Brand Positioning Archives - Page 2 of 4

How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Posted on October 27, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Since the dawn of man, every entrepreneur believes they have the magical product that is going to change the game, revolutionize the market, blaze the trail, and yes, make the world a better place. It’s the type of hyperbolic startup language we’ve come to quickly identify and dismiss because we know at the end of the day, venture capitalists don’t really back products—they back winning business models.

So, how do you skip the tech jargon and get straight to a hair-on-fire business model? There may be no better litmus test than that of the elusive “product-market fit.” Coined by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he defined it simply as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Product-Market Fit Is Startup Nirvana

Sounds easy enough, but the little description belies its massive business implications. This is the sought-after point at which you have identified the best target industries, buyers, and use cases for your product. Sales and marketing strategies become easily repeatable and, more importantly, scalable. It’s the great chasm between the “10x” investment return companies and the ones you’ve never heard of.

These days, most startups don’t fail because of the strength of their idea. It’s because they burn through cash without carefully planning for the crucial moment when customers actually want what they are selling. Achieving product-market fit is nirvana, and there are no shortcuts to nirvana. Fortunately, thousands of companies have gone before us, and there’s something to learn from their trials and tribulations.

Research, Personas, and Segmentation

Everything, and we mean everything, begins with an effort to understand the market landscape and key pain points. In researching the various industry verticals and potential buyers, you are on the hunt for your target customers. After all, they ultimately decide how well a product meets their needs.

Call us old fashioned, but we’ve long believed that the best way of conducting market research is actually talking to your potential customers face-to-face. Sure, you’ll get more data if you use online surveys, but the quality of that data will always be diluted. Especially at the beginning of your journey, you need to hear how a real, emotive conversation about your product evolves in real time. If you put in the work, your customers will tell you exactly what would make their lives substantially better.

We’ve talked before about the importance of using research to develop personas and market segmentation. As a reminder, segmentation is the partitioning of the full market into digestible parts—hopefully with customers that share similar behaviors and needs. Defining the attributes and characteristics of various target users is a great way to make sure everyone on the product team understands exactly who they are designing, building, and sweating for.

These personas aren’t set in stone—they should be revised as you learn more and more. After forming and reiterating on these personas, the next step is understanding their underserved needs. If you can address customer pain that is not adequately being soothed, you’ve stumbled upon pay dirt. In terms of market opportunity, pain is gain. All of this information is driving toward the creation of your value proposition, or how your product will meet customer needs better than the alternatives.

Prototyping, Iterating, Optimizing

Equipped with this information, you should be ready to create what’s sometimes called a minimum viable product. With the help of prototyping tools such as inVision, it’s never been easier to show your customers an interactive, high-fidelity version of your product—without actually having to build the whole thing.

This is a safe space for experimentation, feedback, and a low-risk way to glean deeper insights. The biggest disservice you could do to your product team is asking leading or closed questions that trigger a yes or no response. Engage your sense of curiosity and ask open-ended questions to encourage insightful responses. Only then will you be able to identify genuine patterns and refine the initial prototype into something that is delightful and addresses customer concerns.

Take It to Market

As any creator knows, you can get stuck in the spin-cycle of revision forever. The only real way to validate your hypotheses is by eventually taking your product to market. That’s when the lessons come fast, hard, and uncensored. Suddenly, you’ll have access to conversion funnel metrics, marketing economics, product engagement levels, utilization rates, and lost customer churn.

It will feel like trying to repair a bicycle while currently riding it downhill—but rest easy knowing that you don’t have to fix everything at once. It’s just about optimizing what you can control to make your sales process repeatable and scalable in your established vertical.

Things to Remember

Seek insights from your employees, especially those out in the field. Your operations team sees all the problems with the product and hears all the complaints from your customers. Set yourself up for success early by creating a frictionless process to get those insights to senior management.
There will never be one way to determine product-market fit. You need to embrace the mentality of a scientist by testing, tinkering, and questioning every data point. Use A/B testing with messaging, try different price points, and push everything as far as your conversion rates will allow.
There are so many useful tools out there, like how to calculate your total addressable market size. David Skok, the venture capitalist at Matrix Partners, wrote a great blog on this topic as well. It includes a list of the key questions you need to be asking yourself along each step of the product-market fit process. In addition, it has a calculator template to see how you can score your product-market fit.
Trying to be everything to everyone will result in you being nothing to everyone. Especially for startups, who are often working with a limited budget, it’s always better to have a narrow focus to start. Then, you can go dive deep in that one vertical, making you the clear industry expert in your domain.

To learn more about how to find the right product-market fit, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

How to Tune-Up Your Bullshit Detector 

Posted on October 20, 2022November 4, 2024 by Emotive Brand

In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, “Bullshit is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some way, infused with bullshit.”

As a brand strategy and design agency, we live in the intersection between people and brands. This is perhaps one of the most fertile, organic spaces for bullshit to thrive. The speed of technology has created a sizable gap between those who know what they’re talking about and those who don’t. Our job, to the best of our abilities, is to eradicate the nonsense, the fluff, the jargon, the overpromising and under-delivering.

The truth is, brands have real meaning in our lives and there is some art in strengthening that connection. The inherent tension here is wanting to create something useful, authentic, and emotionally resonate in a space that is and always will be about profit. Some say that’s impossible. Others say that challenge is the very thing that motivates them to produce better work.

Two Ads, Two Approaches in Authenticity

A micro case study: Last month, I attended Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” event that features storytelling, animation, music, and just like a real magazine, ad-breaks. It’s a tough space for sponsored content; these commercials are sandwiched in-between authentic and beautifully produced journalistic pieces.

The first ad-break was for Google’s project, BikeAround, which pairs a stationary bike with Google Street View to take dementia patients on a virtual ride down memory lane. Patients input a street address of a place that means something to them—a childhood home, for instance—and then use the pedals and handles to “bike around” their old neighborhoods. By combining mental and physical stimulation, scientists think this can affect memory management in a profound way. When the ad was over, there was huge applause and even a few teary-eyed audience members.

The second ad-break was for CHANEL, a fast-paced, noir fever dream that beamed messages like, “Seize beauty, all the time, everywhere you go, in a Venetian church, in a boutique of white camellias, in a baroque angel, because it is a vital necessity” straight into our dull, unperfumed brains. When it was over, several people laughed and one person booed.

Is Honesty Just Another Gimmick?

Both Google and CHANEL are trying to sell us something, yet one ad was happily digested and the other spit back. The difference in tone and subject matter here is stark, but it isn’t always as easy to detect. Sure, Google looks like the victor here, but soon after, they were in the news for updating the privacy language for Nest. We all braced for the usual legalese of a terms and conditions manifesto, but were stunned to see a surprisingly transparent document. The text was breathable, there was white space, there was even tasteful, edge-to-edge photography. Do we buy it? Or is this another marketing ploy in the nefarious long-game to pool our data?

The Mirage of Digital Transformation

The first wave of Bay Area entrepreneurship was largely about pitching a vision of digital transformation that was so luminous, so hyperbolic, you couldn’t help but buy in. It’s that classic scene from Silicon Valley, where over a minute-long montage, startup founders pledge to “make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols,” or to “make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints.” No matter how small your product, it was going to have a colossal impact on all of mankind, forever and ever.

I believe we’re in a different era, one that rewards radical honesty (or the illusion of it), utility, and a touch of humility. When I think about my favorite brands right now, they are building products that aim to make a notable difference in people’s lives, as opposed to trying to be their whole lives. We want brands to tell the truth, provide value, and then get out of the way.

People are more skeptical than ever, and with good reason. In a world overrun with fake news, seamless sponsored content, and media scandals, it can be difficult to know what to believe. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, today only 52 percent of global respondents trust businesses. The figures are even more dramatic in the U.S., where a mere 48 percent are similarly trusting, down from 58 percent the previous year. Brands clearly need to re-evaluate their messaging strategies if they are to regain the public’s confidence.

An Incomplete Checklist for Avoiding Bullshit

1. Can you describe it in one sentence?
Brevity is the soul of wit. If you can’t explain what you’re doing in one clean sentence, chances are you’re trying to be everything to everyone. A fantastic exercise is the 100 – 50 – 10 – 5 experiment. The challenge is to describe your company or product in increasingly tighter word counts. Think of this as a sieve for filtering out everything inessential about your brand and the value it provides.

2. Does your mom understand it?
Perhaps the hardest test of all: do your parents understand what you do? Beyond brevity, being able to describe yourself in plain language is key. My parents don’t know what a “global p2p marketplace for homestays and experiences” is, but they understand renting out a spare room to a tourist.

3. Can it be translated into another language?
You know what doesn’t translate well? Buzzwords, jargon, the word “unicorn.” Google Translate is one of the most underrated writing tools at your disposal. It forces you to consider your language in a global context, which you probably should be doing anyway.

4. Does a public service already provide it?
For all the disruptors, innovators, trailblazers, and game-changers out there: if you are working on a slightly modified version of an already-existing public service, you’re not revolutionizing anything. That doesn’t mean you don’t have value, it just means the language you use to describe yourself should be reigned in. It’s tempting to say you’ve “solved commuting” or “transformed how cities move,” but you have to remember: a tech bus is still, first and foremost, a bus.

5. Who is it really for? Who does it exclude? What does the world look like without it?
Who are you really “making the world a better place” for? Can something be revolutionary if it isn’t inclusive, accessible, affordable? Maybe your product isn’t for everyone—and that’s fine! But then your communications shouldn’t be either. When brands veer out of their lane into “universal good” territory, that’s when people call bullshit.

Like death and taxes, bullshit is inevitable. But we don’t have to let brands get away with it. Let’s enter the era of honesty, humility, and transparency—or at least the closest thing to it.

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

Brand Salience Is the Lifeline Between You and Your Customers

Posted on September 27, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

How Are Purchase Decisions Actually Made?

Let’s say you need to buy a toilet brush. You’re at the store with your partner, and they say, “The brushes are just down that aisle, do you mind grabbing one?” Suddenly, you find yourself in front of a wall of toilet brushes. Never in your life have you actively thought about toilet brushes, toilet brush brands, or the state of the toilet brush market. But now, somehow, you find yourself in the position of trying to form an emotional connection to an object that arguably has the worst job in your house. Do you grab the cheapest one? Or maybe just the one you recognize?

The Magic of Brand Salience

Enter brand salience, the unsung hero of indecisive buyers everywhere. In cognitive psychology, “salience” refers to what is most prominent or noticeable. The term describes how “our attention is drawn to intense stimuli such as bright lights, loud noises, saturated colors, and rapid motion.” For marketers, salience is the degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation.

Not to be confused with top-of-mind awareness, which is simply the link to the name of the product category and depends on a single, specific cue. Salience extends far beyond brand awareness. It’s the probability of a person noticing, recognizing, and thinking about your brand when it matters most.

Emotion-led Decision Making

Why is this important? Because as much as we’d like to believe that people make purchase decisions based on rational, utility-maximizing thought, we don’t. According to a study by Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight and consultancy groups, “Consumers rely on mental shortcuts or heuristics when they make their brand decisions. One such heuristic is to assign greater importance to things that have ready mental availability, the effect of which is to choose the most salient brand.”

All this to say we’re flawed, tenderhearted creatures making most choices based on feeling, experience, or precedent. Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science have done research into brand salience, and they’ve found that it’s largely a function of the quantity and quality of the consumers’ memory structures.

Quantity of Memory Structures

In buying situations, consumers are often driven by mental cues that trigger their thoughts around brand consideration sets. For example, if I’m thinking about finding affordable healthcare coverage that allows me to thrive, I’m likely to consider Kaiser Permanente. Since 2004, their ubiquitous “Thrive” campaign has been a staple across TV, radio, online, print, and outdoor platforms in markets throughout the country. The more memory structures your brand is linked to, the more salient your brand, the more likely it is to be thought of during a buying situation.

Unfortunately, what people remember about brands isn’t always the same across buying decisions. Even if you’ve seen the same ads as me, you might have a completely different association to the word “Thrive.” Quantity alone isn’t enough.

Quality of Memory Structures

Romaniuk and Sharp argue that the quality of brand salience is a function of the strength of the association and the attribute relevance. As a former resident of Oakland where Kaiser is based, I’ve seen countless “Thrive” executions, so the linkage is very strong. Additionally, if affordability is important and relevant to me because I’m on a budget, this further increases brand salience.

The quality of brand salience speaks to that classic ad adage: “When I needed a mattress, I saw mattress ads everywhere. Then after I bought one, they all disappeared.” Your need and desire instruct what you see in the world. What you don’t need becomes invisible. At the end of the day, brand salience is a function of a) the quantity of memory structures your brand is linked to; b) the quality of these structures, as defined by the strength of association and relevance of the structure. Your job as a brand is to stay permanently visible by being exactly what your customer needs, right when they need it.

How Do You Increase Brand Salience?

Increasing brand salience is a real estate battle for taking up the most space in your customers’ heads and hearts. Brands can build their brand salience by developing a number of different memory links in buyers’ minds. This can be done a myriad of ways, whether through differentiation, storytelling, or creating meaning. Whatever you implement, maintaining customer share-of-mind depends on consistent and quality advertising. Deployment of the same distinctive assets is what will help your brand win in the marketplace over time. Here are three actionable measures your brand can take to increase its brand salience.

Lead with emotion to create distinctive, memorable assets. Could you pick your content out of a crowd? Is your design unmistakably yours? How can you make your look and feel unforgettable?
Take a bold risk to get noticed. When we talk about memory, we’re talking about that special signal that cuts through the noise. Who do you remember from the last party you attended? Was it the person quietly minding their own business in the corner? Probably not.
Go out of your way to continuously reach potential buyers. There are new ways to form memory structures with your target audience every day. Whether it’s podcasts, newsletters, or mixed reality brand experiences, every leap in technology is another tool to build a new emotional connection.

The Best Thing To Be Is Remembered

Byron Sharp, author of “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know,” says that the pursuit of differentiation and segmentation is not as useful as “creating memorable and consistent brand assets that trigger an instinctive response when they’re seen or heard at critical purchase moments – in other words, they should focus on brand salience.”

There are so many things to consider when building your brand. Of course, brand salience is not the only factor, especially in B2B situations where the journey to purchase is much more complicated than a single point of sale. Regardless, if you can create memorable and distinctive brand assets that trigger an instinctive response in a purchasing situation, you’ve already won.

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

Integrating Company Cultures After a Merger or Acquisition

Posted on September 22, 2022 by Tracy Lloyd

High M&A Activity

Mergers and acquisitions are at an all time high, with $4.7 trillion of global deals signed last year according to a recent M&A report by KMPG.

And although the payoff of a successful M&A is great, these are high risk deals. It’s not just about the financial gains. Reputations are on the line. Stakeholders observe nervously. And in order to ensure the expected return on investment is delivered, a great deal of planning around integrating company culture must go into the preparation.

Cultural Integration Issues

After an acquisition, the merger is a difficult undertaking – and often controversial. Employees may feel confused or unsure about what the future holds. And uncertainty can undercut the upsides of the deal.

When there’s a lack of communication, an incongruent cultural fit, or a poor integration plan, many mergers fail to positively impact the business – not delivering on the expected ROI. In fact, research has shown that around 70% of M&A fail to deliver their anticipated benefits because of “cultural issues.”

Because most M&A have financial, operational, or positioning motivations as the driver, many organizations fail to recognize culture as an influence that can derail the deal. And neglecting how a merger will affect your people can lead to many problems down the road.

Integrating Company Cultures Is Key to the Success of Your M&A

1. Communicate Early and Often

When people on the inside feel as though they are left in the dark, they are unlikely to jump on board with change. Transparency is key here. When your people come along on the journey and see and understand the vision for the future, they are more likely to support the integration effort.

In order to ensure internal buy-in, you need people to feel confident in the decision to merge companies. You also need them to feel secure in their job and valued in their position. You need employees on both sides of the merger to get on board with the change. Keeping everyone in the loop about the change ahead is an important first step.

2. Examine Cultural Differences

In order to establish common ground, you have to recognize and address gaps. Define each culture and map them next to each other. Where are they not aligned? Determining differences is key to figuring out what shifts need to be made and where you might run into problems. Be clear and direct about disparities so you can tackle them head on.

3. Define Your New Culture and Develop a Cultural Integration Plan

A company’s culture is made up of the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are shared among all people within your organization. Oftentimes, culture is something that is difficult to pin down and, as a result, leaders may steer away from clearly defining their culture.

However, it’s very important to define the culture you are trying to build. Leaders should be aligned and clear so they can succinctly articulate the new organization’s aspiration for the future and then behave accordingly.

So it’s important to put in place the measures and incentives that will fuel the behaviors that will then drive your culture. Dedicate the resources needed to create tools for facilitating cultural integration, measurement, and management.

4. Celebrate Change

In the end, cultural integration is about both sides adapting and celebrating the new culture that is born from the merger. This is a time of coming together and taking the best that both organizations have to offer. It’s an opportunity for growth—to get aligned, adopt new thinking, strengthen your culture, and move your business forward.

It’s a Process and Brand Strategy Can Help

Oftentimes, M&As require an investment in brand strategy to really ensure the expected ROI is delivered by employees. Don’t expect the cultural integration to happen overnight.

Dedicating the time and resources to developing and articulating your new brand will help enable both cultures to understand the opportunities of the merger. And creating a newly developed employer brand after a merger will help everyone get on board and aligned with the new brand and the future of an integrated culture.

With the right investment and focus on employees and culture, all employees will meaningfully embrace the changes required during the merger and, as a result, your business will thrive moving forward.

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

The Real Cost of Brand Transformation

Posted on September 6, 2022 by Tracy Lloyd

Oftentimes, branding is seen as just another expense. Another project that needs budgeting. Another to-do to check off the list. Additionally, a brand’s visual identity and its implementation are often seen the same way—but they shouldn’t be.

Branding is only costly to a company if the company doesn’t fully tap into the brand’s value. Likewise, if you leave your brand’s visual identity to flounder in a presentation deck, it remains an untapped value. Understanding the value of your brand and what its visual identity means is key to shifting the conversation from a business cost to its transformative value.

Symbol of Change

Before the introduction of the visual identity, the rebrand is just words on a page, insights explained, or a strategy outlined. People can’t visually see their brand in action. It hasn’t come to life. That’s why the visual identity is one of the most exciting phases of the brand strategy process. It’s the first time business leaders really get to see the strategy come to life, and it’s oftentimes exhilarating, empowering, and transformative for them.

This is where the visual identity becomes a symbol of change. It represents what’s to come for the organization. It shows how the brand will flourish in the future. It demonstrates growth potential, transformation, and exciting possibilities. It emotes the brand’s promise. Executives can finally visualize where their brand is headed, and this new frontier is intoxicating to watch unfold.

In a successful visual identity presentation, everyone in the presentation is on their feet. The room is filled with excitement and ideas are flowing. Everyone is imagining the look and feel in real-time.

The Cost

The difficulty is that before this stage, leaders often can’t fathom their budget because they haven’t seen their brand come alive yet. This is why it’s important to prepare them for this moment early on. Help them understand that a visual identity might change everything, and that advanced planning is needed to support the upcoming shifts of this wake-up call that’s right around the corner.

Approaches like a phased roll-out or touch-point conversation might help prepare them for discussions about what aspects of their brand might hold the most impact. What are the most important elements to implement first? What’s the sign of change for the media? What’s the most transformative aspect internally? This kind of prioritization will help them get ready for what’s to come.

More Value

The value of branding will transform your business. It will touch every aspect of your organization and, through the visual identity, everyone will be able to see a part of themselves in it. So, it’s critical that the brand—and visual identity—be valued from the start.

Plan for cost, but focus on value.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

For more reading on our point of view on branding, check out this post.

What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One

Posted on August 16, 2022November 1, 2024 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”

How to Prepare for Successful Business Transformations

Posted on September 13, 2021October 11, 2024 by Joanna Schull

There’s a well-worn saying in business that the only certainty is change, and these past few years have proven that to be true by exponential levels. Entire industries have found themselves faced with the need to plan and transform their businesses in the face of tremendous unknowns including COVID-19, rising inflation, and a troubled economy. Now, as we enter September of 2022, with the world still in flux, what does it mean to look ahead, and begin planning for the future?

Business transformation matters now more than ever and agility and forward-thinking scenario planning have never been more important.

Building a Roadmap for the Future in Times of Uncertainty

Taking steps to significantly shift—or transform—a company’s business can be either proactive or reactive. Ideally, it’s the former, but external events, whether created by competitors, shifts in customer needs, governmental regulations, or global events can cause the latter to be true. At a high level, the process for either is the same. Here’s the overview:

Begin with fact-based strategic planning, competitive research, and situational analysis to create the essential foundation of data about the status quo.
Next, based on this foundation of data, leaders need to identify and analyze potential future states for the business.
Based on this analysis, leadership aligns with the agreed future state and begins the work of determining the specific changes and sequencing that will be required.
Evaluate the brand and business—are they aligned with each other, or do they need to be recalibrated to make sure that the brand is supporting the new business direction?
Finally, it’s essential to keep employees informed as the process unfolds, not only so they are kept in the loop, but also as a source of feedback and information.

Let’s go into more detail on each step:

Set the Foundation

Successful transformations—or sometimes, evolutions—need to start with a clear-eyed understanding of both the current state of the business, as well as upcoming external forces that will have an impact. It’s good to approach this phase of the process with a structured set of internal and external research aimed at uncovering the business’s strengths and weaknesses, competitive threats, and unmet customer needs. In addition, it’s important to have a good understanding of known external impacts that can be anticipated—things such as regulatory changes and general business trends and market predictions.

Identify Your North Star

Armed with this foundational set of information, it’s now time for a business’s leadership team to identify potential paths forward. Oftentimes, these will exist along a continuum, starting with slight shifts to the existing business, then growing in ambition to encompass more ambitious pivots and expansions. Each potential direction is then analyzed to understand its implications: How will it impact revenue? Do we have the right talent to execute the direction? How will it change our customer base and competitive set? How does it impact our product roadmap? How will analysts and investors react? After assessing the options, the leadership team needs to discuss, align, and set a direction.

Create An Execution Plan

The next step is the planning phase: What changes need to be made in order to begin making the desired shifts? In what sequence do they need to occur? What are the potential ripple effects of those changes? It’s important to do this work in a cross-functional manner, giving all parts of the organization insights into the changes occurring. This helps to eliminate overlapping efforts and activities that could compete with or contradict each other, in addition to providing an integrated roadmap that ensures everyone knows how the change efforts fit together and combine to achieve the end result.

Align Your Brand

When making a shift, it’s essential to make sure that your brand is supporting and reinforcing your new business strategy. This starts with making sure that your brand positioning supports your chosen direction followed by your messaging and external expression of your brand: digital touchpoints (web, social, etc.), sales support materials, PR, AR, IR, and all external-facing communications. Don’t neglect the visual expression of your brand. Many companies, especially former startups entering their next phase of maturity, find that they have outgrown their previous look and feel and need to evolve into a more ‘mature’ level of design sensibility.

Bring People Along on the Journey

The most successful transformations are inclusive, and while it is important that leaders lead the process, it is equally important to involve perspectives and participation from across the organization. This includes involving different divisions, geographies, functions, and levels within the company as part of the planning process in order to get their input as plans are developed. This not only ensures that critical details aren’t overlooked but also builds engagement and buy-in to the process.

A Shared Understanding Speeds Execution

Ultimately, change is about disciplined execution and dedication to doing the work required to make change stick across multiple parts of the organization and ensuring that the people of the organization understand what the change is, how the business is going to adapt, and why it matters because organizations with a shared understanding about the reasons behind change are more likely to move forward with certainty, even in uncertain times.

Take a deep dive into our most recent B2B transformations: Coast, Snow Software, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies

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

Is What You Offer In Evolution? Adopt A Progressive Brand Positioning Strategy

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Saja Chodosh

Brand Positioning, While In Evolution

Our studio works with a diversity of clients, but most come to us in evolution: at pivotal points in their growth, maturation, and offering. For instance, we’ve worked with Series A companies that want to go to market with a compelling brand but don’t yet have a fully realized product, companies looking to emerge out of stealth who have a big vision for tomorrow but want to focus on their current product to prove results today, and maturing organizations at pivotal points in their trajectory who are facing existential decisions about how to evolve their products or build new ones. We also work with organizations who have built credibility around a certain product and/or product suite that now need to shift due to market changes and outside forces, or corporations who’ve grown via merger and acquisition and now find themselves with a complex product architecture and a diluted position in the market.

Whenever they are in their maturation—from startup to legacy—the tension between today and tomorrow can be a challenge when it comes to brand positioning, especially when what a company offers is changing or plans to change. Some worry that if they stand for something too big and too far away, the brand might overpromise on what it can actually deliver to people today. On the flip side, for many in growth mode, positioning solely around what you can credibly deliver on right now means outgrowing that position—and quickly.

Brand Positioning Should Be A North Star

It’s important to remember that product positioning and brand positioning are not one and the same. Your Brand Positioning sits on top of your product or offering, elevating the features and benefits, and value of what you offer to new heights of meaning, differentiation, and relevance in people’s minds and hearts. Ideally, a Brand Positioning should last more than several years (investing the time and resources in a brand positioning is not something you want to undertake every time what you offer evolves slightly), acting as the North Star not only for brand marketing decisions, but for product decisions, sales decisions, recruiting strategies, brand experiences, and beyond.

A Question of Balance

So, the question becomes: how do we position a brand in evolution for success today? And tomorrow? Do we own a position that speaks exclusively to what our product can offer our customers right now, or do we go big and position for the future? Or, somewhere in between? What’s the right balance?

Enter A Progressive Positioning Strategy

Enter what we call a Progressive Positioning Strategy. A brand positioning strategy that can move and evolve as your business, product, and culture does…which, for those in growth mode, it’s bound to.

Take a look:

1. Look outside-in

No compelling positioning is built in a vacuum. Our process always begins with examining trends and forces, both within your industry and in the world at large. For many clients, it’s easy to get stuck in your own thinking, rules, and expectations. Opening the aperture to what’s happening around you can change the game in terms of what’s possible.

2. Build around what’s true and unchanging

We work collaboratively with our clients to uncover what we call evergreen truths: foundational tenets that are baked into the DNA of what you do, how you do it better and uniquely, and why it matters—focusing on uncovering the truths that are true today…and will be true tomorrow. Starting here can enable relevance right now and in the future.

3. Scale the product to meet your ambition

Brands in growth mode have a vision or aspiration they are growing towards. They can envision what they want their brand to be five or even ten years from now. Aligning around this ultimate aspiration can ensure that the product decisions you’re making today are getting you step by step towards that ultimate ambition.

4. Find the right mix of today and tomorrow

Ultimately, any powerful brand has a blend. We work with our clients to find that perfect mix of today and tomorrow to create a brand that is both future-forward and visionary, while delivering and proving results and building credibility today. No brand requires the same balance. That’s why we dive deep to understand the nuance of the perfect blend for your brand, business, and culture.

5. Invite others into your shared vision of tomorrow

Building a community of “believers” who not only believe in what you do today, but what you have the potential to mean to them and the world in the future is critical. We help identify who those people are and what they care about, rationally and emotionally. We brand build to evoke immediate trust and credibility, while letting customers into your vision and helping them feel like they are a part of it is something bigger: your future.

If you want to chat more about our approach to Progressive Positioning Strategy or how to build a brand for today and tomorrow, please reach out. Emotive is an Oakland-based brand strategy and design studio.

Need Purposeful Brand Transformation? Let the Data Be Your Guide

Posted on May 20, 2021 by Joanna Schull

Re-Imagining and Evolving Your Enterprise Brand for Its Next Phase of Growth

There comes a time in most companies’ growth cycle when they realize they’ve evolved from a company into an enterprise—and that the brand positioning and messaging that got them to where they are today isn’t going to allow them to make the transformation to where they need to be tomorrow. In some cases, the ‘1.0 brand’ is actually doing the enterprise a disservice by not accurately representing their new or emerging position in the marketplace. The challenge, of course, is that evolving a successful brand can be intimidating and daunting. What if it’s a flop? What if it jeopardizes near-term sales? What if our investors, partners, or employees just don’t get it? These are all reasonable concerns. But there is a logical way forward.

Step One: Identify Competitive Opportunities

The first step in any brand reinvention: get immersed in the current state AND the future state of the business and the category. This entails getting a solid understanding of the current competitive landscape to look for the open space and areas for differentiation. Through this exercise, we’ll understand where a company is strong in relation to their current competitive set and where they have potential exposure. Because this exercise is about evolving the brand for the future, it also identifies opportunities to differentiate the company in the short term.

Step Two: Get the Right People in the Room

These days, the room might be a Zoom room or a series of Zoom rooms, but the purpose is the same: ensure that all the company’s leaders are aligned and clear on the future business strategy of the organization. To be successful, these types of bold brand transformations require executive sponsorship, ideally from the CEO and CMO, and input from the most senior stakeholders from across the organization. It’s not enough to involve just the marketing organization, or just the product organization, or only sales, etc. Doing so will almost certainly create blindspots in your brand strategy, and lack of belief down the road.

Step Three: Go to the Source

Direct and unfiltered input is invaluable in understanding your client’s brand through the most important lens: The voice of the customer. There’s no substitute for getting insights about your client directly from the source, specifically, from current customers, investors, and even potential customers that turned elsewhere. This phase both confirms what we’ve already heard or suspected, but also reveals new perspectives. It’s not uncommon to hear an anecdote that uncovers a strength or advantage that our clients were unaware of, leading to additional insights and opportunities.

Step Four: Review the Data to Reveal the Way Forward

Taking a deep dive on the data—the competitive landscape, customer and investor interviews, and the company’s own internal roadmaps—reveals opportunities to tell a different, more elevated story that will set them apart today, and can evolve over time as the roadmap comes to fruition. We also find that bringing this data-driven approach to senior stakeholders and the individuals responsible for the future roadmap confirms and grounds the new brand positioning in the facts, resulting in much greater comfort and certainty. When the logic is solid, the way forward becomes clear.

Next Steps: Socialize and Execute

The shift from incubation and creation to execution and socialization is the next logical step in bringing a new brand to life. After months of work, it’s time for the internal brand team to share what they’ve been doing with the rest of the organization. This can be the make-or-break moment of truth. Employees invariably ask: Does it ring true? Is it credible? Is it something I can get excited about? Or, is it marketing fluff?

Our recommendation: Let your people see the work behind the work. When you socialize, show them how you got there and why this brand positioning is the most strategic, logical direction that’ll help your company bridge the gap between where you are today and where you want to be in the future.

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

Navigating the New Norm: Fast Forward for Efficient Growth and Strategic Stability

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Tracy Lloyd

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure to enhance efficiency, sharpen competitiveness, and improve profitability—all at the speed your business demands.

As a brand strategy firm, we understand that many of our clients, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, need a much more agile approach to address the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a six-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Below is an outline of what we tackle each week to gain momentum and drive impact.

Weeks 1-2: Immersion and Audit
We embark on a comprehensive week of intelligence gathering and analysis. We dive deep into your brand, business, and industry, fully immersing ourselves to gain insights and understanding.

We’ll assess your current positioning to distinguish your brand from key competitors, interview stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working, identify white space opportunities for you to own in market, evaluate your latest brand and product messaging, and present a comprehensive audit of our discoveries.

Week 3: Workshop
Based on our findings from the immersion and audit, we develop, explore, and workshop new ideas to enhance your positioning and messaging, ensuring alignment with internal teams.

Weeks 4-6: Develop, Refine, and Deliver
During the final phase of Fast Forward, we focus on producing your bespoke deliverables that will provide the highest possible value and impact on your organization. Below are just a few examples of deliverables you can choose from after we’ve aligned on the key challenges you are facing:

Implement your augmented positioning and messaging through website landing pages that stand out and move the needle
Refresh your sales deck to amplify the impact of your elevated story
Craft a narrative to align and empower cross-functional teams with a unifying vision and strategy to harmonize your efforts

At the end of the six-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process of our Fast Forward offering.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you looking to make an immediate impact?

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel brands, cultures, and businesses forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.