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Category: Culture Transformation

Global Growth, Local Success: Your Employer Brand Can Do Both

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Level Setting: Employer Branding Is a Must-Have

As a brand agency whose work revolves around transforming business by changing how people feel about brands, we’re naturally true believers in the impact of employer branding. We think of employer brand as the practice of ensuring a company’s external branding efforts are supported by a corresponding and complementary internal brand that speaks to current and prospective employees. When companies do succeed at successfully articulating an emotionally meaningful proposition of what it means to work for their company, recruitment, retention, and engagement aren’t the only metrics that soar.

Numerous studies show that employer branding has an impact way beyond a company’s ability to keep employees happy and attract talent. It has a significant and measurable impact on the bottom line. Here are just some facts:

  • Negative reputation costs companies at least 10% more per hire. (HBR)
  • 64% of consumers have stopped purchasing a brand after hearing news of that company’s poor employee treatment. (Career Arc)
  • Employer branding can increase stock prices by 36%. (Lippincott)
  • 96% of companies believe employer brand and reputation can positively or negatively impact revenue, yet less than half (44%) monitor that impact. (Career Arc)
  • A strong employer brand can lead to a 50% decrease in cost per hire and a 28% increase in retention. (LinkedIn)
  • Strong employer branding discourages early departures; new hires are 40% less likely to leave after the first 6 months. (LinkedIn)
  • Companies are overpaying on salaries by 10% if they don’t have a strong brand. (HBR)
  • Employee turnover can be reduced by 28% by investing in employer brand. (Office Vibe)

Global Growth? No Better Time for an Employer Branding Initiative

Many of our clients come to us in times of change or in search of growth. Whether it’s organic or M&A, they need an employer brand to drive global recruitment, retention, and engagement at a time when human capital is critical to keeping pace with growth demands.

With accelerated growth at the global level comes a challenge a bit more complicated than filling the funnel with talent or filling the office with snacks to fill the talent. With growth, comes change, and with change, comes uncertainty. It’s only human. Organic global growth means learning to navigate everything from regional work style differences and communication nuances to basic time zone management. While global expansion by way of M&A brings the additional challenge of merging established workplace cultures and power dynamics.

For executives, this means acknowledging that practices that have served the company in the past might not serve it into the future. For HR and recruitment leads at each location, it’s often fear that expansion at the global level might dilute attention on their own location’s unique assets or needs. With clients who’ve grown through M&A, each location may be in a different stage of maturity. And for employees themselves, growth brings a murkiness of its own: “What does adding a new office or a whole new staff mean to me, my role, and my work?”, or even “Do I still belong here?”

Finding Your Connective Tissue, Globally

The first step in creating a globally-resonant employer brand is identifying, or in many cases unearthing, a company’s connective tissue—the underlying truths at the heart what you do, how you do it, and why it matters.

Discovering these across global locations isn’t always obvious at first. Differing cultures, a diverse workforce, or a broad spectrum of capabilities often make it appear like difference outweighs similarity—especially to those on the inside.

This is where a strong outside perspective brings value—and can help a company identify its universal truths. As an agency partner, we begin by diving deep into all facets of your brand, business, and culture and have numerous conversations with employees and executives working in different roles across the world. It’s our job to look for patterns, discover shared beliefs and values, and uncover common ways of thinking, working, or perceiving.

Ultimately, the common truths we identify bubble up to your EVP, or your Employer Value Proposition, the most differentiated and relevant way to communicate your workplace’s value to candidates and employees, which we pressure test through the following filters:

  • Does it have the power to unite and rally your existing employee base?
  • Will it attract the people your business needs to thrive and invite them into the fold?
  • Can it expand with you as your business grows?
  • Can it flex to each unique location’s distinct needs or challenges?
  • Does it feel authentic, meaningful, true, and unique?
  • Is it differentiated from the competition?

Getting Local With It

At a global level, your EVP may drive brand touchpoints such as a global recruitment campaign, a new career website, or a global employee communications strategy. But what does it mean at a local level? What if one office needs help recruiting experienced talent in a remote city where brand awareness is low? And another office site requires a way to stand out in a location abundant with industry competition? This is where the exercise of localization becomes key.

In every global engagement, we work one-on-one with each location to closely understand their individual challenges, needs, and goals—and how the Employer Branding initiative can support them. We create a roadmap that targets key dates, identifies key stakeholders, and acts as a guide as we develop customized brand assets and strategies for ensuring success. Our work is about meeting each team where they are, flexing the EVP to work to what you have, what you need, and what you want, all while underlying the overall global message that sits above it all.

Global growth? Local success? Yes, we’re here to tell you both are possible. Get in touch to learn more about our future-proofing your Employer Brand for growth.

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

When Your Values Aren’t Really Values

Posted on by Chris Ames

Beware of Generic Values

In the inboxes and Slack channels at Emotive Brand, there is a video that often gets shared before we embark on a brand video. It’s called “This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve,” and it’s a hilarious satire of when you try to make your brand stand for everything, it ends up standing for nothing. “Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement,” the narrator says, in a salt-of-the-earth grumble, “are all words we chose from a list.”

Company values not only shape the external identity of your organization, they act as an internal compass for your current and prospective employees. When done properly, values can be the engine of a thriving work culture, attracting and retaining top talent. On the other hand, when a list of generic, vaguely positive words are selected from a hat, your culture greatly suffers.

If Everyone Is Innovating, No One Is

A research group at MIT conducted a survey of more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database. Eighty-five percent of the S&P 500 companies have a section—sometimes even two—dedicated to what they call “corporate culture.” Above all else, the most common value is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%).

“When we try to correlate the frequency and prominence of these values to measures of short and long-term performance,” the study says, “we fail to find any significant correlation. Thus, advertised values do not seem to be very important, possibly because it is easy to claim them, so everybody does.”

So, what does this all add up to? In short, there are two types of values for a company: universal and particular. Both are important in building a thriving company culture, but in terms of what you advertise and how you use these tools, the approaches differ widely.

The Universal and the Particular

Universal values are the table stakes to get a prospective employee in the door. Is there really anyone that doesn’t want to work at a place that values equality, respect, honesty, teamwork, or innovation? How you deliver and bring these values to life is incredibly important, but it’s something that can be elaborated on in an employee handbook, workshop, or leadership training.

At the end of the day, the only place that universal values really need to live is in the actions of your people. Your website is some of the most valuable real estate for your brand. Writing the word “INNOVATION” in all caps is not going to persuade a senior engineer to apply for a job. Do you know what will? Your technology portfolio.

In contrast, particular values are the principles that could only be held by your company. They should be written in a tone and manner that feels authentic to who you are. Here’s how Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO of Airbnb, explained it in a lecture at Stanford.

“Integrity, honesty — those aren’t core values. Those are values that everyone should have. But there has to be like three, five, six things that are unique to you. And you can probably think about this in your own life. What is different about you, that every single other person, if you could only tell them three or four things, that you would want them to know about you?”

So, let’s look at Airbnb and see if it passes the test. Here is the first value from their career page:

Be a Host. Care for others and make them feel like they belong. Encourage others to participate to their fullest. Listen, communicate openly, and set clear expectations.

First of all, notice the language. Being a host, of course, is integral to Airbnb’s platform. It embodies a sense of empathy while, most importantly, being particular to the company. It’s not that no other company in the world could value these things—caring, belonging, encouraging others—it’s that no other company in the world could have written it exactly this way. Think of how easy it would have been for them to just write the word integrity. Instead, they drilled down into the emotive core of their service and discovered something real.

Core Values Act as a Lighthouse

That’s the beautiful thing about well-written, emotive values. Once they are set, they act as a lighthouse for recruiting like-minded people. As Jim Collins writes, “you cannot ‘set’ organizational values, you can only discover them. Executives often ask me, ‘How do we get people to share our core values?’ You don’t. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren’t predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere.”

So, next time you sit down to write or refresh your company’s values, please resist the urge to paint with broad strokes. Ask yourself, what do we truly believe in? What do we do better than anyone else? What are the real, grounded ways that we are impacting the world? What changes are we looking to make and how do we want to get there? Paradoxically, the more specific you get, the wider net you’ll cast. Or as James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”

If you’re looking to make your brand values act as a guiding light for recruiting and retaining top talent, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

When clients ask us to share our ‘typical’ brand strategy process, we are careful to respond that there is no typical process as all client needs truly are different. The right-for-this-client scope of work comes as a result of a deep process of inquiry into our clients’ circumstances, budget tolerance, depth and expertise of team, and an assessment of what we think they will need to really make their brand perform in the market. Invariably, the question comes, “what about messaging, do you guys do that?” Indeed, what about messaging? A classic component of the strategy line-up, we’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about this deliverable of late.

Messaging, also referred to as Messaging Framework, Messaging Grid, or Messaging Platform, is classically a compendium of messages, written in plain-speak (i.e. not in Brand Voice), designed to translate the core strategic tenets of the brand positioning into relevant and motivating messages for each of the brand’s core audiences (current and prospective customers, partners, employees, etc.). Sometimes, each message will be accompanied by a ‘message pod’—a sample piece of copy, written in Brand Voice, to help a client understand how this message would actually execute in situ.

Why are Messaging Frameworks useful?

What’s great about the Messaging deliverable is that it takes strategy out of a Keynote (or PowerPoint, as the case may be) and demonstrates in real, marketing-jargon-free words what the ideas actually mean in practice. The deliverable goes a long way to take theory into practice and also show how versatile the idea is in its ability to be relevant and motivating for a variety of audiences. A seeming ‘score,’ but to be honest, we’re wondering if this is really the most useful tool for our clients.

When are Messaging Frameworks not what the doctor ordered?

Messaging Frameworks, while noble in intent, can sometimes end up DOA. There are a few reasons we’ve seen this happen. In some cases, our clients have a robust team dedicated to writing content. These teams are well-equipped to take Messaging and turn it into copy and content that extends and enhances their existing messaging. However, for many companies, this is simply not the case. Content is cranked out by all kinds of people, not necessarily writers, and trying to take messaging into copy can feel like a herculean task. Similarly, younger organizations, especially tech companies, are not well-positioned to write content that sits above product descriptions, features, and benefits. For them, brand is a new language and often the reason they’ve turned to a branding firm for help. Figuring out how to infuse their heavily product-focused content with brand messages is simply not in their skill set. Or in their timelines.

What’s a better option?

We’ve been asking ourselves how we can better meet our clients’ needs by giving them content they can actually use. The answer turns out to be not a Messaging Framework at all. The fact of the matter is, there are a variety but not infinite number of touchpoints that are suited for brand messaging. Rather than developing a framework of messages that must then be matched with a need and then recast in Brand Voice, we are asking our clients to tell us exactly what they need from the get-go. A sparkling new “About” section for your website? Check. We can do that. We know who the audience is and we know what key ideas we want to convey to them. We’ve got the Brand Voice down. Easy. How about a blurb for your LinkedIn profile? A sales outreach email? A CEO announcement to employees? PR boilerplate? Check. Check. Check and check.

It’s a new world. Time is money. Brands are erected in months, not years. We are increasingly helping our clients get right to the point with brand-led content they can use out of the gate. There may still be utility for a Messaging Framework for large, distributed companies with plenty of writers with time on their hands. But from our perspective, brand-led, ready as-is content is the way to go.

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

Feeling the Holiday Spirit: Introducing Emotive Feels

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotion Is Everything

For brands to make an impact on the outside world, they must explore inner worlds. In our line of work, emotion is everything. The most successful brands are those that evoke feeling—that ignite new ways of thinking about the world and our unique place in it

At Emotive Brand, naturally, we’re obsessed with emotion. We believe every company can perform better if its brand connects with people on an emotional level. A brand that’s emotive triggers feelings, inspires action, earns loyalty, and lifts spirits. In the overcrowded business world, your brand must resonate rationally and emotionally. Never overlook the mind, but always aim for the heart.

Emotional Impact

As part of our methodology, we’ve identified 301 positive emotions that a brand could possibly elicit in their target audience. These range from expected—supported, enabled, secure—to unconventional—nostalgic, vibrant, zealous. We call this set of feelings an Emotional Impact, and it acts as a compass for guiding creative and strategic decisions.

Emotional Impact is a tool we use in workshops, it’s on our business cards, and all 301 emotions even hang as separate tiles on our office wall. This year for our holiday card, we were thinking of another, more expressive way to bring this methodology to life.

Introducing Emotive Feels

And so, we created Emotive Feels—an interactive dictionary all about emotion. For each entry, we paired graphic design and animation with quotes from our team and influential thinkers. More than just defining the feeling, we’re seeking to enact it through motion and emotion.

“Visualizing the set of 301 positive emotions has always been very important to us,” said Creative Director Thomas Hutchings. “We are always looking for new ways to do this and find new ways for people to engage with this emotion-first philosophy. This site adds to this quest. It’s fun, engaging, and meaningful. It’s always been important to us to make sure this comes through. A methodology should never be laborious and self-serving.”

To be a truly emotive brand requires more than creating one-off emotional ads. It’s about forging valuable emotional connections at every touchpoint: your logo, your website, even the tone of voice your employees use on customer calls. When brands behave this way, they 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.

“The Emotive Feels site is such a great opportunity for our studio to showcase a unique aspect that separates us from other agencies,” says Designer Keyoni Scott. “The creation of the site makes our methodology tangible so it can always live on the web and be a tool to help anyone learn about the ways we help brands thrive. We’re always striving to evoke feeling through design.”

“The big buzzword in design is ‘empathy,’” says Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard. Everyone wants to design with empathy for their end-user in mind, which is great, but the conversation usually stops there. In order to effectively design for your customers, it’s best to understand them on a visceral and emotional level. At this level, you are able to affect their perceptions using the principles of design to build a brand or product that amplifies certain emotional responses.”

On Emotive Feels, you’ll find inspirational words from poets, designers, editors, strategists, musicians, artists, and historians. You’ll see shapes shift, bend, twist, morph, spin, snake, and dance. And when you’re done, we hope you leave feeling differently than when you arrived.

“Emotional Impact has always been embedded in our design process, so this project was a fun opportunity to create something visually engaging around our methodology and have it live beyond our office walls,” said Design Director Robert Saywitz. “I think it’s also vital to constantly exercise that creative muscle by carving out the time to create internal projects such as these, where imagination really leads the charge and allows everyone to be involved for a true team effort.”

From our hearts to yours, we hope the holidays are merry and bright.

The blog will return after the holiday break in January 2020.

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

Company Culture Trends for 2020

Posted on by Joanna Schull

At Emotive Brand, we’ve always been strong believers in the role that a company’s culture and people play in a business’ success. Yes, a sound strategy, a strong brand, and great execution matter, but ultimately, it’s a company’s people that make it happen—because without their efforts and belief in a company’s strategy and vision, even the best strategic plans will falter. Or as the saying goes: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

There are tried and true ways to build a strong culture: a compelling vision and mission; values that are co-created across the company vs. handed from the top down; metrics that align with and reinforce the behaviors that will lead to success; and lastly a commitment to supporting and living the culture from each and every leader.

But there are additional trends and forces at play that are impacting companies of all sizes. Some are a result of advances in technology and its impact on how work happens. Others are the result of sociological shifts in people’s expectations about what work is—and is not.

Here are a few of the key issues and trends we’re tracking for 2020.

1. Employee Happiness and Autonomy Matters

Research from the London School of Economics uncovered strong connections between employee happiness or satisfaction, and positive business outcomes and customer loyalty. “We find a significant, strong positive correlation between employees’ satisfaction with their company and employee productivity and customer loyalty, and a strong negative correlation with staff turnover,” Krekel, Ward, and De Neve wrote in their paper after analyzing the Gallup studies. “Ultimately, higher wellbeing at work is positively correlated with more business-unit level profitability.”

2. AI and ML Have Arrived

If the last few years of corporate transformation have been defined by the shift of essential business functions from on-premise IT to the cloud, the next wave of transformation will be in how AI and ML are integrated into the workplace. Forward-looking organizations are those who are not only using AI and ML to free employees to do meaningful work vs. repetitive tasks, but who are also using AI and ML to make work easier, by automating and streamlining aspects of the workday, from solving basic HR questions to resolving more complex IT requests. The result? Happier and more productive employees.

3. Work Is Wherever You Are

From large global enterprises to small organizations comprised of workers spread around the world, we’re continuing to see more geographically dispersed teams who may not be together for months at a time, but who must collaborate on a daily basis across time zones. The cultural implications of this way of working are significant—and when handled properly, advantageous. Developing collaboration and trust between team members, reduced hierarchical control, and more democratic governance is key to navigating this shift.

4. Enable Transparent and Honest Communication

This is about more than making employees feel heard—in many instances, it’s about getting mission-critical input and data that comes directly from customers, the factory floor, or the front lines of the sales force. And when the news isn’t good, it’s even more important to ensure that the people who have the bravery to raise the red flag aren’t penalized for their honesty. Cultures that embrace the values of honesty and transparency among employees find that those behaviors extend into the company’s dealings with customers and partners, and in turn, help to establish an external reputation as trustworthy.

In all, companies who invest in building a corporate culture that values employee happiness, promotes honest dialogue, and uses technology to enable employees to collaborate more effectively and efficiently will see those investments pay dividends over the long run.

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

Employer Branding Trends for 2020

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Today, we’re continuing our deep dive into the most important trends affecting your business, brand, and culture heading into 2020. Following our look at content strategy, let’s examine employer brands.

Remember when the common sentiment toward millennials was laden with disgust? Who were those entitled young people and their outrageous demands for flexibility, remote working, and—gasp—having a greater purpose in work than making money? It wasn’t that long ago, but oh how the tides have changed.

Now, as we all know, those “millennial” demands have not just become normalized, but meeting them has become the de facto minimum requirement for employers if they’re going to attract and retain top talent, of any generation. But just as the demographics of employees—and their shared needs and desires—shift every year, the trends of effective employer brands shift as well.

As a refresher: an employer brand is the articulation of what makes your company a great place to work. Your employer brand is integral to every touchpoint an employee or prospect might interact with, from the website to social media to the interior design of your office and internal communications. Because the potential touchpoints are vast, consistency is key to ensure optimal impact on your audience: the people most critical to making your business a success. Staying on top of employer brand trends means keeping in touch with what employees are looking for, and thereby ensuring your employer brand is relevant.

Here are the top trends to look out for in 2020.

1. Authenticity

Publicly displayed company values are key indicators for employees looking to align their personal values with how the business is run. But values are meaningless unless you can back them up. Take ‘family-friendly.’ Paid parental leave is nice, but if new parent employees are expected to be available 24/7, traveling all the time, or have rigid expectations placed on when they need to be in the office once parental leave is over, the ‘family-friendly’ value comes across as completely disingenuous. And thanks to sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, it’s pretty easy to find the truth.

2. Growth

As ‘digital transformation’ has become common parlance, employees understand that job security depends on acquiring new skills regardless of where you are in your career. And this doesn’t necessarily mean sending employees to expensive conferences or bringing in a world-renowned speaker. Offering employees exposure to senior leaders or inviting them (even as a fly on the wall) to big meetings is just as important for growth as more formal activities. Using the employer brand to communicate these types of opportunities demonstrate to your employees that you are invested in their development, which in turn makes them feel invested in your company.

3. Personalization

“To attract and retain talent, we’re seeing organizations creating a consumer-grade experience at work which reflects their attractive, authentic employer brand,” says Forbes columnist Rebecca Skilbeck. Personalization, i.e. acknowledgment that I am an individual, not a number, goes hand in hand with hustle. It’s an implicit contract: I work hard for you, you give me praise to keep me motivated. Being treated as an individual, whether through customizable career pages à la Nike or Starbucks, or 1-1 praise indicates a company values your talent and contribution, your experience and perspective. And by acknowledging that through personalization efforts, it creates a virtuous cycle in which employees are more motivated to continue performing.

4. Brand Association

An employer brand’s effectiveness goes hand in hand with the external brand. So if the brand itself lacks public awareness, sells a meaningless product, or worse, is involved in shady behavior, that reputation is going to impact how employees and prospects feel about the company.  A recent LinkedIn study has proven that more than 75% of jobseekers research a company’s reputation before applying. People care about the brand they are working for because it reflects on their personal brand—which has become more important than ever in ensuring long-term career growth. Assessing your brand reputation and taking control of the narrative is imperative if you’re going to attract and retain top talent.

Keep your eyes here for the latest and greatest in all things 2020.

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

Content Strategy Trends for 2020

Posted on by Chris Ames

As the decade winds down to a close, we’re taking a look at the most important trends affecting your business, brand, and culture heading into 2020. First up, we’re examining all things content strategy: tone, technology, and personalization. Let’s do it.

Mobile > Everything Else

The simple truth is if it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work. There can be no compromise when it comes to the look, feel, or content strategy of the mobile experience—considering it is the dominant experience. In 2020, even more emphasis will be placed on increasing mobile user interaction. If your content is not custom-fit to the screen, you will lose out. Call-to-action buttons, for instance, need to be intuitive and easy to tap. Subject lines should be short and punchy so they fit on the screen. Animations need to auto-play or be optimized in another format. The list goes on.

No Sound? No Problem

In the infinite scroll of the internet, your precious, clever content needs to be accessible in the least forgiving way imaginable: viewed quickly, on mute, in a sea of other content. It’s been reported that 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. Make sure your videos are embedded with captioning and conveying your message and the emotional impact you’re seeking—even without sound.

Use Your Voice

As we have mentioned before, voice and audio mediums are leading a sonic revolution. If you want your content to be discoverable in this new era, you must consider how your brand feels with no visual support. That might be in the form of a podcast, creating audio versions of your blogs, or simply optimizing your SEO for vocal assistants.

Speak Like a Human

We know that by 2020, 50% of search queries will be voice searches. Google’s Hummingbird update encourages conversational, long-tail semantic phrases rather than using typical keyword phrases. So, instead of searching for “top marketing automation software,” one might ask, “What are the top marketing automation solutions for small business owners?” To cater to this changing user behavior, brands need to alter their content strategy.

Let Robots Do the Rote Stuff

Chatbots are no longer considered a new trend in the marketing industry. This once-clunky tool has proven itself to be vital for a surprising number of industries. AI is helping brands to be more interactive when it comes to engaging customers, automating rote tasks, freeing up time for higher-level thinking, and paving the way for conversational marketing that allows brands to guide users in their buyer journey. Just look at our work with Moveworks.

Think Outside Department Lines

Content strategy begins with marketing, but it should never end there. If every department uses marketing’s content, why not bring in those other minds to diversify the thinking? As an agency, our best work comes when we ignore department lines and fuse the best of our ideas together. If you create materials for sales without ever consulting your sales department, you’re doing it wrong. Engaging and nurturing the ideas of all the stakeholders is how you craft content people actually use.

Have a Heart

Always remember: people don’t need brands, brands need people. You need to build authentic, personal relationships with customers rather than just trying to sell to them. If your content doesn’t accurately reflect your brand’s voice, your mission, or the specific value you hope to bring your target audiences, you might as well not create it in the first place. No matter the year, authenticity and personalization are always on-trend. The numbers speak for themselves:

  • 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key differentiator that leads to a purchasing decision.
  • 73% of consumers would pay more for a product if the company behind it promises transparency.
  • 94% of consumers say they would remain loyal to a brand that provides complete transparency.
  • In a survey of 1,000 people, 90% remarked that they found personalization appealing.
  • 80% admitted they’d be more likely to give their business to a company that offered them a personalized experience.

While some branding trends are abandoned as fast as they appear, leading with a social conscience is evergreen. Today, consumers want to believe that companies care about the same causes they do. According to the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand report, 64% of consumers worldwide are “belief-driven buyers.” Modern brands need to demonstrate that they put people before profit to increase trust and loyalty.

Any Reality but This One

In recent years, both AR and VR have become massively popular. In 2020, AR is expected to surpass VR in popularity, despite VR’s early lead. Already, many major companies are making use of AR. Ikea, for example, has an app that allows users to visualize what a piece of furniture would look like in their home before making a purchase. How can you leverage AR to remove doubt or create desire in your customer?

Do It Live

Digital Marketing World has predicted that by 2021, 13% of all internet traffic will consist of live video. And that is just one chunk of the whole video gamut. With almost every major social media platform now supporting live video streaming, it is only expected to soar in 2020. As it continues to rise in popularity, live video or podcasts is your chance to let new customers see your business in action or learn from your expertise live and direct.

More 2020 Trends

In the coming weeks, we will be taking a look at employer branding, culture, design, and many other trends. Keep your eyes here for the latest and greatest in all things 2020.

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

Five Ways a Meaningful “Why” Creates a Compelling Workplace Experience

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Our experience shows that many brands have been crafted with only the customer in mind and that the resulting “customer experience” does not in any way parallel the “workplace experience.” As a result, the brand – as it is now articulated – is relatively meaningless internally.

We believe every brand has a meaningful “Why” hidden within.

This hidden “why” is powerful because it can do as much internally as it can externally. Our job is to dig that out and shed new light on it, all with the ambition of delivering these five benefits.

1. Increase Motivation

When your employees believe in your brand, there’s a natural increase in morale and productivity. If employees feel good about the company they work for, the brand their efforts support, and the work they do, those positive feelings translate directly to a positive impact on your company overall.

What makes people “feel good” about their employer and the work they do? We think it’s when they see what they do as meaningful. What makes work meaningful to an employee? When there’s a personally relevant reason why it’s being done (i.e. the company has a compelling reason for being).

2. Increase Personal Accountability

If employees understand the brand promise that they work to support and how their efforts directly affect the brand’s success and fulfill consumer wants and needs, they’ll develop a stronger sense of personal accountability. In other words, they’ll take greater pride in their work and they’ll want to deliver better results. In a nutshell, they’ll care.

People care when they feel cared for. And this is not just about holding hands. It’s about caring what people care about. People care when there’s a direct link between what they’re asked to do and their personal needs, values, interests, and aspirations.

3. Increase Word-of-Mouth Marketing

If your employees believe in your brand, they’ll be more likely to talk about it to friends, family, and anyone who will listen. They’ll advocate the brand online and offline to anyone who will listen, and they’ll guard it against naysayers. You can’t buy that kind of dedication, support, and positive publicity.

A solid “why” becomes a “social object,” or something that can be shared, talked about, and celebrated. It becomes “what” people talk and tweet about. At its best, the mere act of sharing and talking about a meaningful “why” reinforces its personal relevance and emotional importance to all parties.

4. Increase Communication

When employees feel like they have an important place in the brand’s success and they’re truly part of something greater than themselves (i.e. meeting consumer wants and needs), they’re more confident in sharing their thoughts and ideas. This increased level of open communication can lead to fantastic new innovations and opportunities for your company. It can also help to raise potential red flags before they turn into disasters.

We like to think of a brand’s “why” as the launchpad for all sorts of conversations and collaborative actions. It not only focuses thinking on what to do but also helps people vet ideas that go against the brand’s meaningful ambition.

5. Increase Talent Recruitment and Retention

Who doesn’t want to work for a company where the employees are motivated and happy? When your employees speak highly and openly about your brand, your company has a better chance of increasing retention rates and attracting new talent.

What could be more powerful than employees who believe in, and express, the why of your brand to the colleagues, family, and friends? When the endorsement of a workplace is heartfelt and genuine, it communicates far more to people seeking work. It not only helps draw the right people to the workplace, but it also means they’ll more readily become welcomed and productive members of the team.

For further reading on creating a more compelling workplace experience, download our Meaningful Workplace White Paper.

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

Who Thrives at a Brand Strategy and Design Agency?

Posted on by Chris Ames

What type of person thrives at a brand strategy and design agency? Looking around our office, we have people from advertising, journalism, psychology, economics, sociology, sales, graphic design, media – and like any successful venture, a few restless English majors.

Is there a through-line? In our line of work, we privilege business acumen, technical fluency, big idea thinking, writing prowess, collaborative mindsets, passion, curiosity, empathy, and an obsession for the details. We get just as excited by an experiential brand launch as an exquisitely organized messaging matrix.

With our clients, we identify the full range of levers – rational and emotional, strategic and aesthetic – to create an impact across business, brand, and culture. It’s a holistic approach to solving business challenges that requires a little bit of everything.

In a roundtable interview with the Emotive Brand team, we’re attempting to connect the dots by asking: What initially drew you to branding? And what does your unique background bring to the table?

Kyla Grant, Director of Operations

To be perfectly honest, when I started with Emotive Brand, I had no idea what branding meant. I thought I knew, but little did I understand that what I had in my mind was the tip of the iceberg, the small sliver of what branding meant. It’s so much more than the superficial logo, it’s the heart and soul of what a company is. My background is pretty varied, but my strength lies is operationalizing things, in figuring out how to bring an idea, a concept, a strategy to life. My mind lives in the gaps of understanding that I look to fill in order to bring everyone along, without any missteps.

Carol Emert, Strategist

I’m naturally into meaning-making through insight, and branding lets me make a living at what would otherwise be a very passionate avocation. Brands sit at the very root of meaning for organizations, which means that they are absolutely critical for organizational well-being. Just as individual people seek meaning in our personal lives, it’s important for both organizations and for the people who are passionate about them to understand the organization’s meaning and its purpose. Then we can really live it.

Bella Banbury, Founding Partner

I started my career in sports marketing and was always fascinated by which brands were attracted to a specific athlete or sport, and those that were successful in lodging their brand into our hearts and minds often without us even knowing it. I loved brands that were creative and clever in their approach. Fast forward to today, we now sit on the front end of crafting those strategies. As an aside, I don’t think there is anything specific about my background that influences our work other than I am curious about how brands influence and shape our culture. I’ve always worked on the agency side and I never ever take clients for granted or forget this is a service industry.

Robert Saywitz, Design Director

I would say that branding sort of found me rather than me searching it out. When I was in art school, “branding” wasn’t the ubiquitous term it is today, and I found myself in a Visual Identity course where we were tasked with creating brand identity systems, a logo being at the center of it all. My background in drawing and painting, especially my sense of craft – draftsmanship, attention to detail, and visual storytelling – suddenly brought my design ability, and design thinking, to a higher and ultimately much more personal level when faced with the challenges of creating logos and expanding their story into a brand landscape. It wasn’t until working in New York did all of this crystalize into the more tangible world of branding but similar to my first epiphany in school, everything still begins with crafting an iconic logo and expands outward from there.

Jon Schleuning, Strategist

I grew up in Oregon and ran cross-country in high school. The early Nike campaigns struck a chord. There is no finish line. The sense of being part of something instead of just buying a shoe.

Thomas Hutchings, Creative Director

I am actually interested in the subversive side of what branding is: mass consumerism, the ability to use subliminal tactics to make people buy or feel something or just to provoke a reaction. To me, I actually have an ability to manipulate through something not everyone can do. I think in the early days, I was always fascinated by advertising, then somewhere along the way, I learned that I can use design with branding to make a more prolonged effect. Advertising is the 100m sprint, branding is a marathon. I may not always know what is right for the greater design world, but I know what’s right for the brand or understand it as a personality to know what’s right.

Chris Ames, Creative Strategist

I think that thing that I both love and hate about branding is the power of narrative to inform, sway, misdirect, or charm. Those who study the Humanities are often told that their skills will not translate to a “real job” after college. And then when you enter the job market, you find that most companies biggest problems – building a healthy and inclusive culture, telling a cohesive story, articulating their purpose, cutting through the noise – are humanistic disciplines. I try to bring a sense of empathy to this process and constantly remind myself that the best branding puts real people at the center, not glorified technology or embarrassing jargon.

The Only Prerequisite Is Curiosity

Regardless of background, it seems the unifying principle of brand strategy and design is a deep curiosity for how things look, feel, and influence the world around us. At its best, branding is an investigation into meaning. It’s engaging with the unseen and overlooked aspects of business, products, and experience. If you’re interested creative problem-solving, design-thinking, or the intricacies of brand strategy, don’t hesitate to contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd.

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

Culture Is Everything: A Roundtable with Emotive Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Atmosphere. Vibe. Energy. Mood. That certain je ne sais quoi. It’s often difficult to describe a company’s culture, but you can feel it the second you walk in the door. Rajeev Bhardwaj described work culture as “an intangible ecosystem that makes some places great to work and other places toxic.” BambooHR says it’s “like a set of miniature societies within a larger society, and their cultures are expressions of the work they perform, the values they adopt, and the collective behaviors of the people who work for them.”

Culture can bring strategy to life, ignite business success, and contribute to some truly raucous holiday parties. The wonderful and terrifying thing about culture is that you can’t really control it. Executives can shape, model, or guide behavior, but true culture is defined from the employee out. Today, we’re having a roundtable discussion about culture: its definition, its importance, and its influence on our work.

Bella Banbury, Founding Partner

I think about culture as the connective tissue that keeps employees connected to each other and their work. It is vital. Nothing functions well without it, people start pulling in different directions, pain points are elevated, people start focusing on the wrong things and losing sight of what matters. Everyone loses. Culture is unique to the set of people involved and the environment you work in. You have to recognize that people are different, need different things, perform in different ways, contribute in different ways. Let it grow and change based on the unique set of circumstances that are present. Make time for it. Water it.

Saja Chodosh, Strategist

I think of work culture as the personality of a workplace. When you bring a bunch of diverse, unique people together to work around common goals – what bubbles up? How does “the team” operate, think, work, and live as one? Work culture means a lot to me. I want to work for a company where I feel like who I am meshes with and drives the greater personality, goals, and aspirations of the company as a whole. I think culture is influenced by small behaviors, ways of interaction, little moments, that add up to something big. The culture at Emotive Brand is vivacious, always moving, passionate, bold. We are a team that blends hard work, strong viewpoints, and personal integrity with a sense of ever-flowing empathy, generosity, and collaboration. The occasional tequila bonding, too.

Keyoni Scott, Designer

Culture is incredibly important because I think it’s the lifeline you look to when things are stressful. When things are intense, culture is a reminder of why you’re working so hard. It can uplift your day and keep you focused. I’ve never been in a cubicle job, thankfully, but one of the things I love about Emotive Brand is that you’re invited to be yourself. Your voice is heard and I don’t feel afraid to be myself. You’re given space to try, to mess up, and to solve the problem at hand.

Jonathan Haggard, Senior Designer

I think the Bay Area, in general, can have a very demanding work culture. Unfortunately, many companies intentionally provide a culture of excessive work and dependence. I think there needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach the relationship between people and work. In order to win the war on talent, employers should be willing to embrace remote work, flexible time tables, and promote quality over quantity. So much of traditional work culture is about projecting a façade of productivity for eight-plus hours. I would much rather engage in a culture that cultivates a vibe of doing your best work, and when you’re done, be encouraged to live a full life outside of the office. You end up getting better work in the long run.

Shannon Caulfield, Project Manager

For me, culture is one of the most crucial things about running a business. You build the right culture by hiring people you believe can further promote a company’s vision and mission, and finding people whose values are aligned. But an aligned culture doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same – there’s so much value in diversity of thought. You get to learn so much every day by surrounding yourself with people from different backgrounds and walks of life. It leads to much more creative solutions. We have a very close-knit and collaborative culture at Emotive Brand. Everyone is always willing to lend a helping hand, regardless of what role you have here. You know when you come to work, you’re not alone.

Monica Colver, Studio Manager

Cultivating a healthy work culture is important so that employees feel engaged, appreciated, and motivated to do their best work possible. Instilling a sense of community in the workplace is vital because work is where we spend the majority of our waking hours, so we might as well improve our quality of life by improving our relationships with our colleagues. The culture at Emotive Brand takes that sentiment to heart. We are a close-knit team, and as the Studio Manager, I am always seeking out new ways to facilitate connection within our team: organizing trips to museums, group hikes, rallying the team for spontaneous happy hours, as well as simply making a point of learning about everyone’s interests and personal projects.

Beth Abrahamson, Senior Designer

A positive work culture is not only essential to employee happiness, but can improve relationships with clients and the quality of the work itself. There is real value in intentionally creating space to get to know the people you work with every day. Bella and Tracy are major proponents of bringing your whole self to work, and encourage all of us to share our personal interests and passions, which ultimately creates a more vibrant and dynamic culture at Emotive Brand.

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