven messages, and create valuable brand experiences at every touch point. When HR and marketing collaborate on an employer brand strategy together, they ensure that the company lives up to its promise and executes it every day.

Collaboration Wins

HR and marketing are not used to collaborating on strategic initiatives, especially those driven by HR. But not engaging marketing in the project can be a fatal mistake. Marketing owns the brand and they need to be brought along on the journey. Marketing will appreciate being asked to participate and HR will save time and angst by getting them involved from the start.

Top talent have their choice of companies to work for. Access to information and opportunity has accelerated a new employer brand rule book where companies are continually learning to adapt the hiring, retention, engagement strategy, and practices for success. By coordinating these efforts with HR and marketing, your business will reap the benefits in terms of the talent you attract and how well they ‘fit’ into the company.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One

Posted on by Emotive Brand

There’s a lot of talk about the concept of a brand promise. But, what is it? Why does my business need one? How would it make my business stronger? How does it relate to my brand strategy? Here we explore the answers to these pressing questions.  And perhaps more important, what kind of a brand promise does your business need in today’s world to have an impact?

A brand is a promise delivered.

A contemporary brand promise articulates an idea that goes beyond the rational benefits that worked in the past, and extols a higher-order emotional reward. A brand promise is not a slogan or advertising headline. It is not, by definition, a public statement (though it can be as long as your brand truly lives up to it). Finally, it is not a “unique selling proposition”. Indeed, its uniqueness and differentiating power comes not from what it says, but how it transforms the way your organization creates strong and meaningful connections with people.

Continue reading “What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One”

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.