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Category: Brand Transformation

Adopt a Growth Mindset to Drive Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

We believe an organization that adopts a growth mindset can position itself to thrive. But what exactly defines a growth mindset?

At Emotive Brand, we define a growth mindset as a set of attitudes and behaviors that reflect the belief that an individual’s talent is not set in stone. Talent can be developed. Intelligence can be fostered. Creativity and innovation can be strengthened. Leaders can emerge. People hold potential.

This means every employee within an organization has to have the ability to develop, grow, and learn. And organizations who believe this seek out individuals who show a capacity for such growth. And we believe that the companies who work to help each of these individuals progress, advance in their roles, take on more leadership capabilities, and constantly evolve their skills and thinking will thrive as a whole.

Growth Mindset Is Key

Strong leadership, continual learning, and innovation are key to thriving business today. And not just amongst the C-suite or those in designated leadership roles. Leadership and learning must be fostered throughout an organization in order for that organization to really progress. Although this often starts at the top, it must ring true throughout an entire business.

A fixed mindset – unlike a growth mindset – does not encourage any of these ideals. Nor does it allow employees to grow and new leaders to emerge. And less risk-taking, less freedom, less collaboration, and less acceptance of failure – all behavioral symptoms of a fixed mindset – can be detrimental to business.

Adopt a Growth Mindset to Drive Business By:

1. Seeking out learners

Often times, in business, as expertise increases, individuals struggle more and more to see new solutions or ideas.  Learning stalls and this leads businesses to get stuck in their thinking.

In order to adopt a growth mindset that can fuel your organization forward, you must focus on people’s capacity and not their pedigree. As such, recruitment should value people who show a real commitment to learning. These people will help build a learning culture, develop independently, collaborate successfully, and be able to adapt to whatever challenges arise.

Individuals that value learning, and show a capacity and passion for continual knowledge have a natural growth mindset that can move any business towards success.

2. Allowing employees to step out of their daily work

Creating a growth mindset means enabling each individual’s work to be more than just their job. Developing new skills – even if they shift outside of someone’s current daily work – is always valuable.

We believe that understanding and learning other roles than your own can help promote empathy, collaboration, and encourage new ways of approaching things. And setting aside time to build skills such as collaboration and leadership is key to making your people more productive and inspired at work.  

3. Building a culture that is willing to take risks and accept failure

An inevitable part of growth is failure. And adopting a growth mindset means accepting the chance that, in the end, you might fail. But innovation, creativity, and fueling a business forward wouldn’t be possible if people weren’t willing to take risks.

And often, this starts at the top. Leaders should set an example but also allow all employees to take on leadership roles – giving individuals the independence and freedom to try things, fail, and learn from their mistakes.

Taking on challenges is key. And organizations who view their people as capable of taking on challenges – even if it means failing – position themselves for success.

4. Driving commitment, determination, and innovation

Employees at growth mindset companies feel more committed to their work because they feel they have the potential to grow, learn, and thrive within it. They also feel more motivated to do their best because they know that their personal development and hard work is valued.

In fact, research has shown that employees at growth mindset organizations pursue more innovative projects. They also behave more transparently, cut fewer corners, and work more collaboratively. And these authentically motivated people will drive innovation and fuel business. Goals and Objectives

Any business that wants to position itself to meet goals and objectives, set new ones, continually move forward, and advance needs to adopt a growth mindset to succeed.

It’s all about developing, advancing, expanding, and seeing the opportunity and potential in every moment, individual, failure, and success. A growth mindset will move your business forward and position your business, its brand, and its people for growth, profit, and success in the future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

How to Prepare for Successful Business Transformations

Posted on 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.

Excuse Me, But Can I Get A Little Transformation With My Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

Change. It’s a bitch. It’s also axiomatic in our industry. Whether you’re a startup emerging from stealth mode, an industry disruptor going public, or an enterprise business in the middle of a merger, every organization is learning to succeed amidst exponentially complex, relentlessly rapid change.

We get it. These growth moments force business leaders to rethink everything from value chains to backend technologies. They sometimes require reorganization. And they almost always mean revisiting the brand strategy that got you from where you began to today. More importantly, they force a conversation about where you’re going — how to position your business for what’s next and build a flywheel for growth.

But there’s a catch. Sustained growth isn’t just about getting from Point A to Point B. It actually requires continuous transformation. And very few organizations are good at adapting quickly. Or consistently.

Emotive’s experience working with clients at all growth stages is revealing: leaders believe that designing for the future is critically important, but day-to-day responsibilities almost always supersede forward-looking ambitions. They’re simply too hard to push forward without a strategy that’s actually built with transformation — and the whole organization — in mind.

So what do we usually advise?

1. First, figure out how you’re actually going to design your strategy as a process. Will it be top-down or bottom-up? Top-down means that vision flows from executives to managers to on-the-ground employees. It’s efficient, but there’s often loss of clarity and context by the time it trickles down. It produces a lot of questions: How is this relevant to what I do every day? Is what I do everyday going to change? Do you want me to behave differently? Bottom-up invites participation from people closest to customers first. The work still starts at the top, but it begins by developing open-ended questions that engage employees, asking them to co-create the storyline with leaders.

2. No matter what process model is right for your organization, someone needs to be in charge of change. Maybe it’s the CEO if you’re a smaller startup. Maybe it’s a Chief Brand Officer if you’re a larger, enterprise business. Regardless, great brand strategy is only as effective as how it cascades out and across an organization. And that requires a person or team that’s actually in charge of transformation — operationalizing strategic change for the business, including its people, behavior, and culture.

3. Challenge assumptions. If you want different results, you have to disrupt ingrained ways of doing things. Learn how to make new choices, even if they’re uncomfortable. This is especially true for the leadership team, but applicable across the organization.

4. Unleash strategy from the c-suite! Real change requires that everyone across the business adopt a growth mindset, which in turn requires shared context and understanding of the path forward. If that knowledge gets trapped at the top during the strategy process, it makes execution harder, if not impossible.

5. Communicate the hell out of what you’re doing. No matter what your strategy design process, the majority of execution happens deep inside an organization. If you want the whole business to succeed, everyone has to be a full participant, engaged in the activities of change, not just the recipient of a blueprint or — worse yet — an executive slide presentation. Generate curiosity and buzz along the way. If everyone is rolling up their sleeves together, there’s a collective sense of what’s possible. This makes it a lot easier to move the whole ship in the right direction.

Of course, these are just rules of thumb. Every organization has to define what’s required to meet its own greatest vision of success. Developing effective brand strategy is an integral starting point. Don’t give short shrift to the intentional transformation design necessary to bring smart strategy to life.

Need Purposeful Brand Transformation? Let the Data Be Your Guide

Posted on 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.

Ensuring Our Clients’ Success: Change Management and How We Help

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Helping Our Clients Be Successful

As a brand strategy agency, it’s our job to ensure that our clients are successful. The strategy and strategically-informed design we create is meant to position our clients’ business and brand to thrive.

But at the end of the day, it’s not just about how smart or groundbreaking the strategy or design is. There’s a lot of planning and change management that goes into making sure the project is successful and followed through from start to finish in the most impactful way possible. Operations and project management are key to any brand strategy project. Helping a client manage their project, aligning our teams together, and pushing a project forward on schedule is no easy task.

In our experience, change management and ensuring our clients’ success hinges on:

1. Developing a relationship

The first step is all about building a relationship. We’re all human after all. As an agency, we put people first. That’s at the heart of Emotive Brand and what we believe business should be—human. You have to get to know the client and the client has to get to know you. It’s all about trust and respect. Any project will have ups and downs that require give and take, so it’s important to establish common ground. What makes shifts and obstacles down the road easier is when both the client and agency feel like they’re on the same team.

The benefits of building trust are unending. We want people to come to us and say: “We have this doubt. We need help with this. How would you approach this?” And it’s easier to get people to let you guide them and be open to your advice and strategy if they trust you.

It all starts with focusing on the relationship. Creating an environment where you can—if need be—deliver bad news, or say no. Creating an environment where you can celebrate successes and also power through obstacles, together. Face time is important here. Whether its virtual conferences, workshops, meetings, these are often appropriate and convenient tools for communication—especially given our current circumstances. It’s key to understanding people and the cultures they work in. It gives context to people and how they think and work. It changes the relationship for the better and helps collaboration flourish more naturally.

When former clients still call us to check in, to ask how we are, and seek our advice long after a project is over—that’s a success to us.

2. Establishing the expectation of accountability and ownership

Planning, creating calendars, establishing deadlines, setting up check-ins, all of these planning tools are key. But they only really work if people actually show up and deliver what’s expected of them, and this all hinges on accountability. Setting expectations about availability and respecting each other’s timing from the onset is just as important as doing what you say you’re going to do.

As the agency, we create standing project management meetings with our clients to make sure that everyone knows what’s expected of them and to help everyone stay accountable. These meetings are a platform for discussing key milestones, workshops, deadlines, etc. We’ve found that projects get stalled when people feel they are too busy to meet with you. This is why having these meetings is so important. Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s time matters. But by being clear about expectations and deadlines, we get the project done with the least amount of time wasted.

When we figure out how to manage the project together and are aligned around key dates (board meetings, all-hands meetings, etc.) we can more easily build a schedule around an already existing workflow—capitalizing on opportunities when people are already going to be together, which is especially important for global clients.

It’s also important to establish who the key decision-makers are at the outset: who owns the project and who ultimately has the ability to move the project forward. We have to get to the heart of who these people are so we make sure they are there for key moments of the process.

When a project gets stalled because the schedule isn’t followed, the impact gets diluted. There are large stakes. That’s why planning out the resource requirements and establishing accountability from the beginning is so integral to the overall project success—setting up what you need, when you need it, and from whom you’re getting it.

3. Working proactively, always anticipating

Change is hard for anyone, but anticipating the challenges of change is what’s going to make it possible. It’s all about bringing the right people into the process at the right time. There are times when we have to add in minor steps within the process because we anticipate a roadblock ahead. For example, doing a pre-presentation to an executive in order to get them on board and comfortable ahead of a bigger meeting.

It’s also helpful to draw from past experiences in order to anticipate and read the signs of what’s ahead. Every client is different, but we learn different things from each experience. We’re always thinking about the questions: “What would help this process? What would help to get this person on board? What do we need to do to move this forward? What needs to happen next?”

It’s all about being proactive and being a step ahead. That’s what helps make hard transitions smoother. That’s what makes preparing for change feasible.

4. Rigor and flexibility

For a process to create an innovative, change-making strategy it needs to be coupled with rigor and order that ensures trust and confidence.

There’s got to be a process, but you also have to be able to flex within that process. No two projects are the same. Different forks always appear in the road, and often, you have to pause or stop and reflect. Sometimes, you just need more time. Other times, you need more people or even a different direction. We see deliverables shift based on needs. The solution might change but, whatever the change, being flexible within the rigor of the process is key.

Along the journey, you always uncover new things. Listening—really listening—to the client’s needs is key. And needs are ever-evolving. Flexibility comes from learning and adapting to these evolving needs.

Ensure the success of the project and position your client to thrive. That’s the goal, and we are always striving towards better ways of helping our clients reach their goals.

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

Uncovering the True Dynamics of Strategy + Design Synergy: A Conversation Between Robert Saywitz and Giovanna Blackston Keren

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

Our recent work rebranding Topstep—a financial trading platform based in Chicago, IL—shed light not only on our belief in the power of simplicity and clarity for our client but also on internal agency processes that helped us create an authentically differentiated brand. I sat down recently with our Director of Strategy, Giovanna Blackston Keren, to have a candid conversation about our roles in this process and why agencies seem to talk about the relationship between Strategy and Design more often than it comes together successfully in real life. We used our work on Topstep as a prism for this discussion because, in many ways, the project typified how we seamlessly crafted a strategy + design experience from start to finish. Giovanna asked all the right questions.

Why are agencies always talking about the collaboration between Strategy and Design? If it really happens so seamlessly, and if it’s the norm, then why are we all still talking about it?

The truth is, a seamless integration of the two is the ideal but not all agencies are able to pull it off. With Topstep, as with other clients, we were able to bridge the gap by bringing designers into the project early and keeping strategists involved throughout the process. Inviting designers to the initial kickoffs and key meetings helped them absorb the full brand story, informing their creative development. Inviting strategists to provide quick gut-checks throughout the creative process also kept things moving forward while also voicing moments when design needed to shift or even stand down and let the strategy come through more prominently. Extending involvement in both directions is often a problem of bandwidth, but well worth it in the end.

Why do you think that Strategy and Design often seem to be on such different pages, that actually finding a way for us to be talking the same language is challenging?

There is often a natural divide between the expert skill sets of the Strategist and the Designer but, here at Emotive Brand, we bridge that gap in a few ways. One is by having designers involved in Strategy meetings and vice versa; we have also started to share knowledge within our teams through skill-sharing workshops so that Strategists and Designers understand what each other do and literally begin to speak the same language. It also helps that we have specific roles for Creative Strategists—strategists with design/writing backgrounds and steeped in design but performing as a high-level strategic thinker and, at times, a copywriter for the designers and presentations. Their role often transcends boundaries and is the connective thread between strategy and design processes, as well as the articulation of creative thinking to the client. Specifically, with Topstep, this seamless dialogue between Strategy and Design allowed us to focus on the inauthentic, dry, and confusing nature of the language of most financial institutions. Our designers utilized this insight to tap into something bespoke and authentic—cutting through the clutter with radical honesty and a bold, language-driven typographic system.

So often throughout my career, I’ve felt like when I’m finally sharing the strategic blueprint with designers, they tend to see it as shackles rather than a wellspring for exploration—even though the strategy platform is usually built upon months and months of research, interviews, and insights. Do you see Strategy as a constraint in your process?

I actually find that the right kind of constraint can function as a creative accelerant to get you to the strongest ideas much quicker, but perhaps guardrails is a better word than constraints because, without the guidance of the strategy, you’re often jumping around in different directions, exploring far too many ideas that don’t have the grounding of the strategy. I have a fine art background so I know all too well that stepping up to a blank canvas with no plan in mind is much more of an overwhelming challenge than when I have my sketchbook full of notes to guide my process. When you have strategic limits in place, it creates much more freedom and opportunity for a deeper exploration rather than wider, and in this sense, the rules can actually set you free. When we started our initial ideation for Topstep’s new brand identity, we cast a wide net with 20-30 different mood boards, but the strategy helped us efficiently narrow our focus to 5 of the most relevant and resonant options that embodied the strategy and the kind of brand that Topstep wanted to be.

Ultimately, we’re not creating just brand strategies, and we’re not creating visual identities. We’re creating brand experiences, brand worlds, and those worlds have to be built out of Strategy and Design.

Yes, the success we enjoyed with Topstep came from the constant conversation between designers and strategy along the journey—using the strategic platform as a foundational road map for creative exploration. We were very purposeful in bringing the client along on the journey as an active participant and everything we presented to them was met with a very open discussion about our rationale for design decisions—no feedback or pain point was too delicate to unpack between us, which is often a missed opportunity between agency and client. I think that level of honest conversation from the very start of the strategy process through the end of design helped build a foundation of trust and respect between us and the client that allowed us to move much more efficiently and make great decisions together. Ultimately, it helped a great deal when it came time to sell in a radically simple design direction.

The final design direction for Topstep was directly inspired by one of the territories that we brought to Topstep in our Strategy Workshop “And the rules shall set you free.” Traders often feel that the rules hold them back from really being able to be the successful trader they think they can be but, in reality, it is these very rules that keep them on the right path to ultimate success. Seems like a meaningful parallel here with our conversation about the relationship between Strategy and Design?

Definitely. Just as Strategy provides guardrails, it also allows you to explore freely without feeling like you’re staring at that blank canvas, reaching for any idea that may be well-executed but has no relevance with the business or what it is we’re trying to achieve, and in that way, the rules really can set you free. For Topstep, we harnessed this strategic freedom to move against the grain of the natural instinct for many clients to add as many elements into the composition as possible to tell their story and opting for being utterly clear, simple, and to the point, and in the financial world, that becomes quite radical.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hofmann

Click the link to see our work for Topstep: https://www.emotivebrand.com/topstep/

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

A brand strategy can take what people know and believe about your business to new levels. Active brand management takes a valuable asset that may now be largely underused and turns it into a powerful competitive weapon.

Regardless of how sophisticated your current approach to branding is, your business has a “brand” today, though you may have acquired it by default. Simply by being active in the marketplace, your business will have accrued a reputation, a level of fame, and a degree of notoriety (for better or worse) with your customers, and within your industry.

A strong brand strategy will take all that value and put it to work in new ways. It will elevate the importance and relevance of what is already known and believed about your business. It can also add many new reasons, both rational and emotional, that will create stronger bonds with customers and make your business more attractive to prospects. Finally, a well-constructed brand strategy can be used to unite and motivate your employees.

When your business has a focused brand strategy, all its working pieces generate more preference, loyalty, and appeal for your offering and greater profits to your bottom line.

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

Your brand serves as a magnet, drawing prospects to your offerings. Buyers see more difference between your offering and those of your competitors and act in your favor. Your brand stands out in an engaging way in the “me-also” world of your industry and beats back your competitors.

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

Your brand works as a glue, binding customers to your brand so they stay with you, grow with you, and tell others about your brand. It helps you identify your best customers and to direct special efforts against them. There’s far greater ROI in keeping an existing customer than recruiting a new one, and a strong brand idea can optimize your marketing budget.

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

Your brand works as a North Star that your employees follow. As a result, employees feel more engaged, work harder for your brand’s success, and become great ambassadors for your brand. And when recruits feel the energy of your brand, and see the results your workplace generates, they are more likely to join your business.

Today’s most successful leaders embrace brand strategy as part of their overall business strategy. By setting concrete brand goals, and developing strategies and tactics to achieve them, they have seen their brands grow and prosper.

Arm your business strategy with a stronger brand. Develop a brand strategy that takes everything you do today to a new level. Then use your brand to win.

Learn more about the power of a strong brand strategy and brand differentiation. Download our white paper, Transforming Your Brand.

 Download White Paper

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

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Branding Project: Do You Actually Want Something Bold?



Posted on by Chris Ames

Make it Bold

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

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

What it Is and What it Isn’t

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

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

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

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

Keeping Bold Ideas Alive

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

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

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

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

Stay Nervous

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

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

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

Brand Campaign: Emotional vs. Emotive Brands – What’s the Difference?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of an Emotional Brand Campaign

Have you seen a brand campaign lately that made you laugh? Cry? Smile? There are a lot of campaigns out there that pull at people’s heartstrings. And often the most shared campaigns are the ones that rely heavily on emotional content.

As a result, a lot of brands today are hyper-focused on creating emotional advertisements. People rely quite heavily on emotions to make decisions. Anyone in branding today knows this, but just because your brand produces one emotional campaign, doesn’t mean it’s positioned for long-term success. Today, to really connect meaningfully with people, your brand must be emotive, not just emotional.

The Requirements of Emotive Branding

Emotive brands are rarer than emotional brands for many reasons. Emotive brands don’t just create emotional ads. They forge meaningful – and valuable – emotional connections at every touchpoint. They are consistent with the emotions they elicit and make sure that these same emotions ring true through everything they do. Every touchpoint counts: the tone of voice your employees have on customer service calls, how your packaging and website make people feel, how people within your office talk with one another, how leaders welcome new employees, the emotions customers have when they first visit your store, office, warehouse, etc.

Being a truly emotive brand requires building an emotional experience that resonates with the customer at every point of their journey, which is no easy task. It requires a strategic mindset and complete alignment around what emotions your brand wants to elicit and how you plan to create and foster those emotions across all platforms, touch points, and brand engagements. When brands do figure out how to successfully behave as emotive brands, they are able to connect more meaningfully with their audiences. This means people are more likely to remain loyal and engaged, and ultimately feel bonded to the promise of the brand in the long-term.

An Emotive Brand Campaign Must:

1. Behave authentically:

Some emotional brand campaigns feel as if they are trying to elicit emotional responses purely to leverage their own business. These never work out in the end because they feel inauthentic. Being credible and authentically bonding with people through shared values, attitudes, and behaviors has more long-term hold today. Especially since consumers are more distrustful of businesses than ever before. Make sure the emotions that your brand is trying to elicit feel true to who you are as a business, what you promise people, and where you see your brand going. Your brand must behave authentically at every touchpoint in order to create an emotional impact that sticks with people in the right ways.

2. Focus on consistency:

Consistency doesn’t mean boring or always predictable. Building guardrails for emotions can be particularly helpful here. Give your brand room to play, experiment, and be innovative without confusing consumers or behaving in ways that are off-brand and dilute your emotional impact. This means diving deep into what kind of relationship you really want to build with people, whether they be your employees, consumers, other businesses, or competitors. How can you connect in ways that feel consistent, but still flex to people’s unique needs?

3. Build meaningful experiences:

Every brand moment is an opportunity to build further meaning and should be approached as so. Whether it’s an internal meeting, an external presentation, a small or big event, a phone call, an email, or a board meeting – there is always space to convey the unique meaning of your brand and evoke the feelings that are distinct to it. Truly emotive brands are continually thinking of new ways to reconfigure, reshape, redefine, and enhance these brand moments – infusing emotions and meaning at every moment in subtle, yet powerful ways. This requires creativity and dedication to making every moment meaningful.

4. Be human:

As technology advances faster than ever before and digital becomes the new norm, being human is even more important for brands looking to connect with the people who matter so much to their success. A key part of behaving as a human brand – relatable, connected, lovable – is being emotive. Humans are both rational and emotional creatures, so connecting on a human level requires both the rational and the emotional. Marrying these in an authentic way is what gets people on board. Behaving as a human brand today means being flexible and dynamic. It’s about being in-tune with how your brand is making people feel, and being able to adjust accordingly.

More Than an Emotional Fix

Emotional brands may give consumers a 30-second emotional fix, but emotive brands forge meaningful connections that withhold time, shifts in the market, and even new competitors. Our work developing brand campaigns has proved time and again that emotive brands are better positioned to behave authentically, meaningfully, and humanly – and as a result, better positioned to thrive. No matter if you are a B2B or a B2C brand, your success hinges on how you connect with the people who matter to your business. These connections must be meaningful. Learn more about the power of emotive branding to power your brand campaign and create a more emotive, and therefore meaningful brand campaign.

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

Designing and Maintaining an Emergent Brand

Posted on by Jonathan Haggard

When the Emotive Brand design team creates a brand system, we design it to last for many years. In order for a brand system to last that long, it needs to be consistent with a specific core idea, yet flexible enough to grow over time in order to accommodate changes in the landscape, growth into new sectors, building out sub-brands, etc. Let’s explore two different methodologies in conducting brand design and the end result of each: modernist design and emergent design.

Modernist Design: One Solution

Modernist design methodology is built on the practice of digging to find the golden nugget of a single solution, then testing and polishing that nugget into something that is refined and workable for the specific problem at hand. The rules for the solution are codified and set in stone. The specific problem is continually solved using the same set of rules. However, this often leads to the same solution being applied to multiple different problems as a way of short cutting the design process. Why wouldn’t businesses be trying to use the same solution? It’s what they have in their toolkit – but they aren’t aware that this method is ill-fated from the start. It’s the classic “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 

In contrast, emergent design strives to give you the raw steel to work with, so you can create hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, drills, any tool that will naturally solve the problem at hand yet still remain true to its core composition.

 

Emergent Design: A Step Further

Similar to modernist design, emergent design also strives to find that nugget, but goes a step deeper and inspects the atomic composition of the nugget, and uses that underlying structure to let the rest of the design system emerge naturally from its basis. 

Just as nature is able to adapt to its environment, emergent design adapts to an ever-changing business environment. Take the butterfly. Within the core of a butterfly is a systemic solution to a specific set of problems, but those problems can vary across the entire planet, yet the core of the butterfly is able to adapt. Circumstances were created to benefit an insect that drinks nectar and transfers pollen across plants. This in turn became beneficial to the larger ecosystem. The butterfly never receives education or is told specifically what to do in its role, but the structure of the creature itself lets its behavior emerge naturally. 

 

Designing To Let Your Brand Learn on Its Own

Emergent rulesets are cultivated naturally from the core of a brand in response to execution. We learn in the same way. Our core has a few properties that are true no matter what, then we are let loose to execute that core within the world. The results that we receive from our behaviors directly modify our core and lead us to change our next execution. A new rule has emerged.

Let’s say that you’re a naturally curious teenager. Your curiosity is your core and it naturally leads you to learn new things. So you pick up guitar and learn a few songs to show your friends. You get a positive reaction and a big rush of dopamine. A new ruleset has emerged. Learning new things at a deeper level facilitates your core curiosity in a beneficial way and so that emergent ruleset of deeper learning becomes interwoven with your core. This modification to the core will change your behavior to not only be curious about things, but to learn them on a deeper level in the future.

Adaptation and learning are innate characteristics to emergent design. Take Darwin’s finches below. They are of the same family (share the same core), but have adapted to their environments over time. Emergent brands do the same thing. The core is not prescriptive, but emergent. The core family of these birds did not restrict their adaptations, because if it did they wouldn’t be able to propagate as much as they have. Because the core was able to be modified from external factors, the core let an adaptation emerge in order to take advantage of a new food source. In business, this means your brand can flourish entering a new market and still represent the core of your company. 

An Emergent Brand Is Self-Maintaining

Emergent design leads to the opposite of a traditional brand guidelines document. Instead of specifying very specific instances where the system was designed to work, we instead specify the core concept and underlying structure of the brand and let the rules dictate themselves. An emergent system grows over time, it adapts to its environment, and as a result the rulesets change and grow over time as well. This eschews the typical PDF or printed guidelines document where everything is set in stone and ushers in a new era of digital-only guideline systems that are accessible and editable by your design team.

When a designer looks at an emergent brand, they should be able to take in the system from seeing just a few examples and be able to execute the system without drudging through 5 pages of what NOT to do with your logo. The componentry at work isn’t the thing that needs to be systematized. The most critical thing that a designer needs to understand about an emergent brand is what defines the core and what properties are being used to express the core.

When we consider the Embark example above, this is what the core of a brand looks like. Embedded into the geometry of the mark is a series of hexagons. This is all you need to design the rest of the Embark system.

But Emergent Design Depends on the Designer

The thing about emergent design systems is that you need really good designers to see them through thoughtfully. You can’t just plug any person into your design role and expect them to be able to execute on an emergent brand. They need to be able to see the underlying structure of your system and know where to push it to adapt to your business’s needs. Take Yamaha for example. Their core is “Sharing Passion & Performance.” They make products that range from dirt bikes to professional audio equipment. If they had a strict modernist brand, both of the products below would share the exact same design characteristics. However, they don’t. The dirt bike is light, stripped-down, colorful, and aggressive. To the right, the guitar amplifier is a solid and reliable heirloom that is beautiful enough to be passed down to your grandchildren. They still stuck to their core of “Sharing Passion & Performance,” but they adjusted the aesthetic values of the execution based on the emergent nature of the forms of the products themselves and the demographics of the people who would buy them.

How To Interview Designers for Your Emergent Brand

Here are some questions to gauge fluency in emergent design and the underlying intention behind design candidates.

What is your philosophy of design?

  • See if they have a specific idea of what they are trying to accomplish in their practice. If they are early on in their career, it might be fuzzier. Avoid people who just want to make “cool shit” without any conceptual thinking backing it up.

Where do you start in your design process?

  • Look for whether or not concepting is at the start of their process, or if it’s there at all. Concept underlies all emergent design.

Can you show us an example of something where you had to research a really complex topic in order to come to your design solution?

  • It’s critical for designers to have a cogent understanding of the topic they are designing for. They are making decisions that are directly impacting the communication of the business and they need to understand it thoroughly.

What is the underlying idea in a specific project and how was that idea brought to life in componentry?

  • See if the idea extends into typeface selection, color choice, graphic system. There should be an underlying idea that has informed the whole system and that idea should be woven throughout everything.

You wouldn’t use only a hammer to build a house. There’s a myriad of problems that you run into that require special tools suited to each individual job. Emergent design allows for multiple tools and solutions to naturally occur that all remain true to your original core element. It’s a flexible methodology for chaotic times and a philosophy proven by nature for 3.5 billion years.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco-based brand strategy and design studio.