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

Posted on March 5, 2024October 1, 2024 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.

Rebranding in 2024? Move Fast to Go Slow.

Posted on December 13, 2023October 9, 2024 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.

Q&A with Sarah Cincotta of Aperian About Rethinking the Brand of a DEI Pioneer

Posted on October 4, 2023October 27, 2024 by Jim Humes

As the DEI category grows larger and new entrants fight for attention, it can be hard for companies to identify the right partner for their journey of creating an inclusive workplace. Founded in 1991, Aperian is a pioneer in helping organizations develop culturally diverse teams that deliver measurable value. Trusted by over half of the Fortune Global 100, their experience serving over three million learners has driven their evolution into a data-driven, product-led company.

Emotive worked with the Aperian leadership team to redefine the company’s brand as it embraced a new strategy, refreshed its values, and developed a new visual and verbal identity to further differentiate its offering in a crowded space. As they go to market with an updated brand and story, we had a chance to chat with Managing Director of Global Marketing Sarah Cincotta to get her insights on the process of rebranding an industry leader to accelerate its growth.

Emotive Brand: There was a lot going on when you undertook this work. Your two co-founders were stepping back after decades of work to build the brand, and your two co-presidents were stepping up to face the challenges of competing in a rapidly growing space. Why was this the right time to re-examine your brand?

Sarah: The DEI landscape has really exploded over the last few years, and every indication is that it will be a growing part of the corporate culture and governance landscape going forward. This has attracted a number of new competitors to the space who are aggressively building their brands. We found that even though we have longevity and heritage in this space, our message was getting drowned out. One of the biggest assets of being an early leader is that a significant portion of our business historically has come from client referrals. But we got to the point where we were seeing business plateau, and we knew that to keep pace in this rapidly growing landscape, we needed to reposition our brand.

Emotive Brand: Aperian’s go-to-market strategy is also evolving to match the dynamics of the marketplace. How did that play into the work of updating your brand?

Sarah: Aperian offers both live training and asynchronous online learning. As our company evolved, clients began to associate the Aperian Global brand with live training and the GlobeSmart brand with our online products. The market wasn’t always aware of the connections between our offerings, and even internally we struggled to blend those sides of the business. We’ve also added other products to our portfolio during our 30 years in business, and we used the brand development process as an opportunity to unify all of our offerings under a single umbrella.

A big part of this process was building an identity around Aperian that could speak to our existing customers as well as help us build awareness in the SMB segment. With our go-to-market strategy shifting to a product-led approach, our goal was to develop a brand that could deliver a unified message across all segments. By simplifying our brand architecture, we can go to market with a suite of products rather than point solutions to meet the needs of different customers. Our new brand story also gives our sales team a better starting point for engaging customers in our portfolio. And as we get more comfortable leaning into the emotional foundations of our brand, we’re already seeing how our brand is opening the door for new types of conversations with the people we serve.

Emotive Brand: What advice would you give other companies, regardless of industry, that are operating in an increasingly competitive market?

Sarah: A great exercise would be to see how difficult or easy it is for employees across the business to articulate what makes your company different and better than everyone else. At Aperian, we had the problem of having too many reasons we could claim we were different, which is not a bad thing, but we found it prevented us from rallying our brand around a single idea that we stand for in the hearts and minds of our customers.

Emotive Brand: So what is the idea that you rallied around?

Sarah: Simply put, it’s the butterfly effect: how one small change can cause ripples that create an outsized impact. We call this The Aperian Effect, and it gets to the heart of how pursuing our mission can change a workplace, an organization, and the world for the better. After the team landed on this idea, we discovered that back in 2016, Ernie, one of Aperian’s co-founders, sent a state-of-the-union email to employees that referenced this same idea. It was a confirmation that in the process of developing a brand for our next chapter, we were staying true to the DNA that makes Aperian such a unique company.

Emotive Brand: Before partnering with Emotive, your internal team had done some work to update its brand platform. What did you discover while working with Emotive?

Sarah: Our previous work helped us align on the language of our key messages, but what was missing from our work was the emotional piece. Focusing our team on how we want our customers to feel opened up entirely new conversations about where our brand could go. Our work is intrinsically emotional, but getting intentional about creating a specific emotional space—and having the confidence to lean into it as we go to market—has made a big difference in how we’re building relationships with customers.

Emotive Brand: Aperian is blessed with a dedicated group of people who have been with the company for a long time, and a new brand represents a significant change in how a company sees itself. How did you onboard people into this process?

Sarah: There is a good reason why one of our values is, “Stay curious and keep learning.” This mindset creates the perfect opening for communicating openly and transparently about the motivations behind undertaking this work. Our management team hosted bi-monthly coffee chats where people could bring their questions, which allowed employees to learn more about the thinking that went into the new brand. We also made it clear that this was an evolution of Aperian, not a dramatic shift. And by educating our teams about brand and letting them see the iterations of the work that helped us land our new identity, they could see the care and consideration that went into the process. We have a new logo and a new color palette, which is great, but our employees also understand the why behind them.

Emotive Brand: As part of this work, the team also refreshed the language around the company’s values. Why was this important to do?

Sarah: The rebrand could have fallen flat for our employees if we hadn’t taken the time to reflect on our values. In the same way that we refreshed our brand to support our changing strategy, we agreed that our values had to shift to align our culture to our aspirations as a company. So we undertook a process to preserve the ideas core to our existing values, but to evolve them to shape the behaviors that would take us forward as a company. We articulated our new values using language that is more action-oriented, measurable, and emotional, and we’ve found this has made our values more relevant and accessible. Their language is showing up in everyday conversation. Teams are using them to ask better questions about how they can contribute. And across the company, we’re seeing how they can elevate our expectations about how we show up for each other.

Emotive Brand: Now that you’ve launched your new brand, what initial reactions have you experienced?

Sarah: The big takeaway from me, internally and externally, is that in creating a better articulation of who Aperian is and what makes us a different kind of company, we’ve unlocked a new language for sharing our story with the world. It’s a matter of simplifying so we can amplify, which in a crowded market makes a tremendous difference. We’re getting ready to roll out a campaign, and just knowing that we’ve found the right notes to hit gives us confidence that it’s going to make an impact.

Finally, the fact that our co-founders, Ted and Ernie, believe in the work we’ve done is the most important endorsement. We’re stepping into the future in a way that honors our past, which is critical to the customers and employees alike who have made Aperian a company unlike any other.

Q&A with Eric Futoran of Embrace about Building a Brand to Lead the Mobile Revolution

Posted on July 20, 2023October 27, 2024 by Jim Humes

Embrace is a company dedicated to unlocking the potential of mobile technology. As companies envision new ways that mobile can transform the ways people live, work, and play, they are asking their mobile teams to deliver mission-critical experiences that are increasingly bold and ambitious. Developers need help managing the growing complexity of what they build—so they can dream bigger about the role mobile plays in their future—which is what Embrace helps them do.

Emotive worked with Embrace Co-Founder and CEO Eric Futoran and his team to redefine their brand and align their organization on the next chapter in their growth story. As they prepared to launch the new Embrace brand, we had a chance to sit down with Eric to get his insights on how the process helped bring his team together to bring a new story to market.

Emotive Brand: You spent a few months going deep into the why, how, and what of Embrace, with a lot of healthy debate about how to tell the Embrace story. What are some things you learned along the way?

Eric: As a founder, I’m so used to thinking about the long-term vision for the company and how we can power the incredible promise of mobile. And in some ways, this visionary thinking is too far out for people to map to the work in front of them. A lightbulb went off after a conversation with Emotive about how to frame the role our brand needs to play over the next two years. It made the goals much more practical and a lot easier because it didn’t have to play out the brand vision in such detail. And to be honest, I think it made the result more exciting because we could see how it could impact the ways we go to market. While mobile disruption will take five or ten years to realize, not every company thinks that far out. The most significant personal learning was to shrink my timeframe and be okay with that.

Emotive Brand: Throughout our work together, you continually encouraged us to swing for the fences about where we could take the brand. What were your instincts telling you about creating a bold story?

Eric: My thinking was that we needed to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. For all sorts of good reasons, we are focused on the weeds of what’s in front of us. But you don’t build a brand for today. A brand needs to be aspirational by definition and build the bridges between today and the better future we’re all working to create. If we had stayed too much in our comfort zone, we would have created a brand that was good for us today but not tomorrow. By learning how to get comfortable operating outside our comfort zone, we recognized new possibilities for where we could take our brand.

Emotive Brand: Building a start-up brand in a newly forming category brings several challenges in building awareness, understanding, and advocacy with developers. How did you see emotion as part of the equation in bringing this all together?

Eric: When you connect with the brand, there’s an implicit connection that goes beyond the functional ways you will use the brand. For example, when you look at the Apple logo, it has nothing to do with what they do and everything to do with setting the emotional context for their offerings. When you’re talking to developers, I think it’s crucial to think of them as people with goals that inspire them and challenges that give them headaches. Developers are so used to seeing the same set of messages and color palettes and comparisons that they feel like they’re being sold to rather than a brand trying to build a genuine connection based on how well they understand their experience. Our goal is to make developers feel empowered by giving them technology that meets their needs and confident that they have a great partner in Embrace to help them achieve their goals. Emotion allows developers to recognize their aspirations and pain points in our brand, which creates a very human connection.

Emotive Brand: As someone who has successfully brought two start-ups into growth mode, when do you think it’s the right time to invest in brand?

Eric: I’ll preface this by saying I hate this answer—it depends. Everyone has a different product and a different strategy. For us, we’re trying to do something very different in our space and cut through a lot of noise that is out there. So brand is an important tactic to tell a unique story that keeps us from getting lumped in with companies we don’t compete against.

If you think about the other end of the spectrum, where 80% – 90% of SaaS products live, they drive differentiation based on doing something slightly better or cheaper than their competitors. These companies typically use brand to create a different emotion rather than paint a bolder vision. The majority of SaaS companies are highly iterative, which Embrace is not. We built our company to be a disruptor.

Emotive Brand: We started working together when there were signs of a weakening economy, but you invested in your brand when others were holding back. What were your reasons to keep pushing forward on the brand front?

Eric: A lot was the practical nature of where we are as a company. We have a best-in-class product with a well-defined product-market fit, but no one knows about us. Our best move in this situation is to lean into brand and marketing initiatives to fuel our growth. Until now, we’ve underinvested in brand because we never felt the pain because the economy was on fire and people were less cost-conscious. The rising tide lifts all boats. But now, as the tide is wavering, we need to make sure we’re positioned to compete in any market condition. We’re still growing, but our brand activities give us the ability to grow faster.

When VCs tell companies to lengthen their runways, I think that’s good advice for seed-stage companies where money is the greatest asset instead of time. For a growth company, time is of the essence because you’re now measured on what you achieve or don’t achieve over time. To reach our potential, we need to increase our awareness, and brand is a key component of that.

For a growth company, time is of the essence because you’re now measured on what you achieve or don’t achieve over time. To reach our potential, we need to increase our awareness, and brand is a key component of that.

Emotive Brand: As a CEO, you were deeply involved in this process. What were the pluses and minuses (if any) about a founder being so involved?

Eric: In many ways, it depends on the founder. We needed to make a bold pitch based on where Embrace is as a company. And for that to occur, we had to get out of our comfort zone. I think I implicitly had to be part of that initiative because it is really hard to ask a head of marketing or sales or product to put themselves out on a limb and take that risk without the founder being part of it. I’m not a marketer by any means, but I know the power of good storytelling. So from an ideal perspective, the founder and CEO should 100% be part of the process to ensure the brand’s story aligns with the bolder vision for where the company is heading. You’re not just telling the story of this moment in time—you’re telling the story of the people and the journey as part of that company. And so, if I hadn’t been as involved, we may have lost some of the potential of what the brand can do and the impact it can create.

Emotive Brand: As part of this work, we worked with you to develop a Growth Manifesto that tells the story of how you plan to grow over the next two years and beyond. How did this help your team connect the dots and align around the strategic pieces of your business, product, and GTM strategy?

Eric: It helped build a bridge between the near-term goals for driving awareness and our longer-term vision. When we started writing the Manifesto, the combination of the two came together. We were able to frame what we do in the five-to-ten-year vision of how mobile will transform the world and get people excited about this future, and then we made it real by focusing on the next two years and what will be required. The two horizons don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

But the team is still digesting the Growth Manifesto. When rolling out anything new, you need to create a drumbeat of communications and experiences. I have an -ism on this called the Rule of Three: give people the information in three ways and three different times. That’s what we’re doing with the manifesto so that it becomes part of our everyday thinking.

Emotive Brand: Because we’re Emotive, we need to ask you about feelings. Do you think feelings and emotions play an essential role in the B2B space?

Eric: 100%. Our customers are people. The people they serve are people. I think a lot of businesses forget that. We’re a very customer-first, customer-centric company because I truly believe it’s the right way to do business. Rather than B2B, we’re Human-to-Human. Retention is king for all SaaS companies. In addition to having a great product, you need to treat your customers right because they are making a bet on you. There will be bumps in the road, but they’re betting both on your vision and your ability to support them when the product isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, and they need you to take action. The only way you retain customers is by treating them like partners, like people whose success you genuinely care about. That’s the only way you’ll build a relationship that can weather the storms that arise. It’s not commonly expressed in the B2B space, but business is all about leading with emotion.

Business and Brand Strategy: Separated at Birth

Posted on July 13, 2023October 14, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

Peanut butter and jelly. Abbott and Costello. Disco and dancing. Some things in this world simply go together. So why is it that business strategy and brand strategy don’t always get invited to the same parties?

Growth is the Goal
We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning business and brand strategy. Leaders intellectually get this, but many organizations fall into ways of working where business and brand strategy represent two different schools of thought. Delivering on financial goals (business) versus understanding customers and their needs (brand). Defining winning through the lens of revenue, profit, and market share versus winning hearts (and then wallets) through engaging experiences. Economics versus Psychology. Science versus Art. The truth is, these are just different sides of a bigger conversation (we call it a Growth Manifesto) that revolves around how an organization drives growth.

The lack of alignment between business and brand strategy results from not having this shared vision of growth. Without it, the business side of the house will identify, quantify, and prioritize growth opportunities that most readily deliver on an organization’s financial goals. Brand and marketing teams will develop new and better ways to meet their customer engagement goals. Product teams will develop roadmaps and pursue innovation based on how they see user needs and technology evolving. Sales teams will go to market with tactics that drive immediate wins. HR leaders will attract and retain talent based on what each silo needs. Everyone will hope (assume) they are marching to the beat of the same drummer.

The reality: situations that resemble a three- or even six-legged race. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Aligning leaders around where the business needs to go begins with getting clear on ALL the ways an organization can or will deliver value—for customers, employees, stakeholders, and its communities. When you’ve aligned on the value you can create and the impact you want to deliver, getting brand and business strategy working together is a far easier task.

When was the last time you brought your leadership team together to discuss how you create value and for whom? A workshop that gives everyone a platform to discuss opportunities for creating new value through the lens of brand, product, customer engagement, go-to-market strategies, investing in employees, and supporting causes and communities can give you a bigger picture of the opportunity landscape. And it creates a conversation that brings business and brand strategy into the same arena.

What Your Business and Brand Strategy Should Answer Together
Once you’ve brought people together with a shared vision for creating new value, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Answering these questions can take you a long way toward building a plan for how every part of your organization gets aligned on growth:

What are the short- and long-term goals for the business? Is there an exit strategy? A merger or acquisition in the future? How does your brand need to support these efforts?
What are the revenue and growth expectations? Are there specific target revenue goals the board is looking for? Your investors? Wall Street? Are your goals based on revenue, profitability, market share, or something different? How does your brand need to behave to support that strategy?
What is the growth strategy? Is it based on selling products or solutions? Innovating new products and offerings? What role does your brand play post-sales?
What’s the human capital plan for achieving your desired business goals? Does that involve recruiting a different team? How can your talent acquisition team become an extension of your brand team?
What is the product roadmap? Are you entering into new markets? Developing new products? What are you building vs. buying to enhance your product offering? How can your brand open doors for you in adjacent markets?
Is your business structured to accelerate the progress toward goals and objectives? Do you need to shift your organizational structure? Are you ready to bring new members into the C-suite? Do you have a brand leader who is also a business leader?
How should you allocate resources to accomplish these goals?

These questions are integral for shaping both your business and brand strategies. By looking at brand and business together in the same set of questions, you’re ensuring alignment is in place before you start to execute.

Clear Goals Enable a Clear Brand Strategy
With a clearer picture of where you want your business to go, the brand strategy will answer:

What category do you fit into?
How do you define product-market fit?
What is the competitive landscape?
What is your positioning in the marketplace?
Who are your top target audiences?
What is the value proposition?
In what ways is your brand unique?
How does your brand look and feel?
What voice does your brand speak in?

By having the conversations required to make business strategy and brand strategy work together, you’re creating your own competitive advantage (in our experience, most companies don’t commit to the discipline of doing this type of collaborative exploration). As a result, you will not only find more opportunities to differentiate your brand in ways that create value, but because the organization is aligned, you’ll be able to do it with far less friction. And this is how you drive short- and long-term growth in any market condition.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland-based brand strategy and design agency.

You may appreciate the following post on Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy.

Leading With Beautiful Questions

Posted on March 28, 2023October 14, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

Many years ago, we got inspired by Warren Berger’s book, “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.” The basic premise of the book and the post we wrote at the time was that leaders simply don’t ask enough questions when they bump up against uncertainty.

Since then, two things have happened. Mr. Berger wrote another book tying the art of inquiry to generating breakthrough ideas (which we all need today), and the world has started to get wobbly. Every leader we work with and talk to is grappling with the issue of how to drive growth in uncertain times. And they’re also looking for ways to unlock new and different thinking on their teams for how to grow. This creates the occasion for us to update our own thinking on the value of asking questions—beautiful questions—to choose the way forward.

Uncertainty can feel familiar

Say that you and some friends are backpacking through a place you’ve never visited before. The call you took from the trailhead drained your phone’s battery and your navigation app is useless (doh!). Your destination is a campsite next to a breathtaking alpine lake that is a jewel of the mountain range and a like-amplifier on your Instagram feed. When you come to a place where the trail forks, with no signs marking the way, one of your hiking companions (who has years more experience in the outdoors than anyone else), declares, “it has to be this way.”

Who hasn’t been here before?

Either on a trail or in a conference room, strong opinions emerge, experience speaks loudest, the phrase “trust your gut” gets bandied about, and the bias for action short-circuits the deeper process of inquiry. What should you do? Follow experience and take the trail to the left? Trust your gut that tells you not to trust that other person’s gut? Or do you pause to ask a few questions?

Introspection v. action

When we translate this scenario to the current business environment, it mirrors a lot of today’s context: navigating landscapes (economic, market, technology, talent, etc.) that are unknown or unpredictable with limited information to guide you to the promised land. It feels like every day there is a crucible moment that can slow down progress or knock your leadership team out of alignment. And alignment is the key issue here.

A basic assumption in team dynamics is that too many questions will slow us down, and that quick answers will speed us up. This is true, but only to a degree. Without alignment around those answers, you’ll actually move more slowly people will drag their feet or hold back in other ways until the direction proves to be correct. It’s like a cycling peloton that rides single file—you can’t draft off each other in this formation.

On the other hand, lemmings show incredible alignment. But maybe they should learn to ask a few more questions.

The question leaders face during times of uncertainty is whether they should lead with answers (and keep the foot on the accelerator) or lead with questions (and do the soul-searching that builds conviction and alignment)? We think the answer is both. And here’s a simple framework for how to do it.

Identify the operating narrative

Simply put, times of uncertainty = times of fear. When we perceive danger, our amygdala gets activated, and our fight, flight, or freeze instincts take over. Expansion, contraction, or stasis. And when this happens, we begin constructing our own narratives based on how we individually deal with fear.

One person might choose to avoid risk (not taking another step forward), while another wants to leap into bigger risks (bushwacking to the nearest peak to get a better perspective). Your fellow hiker could employ head-in-the-sand behaviors that delay conflict (acquiesce but then grumble the entire time), while another could rebel (go back to the car to charge the phone). While these could all be appropriate actions, they put your organization at risk because they skip the most important step for how teams move through uncertainty. A leader needs to establish a unifying narrative first to build alignment. And then the action can follow.

Ask beautiful questions

Because we all have different relationships with uncertainty, we need a way to get onto common ground. And the best way to do this is to ask questions that reframe the situation.

Berger’s books highlight how when we’re children, we’re full of questions because nothing is at stake when a kid asks a question. But as we mature many of us lose the willingness to reveal what we don’t know (except for the stellar innovators and leaders who are always in learning mode). By offering helpful guides to using a flow from “Why?” to “What if?” to “How?” Berger shows us how to gain awareness of what people want and need, what they’re avoiding, and where the new opportunities lay.

Unfortunately, when the tension is running high and the talk turns to execution, people want answers and action rather than another @#!$& beautiful question. And there’s a price attached to this anti-question bias in business. As companies push away from asking bigger questions in the spirit of addressing short-term needs, they stop looking for the opportunities, trends, and threats that are just around the corner. And they let external narratives (the economy is slowing and companies in our industry must cut X, Y, and Z to survive) take over when they should be formulating their own stories (e.g. by shifting our efforts or leveraging our unique strengths, we can set the stage for the next five years of growth).

The best part of this is that questions are free, with the only cost being the amount of time you invest in exploring them. And by undertaking this process, can achieve results that range from alleviating stress to re-framing your opportunities to unlocking entirely new ideas for your business.

To give you a sense of how asking beautiful questions can help you shift your narrative, below are a few inspired by Berger’s books:

Why are we in business? (And by the way, what business are we really in?)
What if we become a cause and not just a company?
What fears are holding us back?
What do we stand against?
Who does our company look like at its very best?
Where in our company is it safe (or unsafe) to ask radical questions?
Does our mission make sense? Do we embrace it? Does it unify us?
What are we doing the way we’ve always done it? Is it still working?
Where is the place we can be a start-up again?
If money were no object, how might we approach our work differently?
How might we create a culture of inquiry?
Does our future make us feel like dancing? How could it?

You’ll notice that these are open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have right or wrong answers. They’re not koans intended to stump people, but by they do have the power to get people into healthy debate (a conversation you enter into with a willingness to have your mind changed). And these questions are by no means exhaustive. Think up a few of your own that will rattle the cage (in a good way) during your team’s next meeting.

Translate questions into actions

Spending time in shared inquiry is the quickest way to regain alignment when things are wobbly. As a regular practice, it deepens alignment that allows your team to make decisions faster, think bigger, and reach higher levels of performance. By discussing these questions in ways that activate both the head and the heart, you identify the right actions to prioritize that will move the needle for your business while also keeping employees engaged and inspired.

When you’re aligned as a team and everyone feels that they’ve had their say, execution becomes easier. Decisions are more intuitive. You form collective gut reactions that honor everyone around the table. And you locked in on the key priorities for moving into the unknown. You might realize that the way forward lies in focusing on core customers. Or innovating your go-to-market motions. Or giving everyone in the company a day to reflect on a single question that will unify the team. Action is a force of expansion, and aligned action is the quickest way to make progress toward your shared goals.

Your brand strategy is an alignment tool

Your brand strategy can be the catalyst for a culture of inquiry. Many of Berger’s questions are fundamental to building a brand that is authentic and differentiated. When your brand seeks to embody a purpose beyond profits, you get to explore the motives, orientations, and attitudes of your company. You create the space to ask difficult questions that lead to revealing and powerful answers that are rooted in meaning and emotion. This leads to a brand that navigates the world in a more purposeful way, asking the questions that need to be asked of itself, and discovering the meaningful connections that help them prosper.

Ask the questions. Live the answers. And thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

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

Posted on February 13, 2023November 4, 2024 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:

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.
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.
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 December 1, 2022October 14, 2024 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?

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on November 15, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Continuing the Challenge

This post is the second in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read part one, “Challenger Brands: A Primer,” right here.

Previously, we spoke about adopting a challenger mindset. It’s one defined by ambition, agility, and a willingness to take risks. Most importantly, we noted how businesses are no longer competing against each other – they are competing against the category they are in and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

At a glance, these personality traits naturally lend themselves to the B2C world. Ask anyone to rattle off a few challenger brands and you’ll invariably get the same answers: Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb—and it makes sense. When you’re trying to rewire people’s preconceived notions, B2C is, by definition, the shortest path to the customer.

But it is by no means the only path. The worlds of B2B and B2B2C are being transformed by challenger brands. Just look at ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Slack, or even Salesforce. If you can’t see it on the surface, it’s most likely occurring behind the scenes in their business strategy.

B2B Challengers

Founder of 500 Startups, Dave McClure, notes that

“The next bubble is not in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply. Rather, the real bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep up awake at night.”

Many legacy B2B companies end up following a similar lifecycle. They start off small and hungry, build a legacy off of their early innovations, ride the wave for as long as possible, then go out and acquire innovation when they start to stagnate. The daily churn of operating a business makes it very difficult to ignite the same innovation that got you started. So, you import. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it’s a strategy that ultimately puts your future in the hands of other creators.

Homegrown Innovation

Regardless of size, if B2B brands want to truly adopt a challenger mindset, they need to take active steps to continually foster their own innovation. Famously, Google has a 20% rule. Implemented by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, it’s designed to give employees one full day per week to work on a Google-related passion project of their choosing or creation. It’s the same strategy that created Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google News, AdSense, and many others.

The point being, words like agile and innovative don’t have to be words that are only synonymous with startups. B2B companies can instill a challenger’s sense of agility through the behaviors and culture they nurture. If you’re wondering how a B2B brand knows if it should adopt a challenger mindset, there’s a wonderful diagram created by Michael Hay, a business leader with fifteen years at IKEA, that can help. Outlining four essentials for driving a successful change of strategy, it acts as a checklist for recognizing and delivering change.

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

At the end of the day, there are many lessons that B2B brands can steal from the challenger world. Are you leading with a strong story that unequivocally answers the question, “Why do you do what you do?” More than meet a singular need, are you meeting the needs of today and tomorrow better than anyone else? Are you talking with lead adopters at the front of the innovation curve and making them evangelists for your brand?

Perhaps the most important lesson that B2B brands can glean is in how they hire. As Adam Morgan writes,

“Employees at challenger brands require different qualities. They need to be mission-driven. They need to know why they get out of bed and go to work every morning and they need to be passionate about the problems the company is trying to solve. Being a maverick is also of far greater importance at a challenger, the opposite of at a larger organization where dissent is considered a flaw. Employees need to ask the provocative questions and not just take risks themselves, but also to be tolerant of risks that others might take.”

To learn more about how your B2B brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

To finish reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part Three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

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

Challenger Brands: A Primer

Posted on November 7, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Are you up to the challenge?

Starting today, we’re launching a three-part series on challenger brands—who they are, how they behave, and why your brand could benefit from adopting their disruptive mindset. As this is the first blog in the series, let’s start with the basics. The beginning, as they say, is always a good place to start.

What is a challenger brand?

“A challenger brand is defined, primarily, by a mindset—it has business ambitions bigger than its conventional resources, and is prepared to do something bold, usually against the existing conventions or codes of the category, to break through.” —The Challenger Project, by eatbigfish.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “challenger brand,” you’ve certainly experienced its narrative cousin: the underdog story. It’s David and Goliath. It’s Rocky. That oft-romanticized vision of a plucky innovator running a business out of their garage and taking down the big guys. Think of Ben & Jerry’s vs. Haagen-Daz, Sam Adams vs. Budweiser, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Category is the new challenge

While in the beginning being a challenger brand often meant slaying one particular dragon—Pepsi vs. Coke—modern challenger brands are more focused on what they are disrupting instead of who. It’s not about me versus you; it’s about me versus the category, the industry, and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

From Airbnb to Blue Apron to Warby Parker, challenger brands are redefining the ways we travel, eat, shop, and more. As Adam Morgan says, “Being a challenger brand today is less about business enmity, and more about an often mission-driven desire to progress the category.”

Criteria for challenger brands

To be clear, there are no rules set in stone about what makes a challenger brand. By definition, it’s a fluid position. You might start out a challenger and be so successful at taking out the competition that you become the next target on top of the hill. It’s a Shakespearean cycle of ascension and dethronement that leaves only the most innovative companies standing.

“A challenger brand can take many forms; it’s more of a mindset than a specific set of rules,” says Kohlben Vodden, founder of StoryScience. “These brands tell stories that by proxy make us feel empowered. They tell us real success lies in breaking away from the pressure of social norms, challenging authority, and being disagreeable. These brands represent character strengths that we humans universally hold up as positive and admirable qualities—bravery, perseverance, fairness.”

In essence, to be a challenger your brand needs to:

Be somewhere in the middle of the market. You’re not first, but you’re not last. You have enough experience and validity to get in the ring and start punching above your weight.
Have an insatiable hunger and big ambitions that go beyond hitting your numbers. You and your employees need to share a fundamental belief that you are unlike any other company on the planet.
Understand what it takes to close the gap between good and great. When you talk about something as aspirational as a company’s vision for the future, you should never limit yourself to making something merely good. This isn’t a task to work on; it’s a shared vision to work toward.

Culture is the lifeblood of challenger brands

All things considered, this is as much about emotion and personality as it is about strategic priorities. If there’s a straight line through challenger brands, it’s the infectious culture they cultivate and maintain through the ups and downs. And how do you shape culture? Through your mission, vision, beliefs, and behaviors. “Clarity around what a business believes in, and what change it’s trying to bring about, acts as both inspiration and filter for the kinds of disruption it will pursue,” says Mark Barden. “Without that clarity, disruption becomes chaos pretty quickly.”

To continue reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part two—Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers & Part three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts