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Category: Culture Transformation

Where Belief Begins

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Before culture had codes, before brands had voice, before strategy had language, there was belief.

Unspoken. Felt. Known. Shared.

Not the belief written in value statements. Not the kind posted in stairwells and slide decks. The deeper kind. The kind that shapes what people trust, resist, follow, or abandon without ever needing a reason.

That’s what everything stands on. And right now, the ground is shifting.

We’re watching belief systems crack across institutions, industries, even identities. The world is running on fragile assumptions about growth, leadership, and what matters to whom and why.

And when the ground starts to move, people feel it long before they can name what’s changed.

In those moments, belief is what holds. Belief in each other. In the future. In whether what they’re part of is still worth fighting for.

The leaders who sense this aren’t just reacting to change—they’re grounding people in something deeper. They’re creating something others can feel, even if they don’t yet have the words.

Belief doesn’t live in strategy or in your onboarding deck. It lives in the stories people tell when no one is watching. In the quiet before a meeting starts. In what they carry home at the end of the day.

If people don’t believe it, they won’t help make it real. And they won’t stay for it.

So, the real work has changed. It isn’t about what we say anymore. It’s about what people can feel is true. That’s where belief begins to take shape.

The leaders who matter now can sense belief before they can say why. They know it forms quietly, between people, in unguarded moments, in the decisions that never make the agenda. They are not trying to manufacture belief. They notice when it starts to take shape, faint but real, waiting to be named.

They do the work that reveals it. In how decisions get made. In what gets rewarded. In which voices get heard.

They build organizations that can hold hard questions without rushing to easy answers. Teams that understand the difference between tension that creates and tension that destroys.

When belief takes root—real belief, the kind that does not need defending—it changes what is possible.

Not because someone wrote it down. Because everyone already knows.

That is what we are building at Emotive Brand. A practice built on conviction and emotion. Because what endures isn’t what you say, but what people feel is true. What lasts when markets shift and strategies change. What people remember. And why they stay.

Conviction Is the Fastest Way Forward

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Why Conviction—Not Pressure—is What Creates Real Organizational Speed

Every leadership team wants to go faster. Faster product launches. Faster decision cycles. Faster reactions to change. Just faster.

In a world where disruption is constant and expectations only rise, speed isn’t a luxury. It’s a lifeline. So companies try to engineer it. They compress timelines, layer on agile rituals, and ramp up accountability. They tighten the system, hoping pressure will create acceleration.

But here’s what we see again and again with executive teams under strain: Pressure creates motion. But it doesn’t create momentum.

When Movement isn’t Progress

Many organizations are in near-constant motion. Everyone’s busy. Meetings multiply. New initiatives are always launching. And yet, nothing seems to fundamentally shift. People are working hard. They’re trying. But something’s missing. Usually, it’s belief. Not in a philosophical sense. In a very practical one.

When teams don’t believe in the strategy, when they don’t fully trust their leaders—or the future that’s being painted for them—they don’t accelerate. They hesitate. They wait to be sure. They avoid risk. They play it safe.

And that hesitation? That’s what slows things down. Not tools. Not process gaps. A lack of conviction.

Belief is What Actually Moves People

We don’t talk about it enough, but belief is structural. It’s not about values posters on your walls or survey scores. It’s about what people carry into real situations.  Like:

  • Deciding whether to challenge a decision—or stay quiet
  • Taking initiative without being asked—or waiting for approval
  • Making a hard tradeoff—or kicking it down the road

When people believe in what they’re building—and in who they’re building it with—they don’t wait. They move. And that’s what creates speed. Not pressure. Not process. Belief.

What the Data Shows

It’s not just observation. The data backs it up:

  • Only 23% of employees are engaged globally (Gallup, 2024). That’s a massive signal. Not of burnout—but of disbelief. When belief is missing, acceleration stalls.
  • Trust in institutions—including business—has dropped below 35% worldwide (Edelman, 2024). Leaders are trying to go faster in an environment where people are skeptical by default.
  • Organizations with high alignment and commitment are 3.7x more likely to be top performers (McKinsey). That’s belief, quantified.
  • Companies with clear alignment make decisions five times faster, with half the effort (BCG). That’s what belief enables—speed without drag.

These aren’t marginal gains. This is the compounding effect of conviction.

What High-Belief Leaders Do Differently

They don’t just look at speed as a process challenge. They ask different questions.

  • NOT: “Why aren’t we moving fast enough?”  BUT: “What’s missing from what people believe?”
  • NOT: “What do we need to push harder?”  BUT: “Where is belief breaking down?”
  • NOT: “What’s our cadence?”  BUT: “Do our people trust the direction enough to move on their own?”

Because when belief is present, alignment happens faster. People move without waiting. And execution feels lighter.

From Internal Conviction to Market Recognition

What happens inside a company eventually becomes visible outside it. Shared conviction creates the coherence the market needs to understand what a company has become.

The market can only recognize, believe, and value what a company itself understands and carries consistently. When conviction is shared internally, that coherence becomes visible outside the company, too. When it isn’t, the fragmentation leaks out—sales tells one story, marketing tells another, and customers and investors piece together a version of the company that’s incomplete, or already out of date.

That’s the distance we call the Belief Gap: the space between the company you’ve actually built and the company the market is prepared to recognize, believe, and price. A lack of internal conviction doesn’t just slow decisions down. It widens that gap—because the market can’t believe a story the company isn’t carrying consistently itself.

It’s the same mechanism, inside and out. Conviction is what’s true inside the company. Emotional Impact is what turns that truth into something people can feel. Belief is what the market gives back once it recognizes what the company has become. Internally, that belief looks like speed. Externally, it looks like being understood, valued, and priced for what you’ve actually built.

So the choice we described above—pressure or belief—was never just an internal one. Build conviction inside, and eventually it shows up outside: in how investors describe you, how customers talk about you to their peers, and how quickly the market catches up to who you’ve actually become.

The Shift That Matters

You can keep optimizing for activity—more meetings, more urgency, more friction. Or you can build belief.

It doesn’t mean abandoning discipline. It means recognizing what actually makes speed sustainable. Because belief isn’t about being idealistic. It’s about being real with people, clear about where you’re going, and committed to making it worth their effort.

That’s what changes behavior. That’s what scales. And that’s what creates the only kind of speed that lasts.

–

We’re Emotive Brand, a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies. We help close the Belief Gap so companies become understood, valued, and priced for what they have built.

Culture Transformation: Give Your Employees a Reason to Believe

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The Unspoken Truth

Feel the weight of it. In conference rooms across the world, leaders unveil visions meant to inspire, yet faces remain blank, hearts unmoved. This isn’t just a momentary disconnect. It’s the emotional void where transformation goes to die.

When 30% of your people feel invisible and 65% feel their contributions evaporate into thin air, they’re not just unhappy—they’re unreachable. The most brilliant strategy means nothing to a soul that doesn’t believe.

Belief Matters When Stakes Are High

We stand at the edge of a new emotional landscape. The old certainties have dissolved into air. Promotions are fewer. Pay bumps are smaller. IPOs are on hold. The promise of financial upside isn’t doing what it used to.

And your employees are paying attention.

As Carolyn Moore, a Chief People Officer coach who works with high-growth leaders puts it:

“Employees need a reason to believe.
And if you don’t give them one, they’ll go.”

 

She’s right. Your best people don’t just want to feel appreciated. They want to feel their work is meaningful, that it’s leading somewhere, and that it’s worth staying for. Without that belief, they’ll start weighing other options, whether they’re actively job-hunting or not.

The Beautiful Barriers We Build

What gets in the way isn’t bad intent. It’s leadership focus in the wrong place:

  • Values with no follow-through. When values live on posters but not in practice, people stop trusting what you say.
  • Inconsistent leadership. Mixed messages from the top fracture belief and wear people down.
  • Cultural noise. Endless initiatives, shifting priorities, and overuse of the word “transformation” make it hard to know what really matters.
  • Emotional blind spots. Most organizations don’t know how their employees actually feel, and even fewer know what to do with that insight.

The Power of Emotional Clarity

Belief isn’t built through behavior metrics. It’s built through emotional clarity.

At Emotive Brand, we use an approach called Emotional Acceleration. It’s a way to move people from understanding what you’re trying to do to believing in it enough to act.

It starts with a simple question: How do people feel right now? Not what they are doing. Not what they are producing. What are they feeling?

Through an Emotional Audit, we identify the gap between the emotional experience people are having today and the one they need in order to connect, align, and commit.

From Belief to Belonging

When you create reasons to believe, something extraordinary happens. People who moved through days on autopilot suddenly awaken to possibility. Teams that operated from obligation begin to move with purpose.

Belief isn’t soft. It’s strategic.

If your employees don’t believe their work matters, they’ll stop investing in it. But when they do? They push further. They stay longer. They build better.

Belief is what turns a bold vision into a shared one. It’s what makes a culture feel like a place worth belonging to. And in today’s talent market, it may be your greatest competitive advantage.

The Courage to Feel

The most profound business transformation isn’t something you implement. It’s something you feel—together.

Will you have the courage to discover what your people truly believe? Will you dare to build your future on emotional truth?

So ask yourself: Do your people have a reason to believe?

Because if they don’t, you’ve got work to do.

The Future Belongs to Those Who Make Us Feel

Posted on by Emotive Brand

As technological, political, and societal shifts accelerate at mind-scrambling speed, not all are lost. A new type of leader is rising to meet this unprecedented moment: Visionary reinventors.

While more traditional leaders are disoriented by growing complexity, visionary reinventors maintain clarity, direction, and unstoppable momentum.

They know that as AI ascends, uncertainty abounds, and culture morphs and even fractures, one thing remains constant—the powerful combination of conviction and emotion.

By defining, honing, and owning the conviction and emotional impact of the brands and organizations they lead, visionary reinventors forge meaningful and enduring connections with customers, investors, and employees.

Conviction isn’t manufactured for a pitch or invented on demand. It’s the truth already sitting inside a company, waiting to be named. Visionary leaders find it first, own it fully, and let it lead everything that follows.

This emotion-centered approach empowers a fiercely proactive posture. Visionary reinventors don’t wait for the world to be ready.

These modern leaders move people, markets, and industries above features and functionality to the higher ground of belief, a place of new perspective, where change is not feared–but desired, demanded, and inevitable.

They know that innovation alone does not and can not unleash true disruption. Visionary reinventors understand that today, more than ever, disruption unfolds from an emotional epicenter.

Passionate conviction ripples out, igniting the energy of a movement. What once felt like foundational truth is revealed as dogma, suddenly inadequate and unbearable, making way for new possibilities and deeper purpose.

After all, the elevation of human potential is what makes technology truly powerful. And in ever more saturated markets, how products make us feel is what drives their value.

Consider these two examples, each with a functional and emotional premise.

image-functional-and-emotional-premise-examples

Make no mistake–the emotional framing captures truth. It simply translates the functional premise into the human meaning, painting a picture not of a product but of a better future for people.

This is how visionary reinventors communicate. They don’t convince—they inspire belief. They don’t pull people along—they create a strong emotional current that moves people to alignment and action.

Ideas propelled by emotion have a magnetism and magnitude that can’t be neatly contained in any pitch deck. How they make people feel can’t be replicated by competitors. And once unleashed and embraced, they can’t be stopped.

Emotion’s catalytic role in transformative leadership lives at the core of Emotive Brand’s services. Every day, we have the privilege of partnering with visionary reinventors to reimagine brands, create categories, and ignite change.

We’ve seen it firsthand. The future isn’t built by those who wait for the world to be ready—it’s built by those who make the world feel ready.

An Emotive Founding Story

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Emotive Brand was born out of a belief that the brands that make you feel are the ones that move you to action. This founding tenet arose from real, hands-on experience.

In 2009, Tracy Lloyd and Bella Banbury had the guts and heart to not only start an agency, but ignite a movement to change how brands communicate. What those early days lacked in glamor, they made up for in joy–and grit.

Emotive Brand’s first home was more warehouse than studio, complete with broken glass, no heat, and a single bathroom that was also somehow the kitchen. Yet executives from some of the world’s most iconic brands not only loved their time there, they kept coming back for the kind of collaboration that leaves you feeling lighter, brighter, and ready to take on the world.

Tracy and Bella’s fundamental premise was that if you could define the emotion you want people to experience, clearly express why your brand matters, and evoke those feelings at every touchpoint, you could generate a flywheel of enduring connection and impact. 

This strategy was never limited to crafting clients’ brands. The Emotive team lived and breathed the philosophy, with consideration for every client interaction–from a mid-meeting tequila shot to greeting clients at the ferry with Blue Bottle coffee in hand. Bella explains, “When people came to our office, we wanted that to be the best part of their day. We wanted it to be an experience beyond what they could imagine. It was this balance of incredible preparation, polish–”

“And, you know, personalization for each client,” Tracy interjects, with the easy rhythm and warm spark that defines their partnership, best-friendship, and Emotive Brand.

Tracy continues, “Let’s be real, though—emotion is not what brings most clients to our door. They come to us for solutions to complex, mission-critical business problems. But to dismiss emotion as fluff is an often fatal mistake for brands. After all, regardless of what you’re selling, every buyer on the planet is human. And feelings happen to be a very powerful element in breaking through and connecting with humans to motivate decision-making.” 

From day one, they left the status quo—where logic overshadowed emotion—far behind. The ripple effect of Tracy and Bella’s connection and conviction extended outward, attracting a crew of whip smart strategists, designers, and innovators who were just as passionate about balancing head and heart. 

Over 15+ years, each individual has contributed new insight, originality, and inspiration. Together, Tracy, Bella, and team discovered–again and again–the enormous power of emotion to move people, advance ideas, and grow businesses. Never complacent, Emotive has continuously shaped and refined their approach, learning which strategic and creative components catch fire and which fizzle out.

Tracy and Bella’s vision for a different kind of agency became a reality and, thanks to the resilience of Emotive’s purpose and people, it has endured. There were stretches of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, when the agency learned to adapt and respond to changing client needs. And when COVID chaos descended, they found new paths to connection no matter the distance.

Through it all, they refused to compromise. Emotive has helped industry heavyweights and disruptive upstarts find their footing and seize opportunity, whether that’s rebranding after an acquisition or shaking things up in a market shift. Holding steady at the center of the work is a unique focus on what Tracy and Bella call “Good Growth”—growth that’s transformative, sustainable, and most importantly, human.

As founders and friends, they’ve built a remarkable legacy of powerful brands through exceptionally collaborative partnership, with impact that expands what’s possible for clients’ businesses and people. 

The movement they kicked off in 2009 continues to expand and unfurl, more resonant than ever. With the rise of emotionally intelligent leaders who center purpose and seek to catalyze change, Emotive Brand is poised to help bridge meaningful emotional connection and measurable business success like never before. 

Guiding their teams and clients into the future, the two are as united, committed, and inspired as ever. Playing to each other’s strengths and bringing out the best in the talent, leaders, and brands drawn into their orbit. Thankful for all they’ve learned and achieved, and everyone who contributed along the way. As they look ahead, Tracy and Bella know–and feel–that the best is yet to come. 

“Tracy is fearless and so unique—she becomes the CEO Whisperer, with a way of telling them what everybody else is too scared to say. She can deliver truth to people who are often shielded from it. She does it from a place of strength and a foundation of having done the work, but once she breaks through, trust is earned and the relationship is locked in. Amazing.”
–Bella

“Bella is the glue that keeps it all together at Emotive Brand. From the day she put on the CEO hat, she made shit happen. We all know there would be no Emotive Brand without her because she figures out the hard stuff, enabling every single one of us to deliver easier and faster. She’s operationalized how we work so we can do better work for our clients. As her partner in crime and co-founder, I feel like with her beside me, there’s nothing we can’t do together.”
–Tracy

 

Fin.

The Engine of Productivity: Wellness in the Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

How we define the workplace has changed radically over the last few years. Offices no longer represent the primary workplace, and remote and hybrid modes of working are becoming the norm rather than the exception. And this has greatly disrupted the way we work. The “office rhythm” is out the door when you’re zooming with people three time zones away one minute, taking a call from the car while you drive your kids to school the next, and collaborating with colleagues face-to-face once or twice a week. It’s hard to connect. Hard to disconnect. And it’s hard to orient yourself in a culture without the daily cues to keep you on track.

All of this leads to wellness issues. The stress of being connected all the time. Or the self-doubt that leads to quiet quitting behaviors. The physical toll of being rooted at your desk all day. The erosion of mentorship in the workplace, and the rise of coaching to fill the gap. HR professionals are on the front lines of a crisis, and they’re responding by paying more attention to wellness than ever before. Employee well-being has emerged as a major focus as organizations replace the free-lunch and foosball-driven ethos with programs aimed at helping people thrive personally so they can thrive professionally.

The data supports this trend: corporate wellness directly influences the emotional and physical health of employees and, by extension, the health of the entire organization. Companies that prioritize wellness not only see an uptick in morale but also in productivity and retention​​​. In fact, 83% of employees report that having a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace correlates with a significant increase in productivity.​​

Crafting Cultures That Resonate with Employees’ Needs

Leaders in HR play a pivotal role in translating these programs into strategic elements of the company culture. The trend is clear: holistic wellness programs that address the full spectrum of well-being—mental, physical, emotional, and financial—help retain people and attract new talent. They make people more productive, as happier employees take fewer sick days, are more loyal, and bring a higher level of creativity and energy to their roles. And they add to your overall organizational resiliency, which is critical to navigating the ups and downs of today’s volatility.

How to make well-being a strategic element of your employer brand

1. Define a Wellness Philosophy: Have a candid conversation with leadership about why your organization values wellness, and how much you’re willing to invest in it. This is a crucial first step to getting your leadership team aligned on the value that wellness creates for the entire organization. You’ll need to address the holistic equation of well-being—physical, mental, emotional, and financial—and how each dimension drives employee performance and satisfaction.

2. Consistently communicate your POV on Wellness: Use every communication channel to consistently reinforce how wellness is woven into your corporate culture. Share stories that highlight the positive impacts of wellness initiatives on employees, strengthening the perception of your brand as caring and supportive.

3. Align Wellness with Strategic Goals: A key part of your wellness initiatives involves connecting the dots between employees’ well-being and the strategic objectives of the company. For example, link mental health programs like mindfulness sessions to innovation to demonstrate how they result in a more creative and productive workplace.

4. Showcase the Impact: Evidence that wellness works only deepens belief in it as a necessity. Share real-life examples of how wellness programs have improved workplace outcomes. Highlight case studies and testimonials from employees who have benefited from these programs. Create case studies that demonstrate improved productivity, reduced stress levels, and better teamwork.

5. Lead with Wellness: When leaders actively participate in and advocate for wellness programs, it sends a powerful message that no matter where you sit in an organization, you’re still a person with the same needs for support. The more leaders participate and evangelize your wellness programs, the more they become a core part of the company ethos.

6. Offer personalized Wellness Options: There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to well-being. By offering personalized wellness options that can be tailored to individual needs, you underscore your commitment to supporting each employee uniquely. This flexibility makes the programs more effective and highlights your company’s dedication to its workforce.

7. Measure Success and Adapt: As your employees engage with wellness programs, their needs will change. You need to continuously assess and adapt your wellness initiatives to keep the offerings relevant, the energy fresh, and the impact high. By actively managing the portfolio of wellness offerings, you show your workforce that rather than checking a box, the organization is committed to making wellness a foundational element of your employer brand.

Thinking Beyond Wellness Programs

Wellness programs alone can feel like Band-Aids if they’re not connected to the employer brand—the internal expression of your mission, purpose, and values—that drives your organization. As employee well-being emerges as a dynamic force that shapes every aspect of workplace engagement and productivity, employees need to feel that it is part of your organizational DNA.

At Emotive Brand, we specialize in connecting business strategy to culture strategy to develop employer brands that are not just smart—they resonate emotionally. Making sure that employees experience wellness programs as part of a larger narrative around how you value people is essential to delivering the experiences that contribute to an organization being a great place to work.

If you have thoughts about the role wellness programs play in culture strategy, please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to get your culture better aligned to your business strategy, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

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

How Do You Orient Your Team When Everything Seems Uncertain?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Shaky markets. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to business success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward.

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it. For companies to navigate wave after wave of uncertainty, you need a more responsive approach:

Understand how your employees are feeling right now.
Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation? The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

Address employees’ emotions with a clear story of how you plan to move forward.
While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future. All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment: corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. You must cut through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization.

Get employees focused on a future that they are empowered to create.
In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To move your business forward and ultimately grow in times of uncertainty, you need better ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And you need to equip them not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward. 

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it.

At Emotive, we believe that companies need more responsive tools to adapt to the future—whatever it holds. They need ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And they need to equip their organizations not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. 

When you understand the emotional state of your organization, you can move forward. Faster.

How do your employees feel? Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation?

The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

We use the lens of brand to audit the emotional state of an organization and identify alignment opportunities that can reduce friction, create efficiency, and drive growth. Our approach recognizes that businesses are more than just a collection of employees working towards a common goal. They’re complex networks of people with myriad emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When you actually know what’s animating people’s behavior—the critical emotional drivers—you can craft more resonant, engaging stories about what you’re all working toward. 

Emotional understanding only makes a difference if your growth story is clear.

While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future.

All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. 

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

Your growth story can’t be separated from the quality of storytelling.

In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To grow in times of uncertainty, you need to understand how your people are feeling. You need to address their emotions with a story of how you plan to grow. And you need to get them focused on a future that they are empowered to create. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

Integrating Company Cultures After a Merger or Acquisition

Posted on 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.

HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Finding the Right Fit: HR’s Number One Challenge

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

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

The Heat is On

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

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

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

Five Ways to Create a Successful Partnership Between HR and Marketing

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

Collaboration Wins

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

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

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.