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Category: Emotion is the Strategy

Challenger Brands: A Primer

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Are you up to the challenge?

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

What is a challenger brand?

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

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

Category is the new challenge

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

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

Criteria for challenger brands

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

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

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

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

Culture is the lifeblood of challenger brands

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

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

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

Why Do Billion-Dollar Companies Use Stock Photography?

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The following pictures are from the websites of Fortune 100 tech companies in the year 2019. I did not edit or manipulate them in any way, and most of them are only one click away from the landing page. To reiterate, these are companies that drive billions of dollars in revenue, and often spend years crafting their identity.

Stock Photography 1

Three business professionals inexplicably working on one computer, eleven people smiling into the same void, a hand with the power to emit data-point holograms – this is the visual language of stock photography for enterprises.

When it comes to the subject matter, there is a myriad of topics, but as Megan Garber of The Atlantic wrote in 2012, “One of the most wacky, wondrous elements of stock photos is the manner in which, as a genre, they’ve developed a unifying editorial sensibility. To see a stock image is … to know you’re seeing a stock image.”

The benefits of using stock are obvious: cheap, easy to implement, mostly inoffensive, time-saving. But why do so many lucrative companies with the time, resources, and money needed to produce authentic visual assets use stock? Either it doesn’t matter, or companies don’t understand how much it’s hurting them.

Stock Wastes Real Estate

According to an eye-tracking study by Nielsen Norman Group, people gloss over or entirely ignore generic or stock images. Every stock image is like a blank lot on the most valuable strip of real estate your brand has: your website. Regardless if stock isn’t detrimental to your brand, at the very least, it’s invisible. And in a crowded marketplace, whatever isn’t actively working to create meaningful differentiation is hurting you in the long run.

Stock Hurts Your Employer Brand

While there has been an effort in recent years to diversify representation in stock, it’s still a field that is predominately white and male. It may be unconscious, but when you lead with photography that doesn’t allow for other viewpoints to exist, you’re shutting yourself off to future talent.

Seventy percent of women don’t feel represented in media and advertising, and those who purchase stock photography are on the hunt for more inclusive and diverse images. Getty reports huge increases in the following terms over the past year: “real people” 192% increase, “diverse women” 168% increase, and “strong women” 187% increase. With authentic creative, you pull in talent because they see your real team, rather than a computer-generated idea of “teamwork.”

Stock Photography 3

In a great post over at Intechnic, they compare the difference between real and staged photos. One of these women is a real Project Manager, the other woman is from a generic stock photo featured on countless websites. Can you tell which one is which?

It seems small, but the net result of using authentic visual language adds up over time. All of it works toward making your brand identity more approachable and tangible. People will feel more comfortable contacting you, inquiring about a job opening, trusting your products, doing business. As they say over at allBusiness, “There’s nothing more inauthentic than a professionally staged photograph of people who clearly don’t work at the company. It puts your company behind an overly polished veneer that makes you seem distant and possibly uninviting.”

Stock Sacrifices Your Vision and Brand Affinity

Stock Photography 2

Images have a language of their own. For instance, this image tells me, “We need more computers at the office.” When it comes to your brand, your product, your vision of the future, why would you want to lead with someone else’s words? Even if you spend hours burrowing deep into the wormhole of royalty-free images, you’ll always end up making a concession on the integrity of the brand. As writer Grant Epstein says, “Imagine if a print ad for Coca-Cola used a generic image of people holding cups of unidentified brown liquid. It would be so bizarrely off-brand that you wouldn’t even identify it with the company at all.”

A Revolution Is Coming for B2B Design

For the record, there’s nothing inherently evil about stock photography. But for me, it speaks to a larger trend that I don’t quite understand. Why are so many companies, especially those in the B2B tech sector, comfortable with poor design? Why is there such a mental division between our expectations of what B2C and B2B should look, feel, and sound like?

As Ross Simmonds writes in his post, “Why Are Most B2B Websites Designed So Poorly Even in 2019?” from usability challenges to inconsistent visual assets, there’s no shortage of aesthetic issues in the field. Traditionally, B2B companies have complex sales cycles and logistics to convey. Trying to explain CRM, ERP, or inventory management software is obviously more aesthetically challenging than featuring a gorgeous consumer product. Still, that doesn’t mean people are willing to accept poor design, repetitive visuals, or a lack of differentiation. It doesn’t matter how good your product is: nothing sells itself.

“As the average age of B2B buyers drops, their expectations for the online experience rise,” writes Simmonds. “These buyers are expecting a buying experience that resembles something they’d find visiting Amazon, eBay, Etsy or their other favorite online retailer. The best website experiences are created from a place of empathy and a keen understanding of the goals a buyer has when they visit your site.”

As with any challenge, there is also a massive opportunity here for B2B companies that are willing to lead with something bold, emotive, and design-forward. Don’t package your brilliant product in bad creative.

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

Brand Salience Is the Lifeline Between You and Your Customers

Posted on by Emotive Brand

How Are Purchase Decisions Actually Made?

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

The Magic of Brand Salience

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

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

Emotion-led Decision Making

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

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

Quantity of Memory Structures

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

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

Quality of Memory Structures

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

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

How Do You Increase Brand Salience?

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

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

The Best Thing To Be Is Remembered

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

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

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

Storytelling Is the Best Bridge Between Customers and Solutions

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Once Upon a Sales Deck

Salespeople want to sell. This much we know. Often, in our conversations with clients or in our perusing of sales decks, we hear a similar refrain. How do we cut to the chase and get to the meat? We don’t blame them. In today’s millennial-influenced age of purpose, you could sit through a narrative, a manifesto, a history lesson, a personal testimony, and a video on corporate social responsibility all before learning what someone is actually selling you.

That’s the balancing act. You’re only as strong as your story—but if your story goes on too long, meanders, or doesn’t naturally bridge to your solutions, people will read something else. When done properly, a story is the shortest distance between what your brand does and why people should care.

The Cost of Confessionals

Consider this study conducted by Origin/Hill Holliday. They asked 3,000 online panel participants between the ages of 23 and 65 about the perceived value of various listings. In every case, the addition of a story—whether it’s from a customer, an origin story, or even short fiction—increased the value, sometimes up to 64 percent!
storytelling

We hate unnecessary front-matter in sales decks more than anyone. But when you look at the numbers, it becomes clear that storytelling isn’t trite, it’s a trenchant tool. In a short amount of space, stories can do the heavy lifting of connecting your vision to your portfolio. As much as you might want to dive directly into the organizational prowess of your cloud infrastructure, it’s worth pausing to discuss the transformational outcomes of your product. What happens when everything works like it’s supposed to? Picture the worst day of your customer’s life—how does their experience change when they interact with your brand?

In a Crowded Marketplace, Far, Far Away …

Take the stylish and digitally-minded luggage brand Away. In an incredibly crowded marketplace, they’ve been able to differentiate themselves through their sleek design, cost transparency, and use of storytelling to elevate their solutions. Their blog isn’t about the intricacies of wheel design—it’s a travel magazine designed to activate your wanderlust. (And then, of course, buy their products.) As they say in their narrative, “If you’re looking down at your dying phone and broken bag, you can’t see up, out, and ahead to the world in front of you.”

By using storytelling to articulate the highest possible value, they take the customer on a journey from product to benefit. A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product. As goes the saying, people don’t buy features, they buy better versions of themselves.

 

This is in no way limited to B2C—B2B brands can be emotive, and should be. According to research by Google in partnership with Motista and CEB, 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy if they can connect emotionally with your brand. It starts with your goals, objectives, mission, and vision. But beyond that, it’s being able to communicate the professional, social, and emotional benefits one experiences in addition to the actual product. Storytelling can go a long way in bridging that gap.

The most important thing to remember in crafting your story is authenticity. Away sells luggage, they tell travel stories. Lenovo sells computers, they tell stories about people doing innovative things with computers. “When authenticity is put forward as the priority,” says Taj Forer, Co-founder & CEO of fabl, “the emotive stories will generate themselves as the organic byproduct.” In other words, you’re not allowed to airlift some emotional story into your brand if it doesn’t make sense.

Equipping your sales team with the right library of emotive stories gives them even more arrows in their quiver. So, they can do what they do best: sell.

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

Emotive Brand and Emotive Branding: Our Origin Story

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands for the Better

The idea of emotive branding—and the creation of our agency, Emotive Brand—flowed from our desire to make a positive difference in the way people and brands interacted with each other. These were our goals:

  • Bridge the gap between commerce and civility.
  • Create brands that people appreciate, respect, and actively seek out.
  • Help employees of brands feel better about their jobs.
  • Make partners and suppliers vie for the opportunity to work with our clients.
  • See communities welcome our clients’ brands with open arms.

As a result of all of this goodwill, our clients’ brands would thrive and prosper.

Realizing the Value of Meaning Something More

We came to those goals through two major realizations:

First, as consumers ourselves, we noticed that only a handful of brands really went out of their way to mean anything to us. When they did make a connection, wow, it was love! We’d go out of our way to interact and engage these brands. We even felt disappointed when we had to settle for something less. We’d get excited when other people started talking about these brands and chimed in with our most recent, “I can top that!” story. These brands had come to mean something to us because they had a clear reason for being and made us feel something good time and time again.

On the other hand, zillions of brands never really hit our emotional radar. These brands meant almost nothing to us–even though we’ve heard about them or even bought and used dozens of the brands regularly.  

A Problem in the “Brand Decks”

Second, as brand experts, we saw firsthand why so many brands fell flat–lackluster and bland–in the minds of customers. As designers, copywriters, and strategists, we work on virtually every aspect of communication from identity to websites to advertising to point-of-sale to employee recruitment and beyond. Behind each piece of work, there’s always a brief, and often attached to the brief is a two-hundred some page PDF titled “About the Brand.”

Reading through many of these so-called “brand decks,” we quickly recognized a problem. In fact, the “brand decks” were the problem.

Traditional brand thinking results from business people from branding agencies talking to business people within client organizations. The language they use is full of industry jargon, client-speak, and solely rational thinking. Everything is expounded upon, nothing is simplified, and little is made human. And after several rounds of review, the final documents show the scars of compromise.

And what do these documents lack? The brand’s meaning as defined by its reason for being (why it does what it does) and how the brand wants people to feel (how the brand connects emotionally with customers). Brand decks, on the whole, left out what matters most to us as consumers and businesses and what we admire most in the great brands out there.

So we asked the question: What if meaning was the entry point into brand thinking rather than an appendage at the end? And that, folks, is how Emotive Brand was born.

Learn more about our methodology emotive branding, how our approach challenges convention, and why emotive branding is a next generation brand strategy.

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

What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One

Posted on by Emotive Brand

There’s a lot of talk about the concept of a brand promise. But, what is it? Why does my business need one? How would it make my business stronger? How does it relate to my brand strategy? Here we explore the answers to these pressing questions.  And perhaps more important, what kind of a brand promise does your business need in today’s world to have an impact?

A brand is a promise delivered.

A contemporary brand promise articulates an idea that goes beyond the rational benefits that worked in the past, and extols a higher-order emotional reward. A brand promise is not a slogan or advertising headline. It is not, by definition, a public statement (though it can be as long as your brand truly lives up to it). Finally, it is not a “unique selling proposition”. Indeed, its uniqueness and differentiating power comes not from what it says, but how it transforms the way your organization creates strong and meaningful connections with people.

Continue reading “What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One”

Why Have a Purpose Beyond Profit?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Developing a purpose beyond profit business strategy has been gaining momentum in the business world, with both positive and negative attention.

For decades, enterprises have had “mission statements”, “vision statements”, and  “values”. Check almost any corporate website and you’ll find these “drivers” of the business buried deep down and many clicks away from the surface.

Despite having taken on these important steps to say what their business is all about, there’s often a big difference between what they intend, and the effect they have. The fact is, these tools of business have rarely gained much traction outside of the C-suite.

Defining Purpose

A “purpose” is a more powerful and effective tool because it engages in a way that matters to a wide range of people across an organization. It is not dry, administrative, and full of corporate jargon. It doesn’t set a goal that feels irrelevant outside the C-suite. Rather it is an idea that touches upon a quest for meaning and purpose that is universal in appeal, while at the same time relevant to the business.

People connect to a purpose. Within the purpose they see room for themselves to do something meaningful with their work lives. They feel closer to, more aligned with, and willing to help the business.

A good purpose can radically alter the customer experience as well, as the brand gradually starts to live up to its purpose and make life better in meaningful ways. As such, products evolve to embody greater meaning, the changing attitudes and character of the staff leads to more meaningful service, and every experience with the brand more clearly separates what it does from its competitors.

Think of purpose as a “North Star” for your organization, not as a marketing message. Let it help shape, guide, and align the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of your people. Let the energy that new spirit generates create a beacon that attracts new customers, job recruits, partners, and others to your brand.

Why look beyond profit?

The most powerful purpose statements look beyond profit. This means they talk only of the good the brand seeks to create without stating the obvious goal of every business: profit. It is within the context of profit making that goodness makes a difference. People always remember the profit orientation of a meaningful brand, but it is the meaning the brand conveys that leads people to appreciate and prefer that brand.

While it may seem counterintuitive to not include the profit motive—after all what will shareholders think?—the benefits are clear. Having a purpose is not about forgetting about profits, it’s about changing how you think about the positive outcomes that happen when you make profits.

How does one define a purpose beyond profit?

Strong purpose statements flow from the emotional impact that is generated by the prime meaningful outcomes the brand produces through its products, policies, procedures, and behaviors. The ideal purpose operates on a level that makes it possible for even the most disparate people to see the relevance of the brand to their lives.

The outcomes to which the purpose points are the positive impacts that are made by the brand across the personal, social, or environmental realms. Positive impacts are those that add to the individual or collective well-being.

Everyone affected by the brand should feel that the purpose is personally relevant and emotionally important, that it embodies an ideal they share, and that they want to be part of fulfilling that promise, whatever their role.

As such, the language of a good purpose is anything but corporate-speak. Jargon gives way to simple, honest, and memorable words and phrases. The voice is positive, uplifting, and purposeful.

A brand purpose is not a tagline

A purpose is not written to fit the style of a slogan or tagline; it contains all the thoughts it needs to engage and inspire people. A new brand purpose may well inspire a new tagline (as well an overall communication style) for your firm. Though we caution you to be realistic about how much a tagline can achieve with respect to creating a meaningful difference. Remember, real change won’t come from what you say in advertising and marketing, but from the emotions your brand evokes in every interaction.

Download and read our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

 

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

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

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

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

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

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

So what do we usually advise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

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

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

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

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

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

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

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

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

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

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

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

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

 Download White Paper

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

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B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about emotive branding and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate and grow their businesses based on an emotive proposition.

Note that we didn’t say an “emotional” proposition.

Through “emotive” propositions we talk about B2B brands that reach out to people in a way that not only makes them think but makes them feel something memorably satisfying.

The Power of Emotive Branding in B2B

Emotive branding is about digging deep into a B2B brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading, this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors; and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Emotive branding isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and sets you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1.  Business audiences wake up as humans – From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2.  B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves – Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings. It’s not as difficult as you think.

3.  Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands – In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4.  B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments – B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5.  There’s proof in the pudding – All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We’ve applied the principles of emotive branding in a number of B2B scenarios, including global enterprise software companies, high-growth technology companies, global consulting firms, and businesses leading with purpose.

Looking to set your B2B brand apart by connecting meaningfully to people and distancing yourself from the competition? Emotive branding is your answer.

To learn how emotive branding works, download our white paper below:

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Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.