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Category: Emotion is the Strategy

Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now

Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly meaningful experiences is what really matters right now.

At Emotive Brand, we’ve built our methodology on our belief in the power of emotion. Our methodology has never proved more important or relevant than now. Emotive brands forge emotional and meaningful brand connections by caring deeply about people and aligning their actions and communications to the deep-rooted human needs, desires, and aspirations of all those important to the brand.

We see the keystones of such connections as empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. In our seminal white paper, “Transforming your brand,” we introduce these key drivers of thinking in this way:

“Emotive brand strategies use empathy to better understand and address the needs, values, interests and aspirations of people, both within and outside of your business. As such, we take your brand’s positive attributes and match them against what we know about the ideas and ideals that people care about, connect to, and that can change their behavior. We also encourage our clients to adopt new behaviors that are more empathetic toward both their employees and customers, and to use the insights they gain to identify ways to make their workplace and offerings more personally relevant and emotionally important in the moment.”

Why Empathy?

Empathy is being able to vicariously experience how another experiences something. It’s not actually having the same experience, but rather allowing yourself to see the world from another’s perspective. For example, you don’t have to be blind to understand what life is like without the key sense of sight. Empathy is an innate trait (children are naturally empathetic), and simply needs to be sourced from within. We take an empathetic view of your audiences and then assess how your brand addresses their deepest needs. The results are sometimes unexpected, but always gratifying to our clients, and cultivating empathy is especially essential in navigating uncertain times like these.

Why Compassion?

Compassion is putting the insights you gain through empathy into practice in a helpful way. This is the essence of problem-solving. You come to understand another’s needs and then redesign products, experiences, and communications accordingly. This means greater creativity, innovation, and a continually broadening perspective. We turn to our compassionate nature to translate the unique intersection between your brand and basic human needs into actionable practices that bring the resulting meaning to life.

Why Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of the surrounding world and more alive to its inherent possibilities. It is about having a broader perspective and a universal respect for others. It is recognizing that more unites us than separates us. It is about being humble, feeling connected, harnessing and using energy in new and more gratifying ways. When you employ a mindful attitude in everything you do, you enable a mutually-beneficial balance between your tangible business needs and the intangible meaning that will help your brand thrive in a COVID-19 world and beyond.

Every brand strategy we develop embraces the practices of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. Through this we are better able to match your brand’s attributes with what truly matters to people today on deep and meaningful levels. At the same time, the brand behaviors we develop aim to promote these factors on both leadership and organizational levels.

Making Meaning A Way Of Doing Business

Organizations and leaders are often overwhelmed by circumstances and respond by turning inward both as individuals and on an organizational level. A state of mindfulness enables organizations and leaders to rise above the immediate situation and to turn outward to others on a deeper and more personal level.

Brand behavior that promotes an empathetic, compassionate, and mindful culture helps ensure that your brand will evolve into the most meaningful state possible. As a foundation for your brand culture, these vital traits also make sure that your brand’s meaningful way of being is sustainable and enduring.

As brands seek to confront the challenges of this new world, it’s only natural that they turn to meaning. But it is important to remember that it’s one thing to claim meaning, and quite another to continuously create meaning both within and outside your brand organization. When empathy, compassion, and mindfulness inform the organization, drive its decision-making, and shape its vision, meaning goes beyond being a buzzword and becomes a way of doing business.

Download White Paper

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

Image by Alen Pavlovic

Cultivating Empathy: Essential in Uncertain Times

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Empathy in Uncertain Times

These days, everything feels unsettled. We’ve watched travel discontinue, lively offices expeditiously shift to remote work, restaurants and small businesses shut their doors, cities still and quiet, as the landscape of our global economy shifts on a daily basis. Recognition that this COVID-19 state of living, working, and doing business will not be ephemeral is settling in. We’re seeing first hand as our clients are forced to quickly adapt—make swift decisions, innovate new solutions, and reimagine the way they’ve always done business.

It’s clear that the weight communications hold has heavied. Executives are reaching out to their employees, eager to instill both calm and action. Businesses are connecting with stakeholders aiming to secure trust. Brands are reaching out to customers, motivated to emotionally resonate with consumers’ current state of mind. These connections, big and small, have never been more critical. Empathy has never been more essential.

Getting Closer in a Socially Distanced World

Empathy is an innate human skill that is available to each and every one of us. As such, it is a talent that stands ready to be reanimated through leadership, organizational behavior, and brand behavior.

As your brand aims to re-create a collective sense of what truly matters to people, and responds accordingly, it has the opportunity to take on a new and more emotionally valuable role in people’s lives. Employees will feel closer to your organization if they feel it is working hard in favor of their interests. Customers will feel a sense of kinship if they feel your brand truly understands them. Now is the time to think about how the experience of your organization’s products, marketing, and support all confirm its commitment to putting people first. How do you ensure that people walk away from every communication feeling they’ve been listened to, that their needs (both emotional and rational) have been better met, and their fears have been quieted? That every connection means one step closer together?

Redefining Empathy

At Emotive Brand, we see empathy as something a bit more than simply “sharing someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation.” (the dictionary definition). To us, it’s more powerful than both sympathy and compassion combined. Empathy is two-fold: both understanding and action. It’s the ability to truly feel and understand someone else’s situation—their emotional state of mind, their needs, desires, and fears. To use that empathetic understanding and take action that is in tune with the person and their state—ultimately improving it.

It’s no secret that business has never been strong on empathy. The closest it usually comes is in consumer research, but that science often leads to inhuman numerical analyses of the human psyche. People are notorious for telling researchers what they want to hear and are often unable to articulate what they really want or need.

Empathetic understanding is not necessarily an empirical process. Rather it is an experiential one leading to deep insights and a profound understanding and appreciation of the lives of others. It is a way to feel the hopes, dreams, fears, and concerns of the people your business seeks to impact. It is a way to vicariously experience what they see and feel when they use your products, experience your marketing, and deal with your people. This informs you of how you can retune and refine what your business does in ways that better reflect the insights you’ve gained through empathetic understanding. This also leads you to new ways of doing business that is more aligned with today’s world and more resonant with where people are today.

It’s Time to Rediscover Your Innate Empathy Skills

The smallest children show empathy for others, but we tend to lose this skill as we enter the mainstream of life. We can, however, reawaken this valuable talent and put it to good use.

The first step is to turn up the dial of two other innate traits: curiosity and caring. Think of the people who your brand impacts as people you know, love, and treasure. Try to imagine the perspective they have on what’s happening, the attitudes and beliefs that drive their behaviors, and the emotional nature of their new daily realities. Give them permission to have values and needs other than your own. Don’t ascribe right and wrong, rather strive to find out more about what drives them, what fulfills them, and what brings them greater peace of mind.

Empathy Has Rewards

For leaders today, empathy might be your most powerful tool. By better understanding what makes followers tick, empathetic leaders can find ways to make their new ideas, messages, strategies, and dreams more relevant and emotionally important. This shifts the response from followers, not only in aligning them to your vision, but also energizing them to work better together, develop new ideas, and strive for the highest goals.

The rewards multiply for an organization in which empathy is a core practice today. More resonance, greater impact. More appealing, relevant, and differentiated products. More compelling, activating, and loyalty-building marketing. More innovation, collaboration, and spirit flowing within the organization and greater stability to underpin your business.

If you want help embedding empathy into your executive and company communications during this time, please reach out.

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

Looking for a Better Client-Agency Relationship? Look No Further

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Sara Gaviser Leslie is a brand marketer, creative consultant, and former Emotive Brand employee. After years of thriving on the agency-side of the equation, she recently took an interim position at Course Hero to experience the client-side of things. If you’re looking to improve your client-agency relationship, here are her five tips to make sure every project is a success.

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The Client-Agency Relationship

Until recently, I’ve never experienced a brand creative project from the client-side. I was always the consultant. But, recently, when I took an interim but full-time role with a client, I was asked to run a creative project. I had expected mine would be the easier assignment; someone else was doing the work, right? What I learned, though, is that the client—and their relationship with the agency team—can improve the outcome of a project but also sabotage its success. I noticed some things that helped drive the success of these projects. Whether you’re working with an agency on a brand strategy, campaign, or video series, I am hoping they’ll help you, too.

1. Sharing Is Caring

Almost every project starts with a discovery phase. This is when the client shares all the materials that explain the company’s strategy and current brand. Your agency will likely give you a list of suggested documents. Don’t hold back! It’s your agency’s job to review the material; more really is better. And don’t worry if pieces are in draft form. Just send them along.

2. Make Yourself Uncomfortable—At Least a Little

One of the reasons that you chose the agency you did was because you saw the work they’d completed for other clients. It was clever, interesting, and maybe a bit unexpected, right?

I get that it’s easier to propose something unexpected when you are on the agency-side. I’d caution against clients playing things safe, however. As the marketing/brand representative from your company, your role is to ensure that the agency’s work is on-brand. The agency’s role is to create something different and memorable. Where these two roles converge is where the best creative work happens.

3. Chase Enthusiasm

Following from the point above, when you get to the point of choosing between different campaign options, as long as neither compromises the brand, choose the one that the agency likes best. You want to work on things that excite you, right? Your agency is no different. If they gravitate to a certain concept, take that cue. They’ll be more excited to work on that idea and you’ll get a better product.

4. Educate Them on What You Have Learned

One of the reasons I love consulting is because I love learning about new industries, business models, and technologies. My clients are great teachers. In a recent project, while our agency had original and interesting ideas for new social assets, they had less experience actually implementing these assets on different channels. You may also find that your agency is less skilled in performance marketing, content strategy, sales, or other execution work. Teach them! When you, the client, explain how you will use assets and what methods are most successful, your agency will be better equipped to meet your creative and implementation needs.

5. Lean on Them for Support

A campaign or other creative project is an investment. But it’s not worth pursuing this kind of project if you can’t implement it. If you have to move individuals in-house from one high-priority project to your high-priority campaign, your company loses. Similarly, if you are shorthanded on designers, copywriters, or videographers, make your needs known to your agency. Agency teams include full-time team employees, but most also have connections to freelancers in every possible area. Getting the right implementation team—whether internal or external—ensures that the creative work wasn’t in vain.

Instead of two parties on opposite sides of a negotiation, think about projects with agencies as partnerships filled with lots of possibilities. A growth mindset pushes you forward. What can you do together? What can each side gain? Agencies and clients are better when they work together.

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.

The Next Frontier for Employer Brands: Healthy Behavior Change

Posted on by Carol Emert

At Emotive Brand, we’ve seen a jump over the last year in clients seeking help with employee behavior change. Better brand behavior isn’t the focus. Instead, organizations are actually trying to help their people live happier and healthier work and personal lives.

It’s exciting to see companies living out their employer brands through a greater commitment to their people, and to see them authentically rewarded with more trust and loyalty.

Several trends have brought us to this point, starting with greater competitiveness in recruiting – especially in Silicon Valley, which seems to be innovating the employee-employer relationship as fast as technology these days.

Other factors include better neuroscientific insight into the mechanics of behavior change coupled with proven successes, especially in the area of health. And putting all of that theory into action are new digital tools that can monitor, measure, and support healthy habit formation over time.

From our vantage point at the intersection of brand and business, we’ve identified four best practices for successful behavior change.

1. Open the door with a powerful creative idea

You can chuck a new benefits program over the fence through an email and a new section on your HR page.  Or you can really engage employees through a strategic internal campaign wrapped in a powerful creative idea.

To get to an idea that works, you need to deeply understand your people. How they perceive the problem. Their barriers to adoption – both functional and emotional. What their ideal end state looks like. The language that resonates with them. The cultural context in which they live and work.

Connecting the dots between these data points will provide the emotional insight that informs your messaging. This insight and the resulting creative idea should create a siren’s call that’s so true and powerful, your people open up to it instinctively.

2. Make behavior change activity visible

Once you have peoples’ attention, they’ll be more drawn to a new program if they can see others participating. A sense of momentum triggers both FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and a genuine desire to be part of a collective action.

Think of the poor chump who is the first to give a standing ovation after a performance. Standing alone feels incredibly vulnerable – and foolish if nobody joins in. But once the standing O gains momentum and most people are doing it, the vulnerability shifts to the few people left sitting. A moment ago they were a regular part of the crowd. Now they appear either mean-spirited or clueless.

This principle, called social norming, is classically illustrated by this video of a lone Dancing Guy who convinces a whole hillside of picnickers to stand up and boogie.

For organizations, social norming points to the importance of seeding a new behavior change program with high-profile early adopters. Then make their activity visible, ideally both through external markers like a progress-tracking exhibition or swag, and digitally through workplace social networks, apps, or an intranet ticker showing an ever-growing number of participants.

3. Reward small actions and accomplishments

Gamification has exploded with the proliferation of apps promoting wholesome behaviors, from exercise to saving money to learning a language. Congratulatory badges and notifications have become expected bread crumbs down the path of behavior change.

Employers can leverage this trend by offering consistent, step-by-step rewards and incentives to get people started on a new behavior and then keep them on the path of progress. In addition to digital gamification, rewards can include personal recognition, financial incentives, and perks – whatever feels most true to the employer brand.

4. Break down big challenges

Sometimes behavior change is difficult because mastery requires an intimidating amount to learn or do. The sheer number of topics to master or actions to take can be paralyzing. Financial planning is one example. Losing 70 pounds through diet and exercise is another.

There are two ways to take the intimidation out of behavior change. One is to break down each step into pieces that feel doable. The second is to start with what’s easy. For example, someone might find it hard to create a financial plan that addresses all of their life goals. But starting with something that’s inherently rewarding, like saving toward a vacation, can open the door to a broader conversation.

If the process is then laid out in simple steps, ideally reinforced with a system of rewards, there’s a better chance of an employee getting all the way to the end.

A new frontier for employer brands

Behavior change is hard. Historically, it’s been a lonely endeavor. But we believe organizations can change all that by following our simple blueprint: Harness the power of your community. Break down big challenges into the doable. Offer motivating incentives. And deliver it all through inspiring communications.

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

Reducing Stigma Through Branding: A Moral Dilemma

Posted on by Chris Ames

Anti-Stigma Campaigns Need Authenticity

Inauthenticity is the Achilles heel of purposeful brands. More than ever, people gravitate toward companies that radiate transparency and accountability. We laud brands that shift our perception to break down stigmas. However, if these sensitive topics are clumsily handled, the backlash is harsh and swift. Failing to sell a luxury item is one thing. But misrepresenting a sensitive topic for financial gain? That’s another.

Nowadays, it seems hardly a week goes by without a public apology in response to a tone-deaf branding effort. So, how does a brand discover if it’s equipped to tackle an anti-stigma campaign?

Most people have trouble holding two ideas in their head at the same time, especially if the ideas are contradictory. It’s even harder for brands. Anytime a company puts an object out into the world – a branding campaign, an ad, a tweet – two ideas are presented:

1) The story of the object
2) The story of the brand

When it comes to the tricky world of branding for hot-button issues like awareness, social justice, or reducing stigma, audiences must reconcile these two stories.

What’s Your Brand Promise?

We’ve said it before, but at its best, a brand is a promise delivered. It informs people what they can come to expect from your products and services. Furthermore, it differentiates your offering from your competitors. A brand promise doesn’t materialize out of thin air. You should derive this from the intersection of who you are, who you aspire to be, and who people perceive you as.

Above all, does it make sense for you to be telling this story? Are your ideals and outcomes aligned with this cause? Or are you hoping to draft off the zeitgeist?

Storytelling Helps Reduce Cognitive Dissonance

Take the example of Pepsi versus Heineken. We have two beverages attempting to tackle big issues like systemic racism, transgender rights, and climate change.

In what could only be described as cultural drafting, Pepsi sprinkled in Black Lives Matter imagery into their ad with no real rhyme or reason. Unexplainably, it ends with a supermodel giving a police officer a soda.

In contrast, Heineken took something true about their product – people discuss complicated matters over beer – and transformed a bottle into an opportunity to dispel stigma through conversation.

The Specific Is Universal

Recently, we helped a global technology company address mental health in the workplace. There was no cognitive dissonance in their mission, so the question became: how do we approach such a large issue?

In the tech world, language shifts toward the hyperbolic. Given that approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experience mental health issues each year, it would have been easy for us to lean towards big, universal messaging.

The only problem is, stigma isn’t always that overt. Often, it exists because a shadowy old idea has been allowed to live unchallenged in someone’s mind. As a result, a strong stigma strategy focuses less on the stigma itself and more on creating familiarity through education and the common stories of other people via empathy and compassion.

So, we created a way for employees to connect with each other, share their personal journeys, and access mental health resources. By zooming in on the authentic stories of individuals, we could address a larger narrative without coming off as preachy or dogmatic.

Reducing Stigma Is Not a One-Off Campaign

Lastly, nothing builds public trust like a proven track record. It’s easy to support a trending cause. But reducing stigma is not a one-off campaign, it’s a long-term commitment – and we can help you keep that promise.

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

Checking In: One Month of Strategic Writing at Emotive Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Chris Ames has now officially been with Emotive Brand for one month – who knew he’d make it this long?– and as a new writer in the branding world, we wanted to see what he’s learned thus far. In this post, Chris talks about the importance of strategic writing and shares some advice that he’d give to other young creatives looking to break through in marketing and branding.

What has been your biggest surprise so far?

The sheer amount of strategy, planning, and forethought that takes place before even a single external word is written has been impressive and humbling. As a writer, I tend to create a giant block of content and slowly chip away until it’s refined, but it’s fascinating to see the inverse process: creating target audiences, customer journeys, language guidelines, mood boards, manifestos, rallying cries, narratives…and then beginning to write.

Until I worked here, I never realized the importance and power of internal documents for brands. Most of the work I’ve created so far is inward-facing. And though the initial audience might be small, it has the potential to act as a microphone for how brands not only articulate themselves in the marketplace but how employees communicate with each other on a personal level.

Any challenges?

I think an early decision writers must make with clients is choosing what your biggest strength is going to be: voice or versatility. When you hire me, is it because you want your copy to sound like me, or because I can sound like whatever you need? Especially when you’re working with tech companies or startups that have a jargon-heavy lexicon, it can be a game of linguistic tug-of-war. In a perfect world, you can meet the tone of the client and still retain that undercurrent of charm. Knowing when to mute your own voice is a good life skill in general, and I’m sure I still have a long way to go.

How does this writing differ from your previous job at a creative studio?

At my previous job, it was a volume game: how much content can I possibly create for you in the shortest amount of time? I worked very much in a silo, and the only real editor was the deadline. Here, everything is much more deliberate, collaborative, and there is an economy of words. Instead of chasing word counts, it’s more like: can you create one perfect, muscular sentence that’s strong enough to carry an entire campaign? Which, at first, seems easier. But it’s totally that Mark Twain– “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”– kind of thing. Simple is hard. Short takes a long time.

What advice would you give to young creatives entering the field of branding and marketing?

Reading books, especially written by people from a different background or perspective than your own, makes you a more empathetic person, and empathy is probably the strongest tool to wield in the workplace. Yes, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another will make you a better brander, but it will also just make you a better human being.

I’d also add, don’t waste your time in toxic work environments. There are tons of businesses looking for young creatives to drive into the ground because they don’t know any better. You might think that because you don’t have a ton of experience, you need to put yourself through hell as a rite of passage. The truth is your fresh eyes are actually a huge advantage. The whole reason brands hire outside agencies in the first place is because they’re seeking an outside perspective. Find an agency that’s excited about your new ideas and willing to embrace a fresh perspective, instead of looking to punish you for not having 10 years of experience under your belt.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

Building a Brand Awareness Campaign: How to Get It Right

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Big-Fish-Eat-Little-Fish World?

The brand world follows the food chain – little fish look up to the big fish, everyone wants to be on top, and low visibility is often equated with eventual extinction. Every brand wants to be the next Nike or Apple, right? The thing is that those big brands – those top-of-mind, always relevant brands that even your grandma knows about – are rare. And if you’re a brand that’s still trying to build awareness, simply imitating what they do isn’t always the right strategy.

Brand Awareness Issues

At Emotive Brand, we’ve worked with a lot of brands who share a common frustration. They’ve put so much into building a business, product, solution, service – endless hours, heart, and soul. And it’s great. The problem is that no one knows about it. No one understands the true value that brand can offer, or no one seems to care. That’s where an awareness campaign comes in to help.

Creating a Brand Awareness Campaign

Brands look to an awareness campaign to drive awareness, spark engagement, and ultimately, foster loyalty. If you get your awareness campaign right (it’s hard!) your brand and business can grow in meaningful and impactful ways. Here’s our advice.

1. Turn Your Audience into Your Advisor

You don’t have to have millions of loyal fans lining up at 3 a.m. for your latest product to know who your brand-lovers are or what they care about. As long as you find someone who loves your brand, you can learn and gather deep insights about how your brand fits into their lives. And from there, you can find people just like them – people who have the potential to fall in love with your brand.

2. Locate and Listen to Your Brand’s Heart

Getting to the core brand truths that will drive your campaign requires getting to the heart of why people care about you – both functionally and emotionally. Although most brands focus on the functional, if you really want to grow your brand, understanding what emotional role your brand plays in people’s lives has unparalleled value. These insights will inform how you build a relationship with your target audience moving forward.

3. Create Consistency, Create Trust

Once you identify your target audience and why they should care, you can figure out how to meaningfully connect with them and stand out in a way that consistently reinforces those key truths. A campaign is a perfect opportunity to introduce your brand in a way that resonates and draws people in. Setting the tone for the future, you can begin to build consistency and trust with the people who matter to your business.

4. Timing Is Everything

A mistake lots of brands make when creating an awareness campaign is generalizing time. How much does coffee matter to you at 10 p.m.? Have you thought about your car insurance today? A lot of brands think of themselves as lower-involvement brands because people don’t care about them all the time. But what about 7 a.m. when you have to get to work? Or those moments just after a fender bender? What really matters is finding those higher-involvement moments and pinpointing when they occur. When you isolate the occasions when people care the most, you can recreate campaign moments in which people will be most emotionally poised to connect with you. This helps make it real and motivates people to take action.

5. Nothing Beats Authenticity

People can smell inauthenticity from miles away. As you’re establishing yourself in the market and gaining awareness, it’s super important that you be authentic and true to who you are. The way you reach out to people needs to ring true to your core truths. Don’t grab people by imitating the big players. Grab people by being particularly emotionally relevant to them and genuine about what your company is really about.

Lower Awareness Brands May Not Be at a Disadvantage  

Being poised to grow, ready to exceed expectations, and eager to connect with people is a powerful position to be in. Many brands would do anything for a blank slate – another opportunity to make a perfect first impression.

Keep this in mind: while those big brands enjoy their position at the top, most people don’t feel delight in aligning with a massive company that everyone already loves. What many people crave is the thrill of discovery. Like stumbling upon a great unknown band or artist, there is a joy in unearthing a great unknown brand.

So focus on leveraging your position into an opportunity for people to explore and try something new. A lot of our clients struggle to see the tremendous emotional impact their small (but mighty) brand already has. As an agency, it’s our role to bring this potential to the surface, find those passionate brand advocates, and unearth the powerful core truths that will drive a campaign that can sky rocket brand awareness.

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

Nostalgic Brands are Capturing Hearts and Minds

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

A Nostalgic Age

As technologies continue to innovate and find new modes of connection, businesses need to move faster than the speed of light. But while moving forward is key to business success, many brands are looking backwards…and with success. Nostalgia is, no doubt, in. Bath & Body Works just announced the reintroduction of the old scents of the ’90s. The Sacramento Kings have embraced nostalgia with a new logo. Urban Outfitter’s is full of Polaroids, records, and retro cassette players. TV networks are bringing back ’90s favorites like Boy Meets World and Full House, which remind viewers of an age when scheduling a TV date with your neighbor was the norm. #TBT (throw back Thursday) continues to be one of the most trending and repetitively used hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Even Facebook reminds us of what we were doing 10 years ago, today.

The Financial Review’s conversation around this current “Age of Nostalgia” explains it as a backlash against the fast-paced technology and the economic and political uncertainty that has left people feeling anxious about the future. The millennial generation, in particular, is longing for the familiar: the products and brands that remind them of growing up and that elicit feelings of safety, comfort, and happiness. There’s a yearning to bring back the “good old days”. The success of these brand campaigns demonstrates the power of nostalgia: this strong and sentimental longing for the past. People are literally buying into the past.

But if a brand is rooted in nostalgia, how is it positioned to evolve? Successful brands need to use nostalgic triggers to help them progress, while capturing and re-capturing the hearts of their audience. And here’s how:

Short-Term Campaigns

Nostalgia shouldn’t be a long-term strategy. Oftentimes, the most successful brand campaigns are short-lived – little reminders of a brand’s beginning and how far it has come. They make people remember why they fell in love with the brand in the first place and how that love has evolved. These campaigns conjure up happy memories that keep people loyal and connected to the brand.

Crowd-Pleasers

Nostalgic campaigns don’t have to reach the masses. Many nostalgic brand campaigns have been most successful by targeting the millennial generation. Much of the power of nostalgic campaigns lies in how tailored their meanings are for a specific audience. Everyone has different memories associated with the brand from the past, and these independent and meaningful experiences are what make nostalgia hold such impact. Millennials are often the most connected, owning the most devices and demanding speed in every form of media. So these feelings of a slower, simpler times are often felt more acutely within this audience. At the same time, the success of a nostalgic campaign has the most potential within the millennial generation thanks to their connectivity to social media. If anything is going to go viral, millennials need to be part of it.

Rely on Established Brand Equity

In the end, most brands can’t rely on nostalgia alone. Nostalgia is a complex emotion that has to fit into the way the brand already wants to make people feel. Nostalgic triggers should add to the brand’s emotional impact, but not necessarily replace it. The most successful nostalgic campaigns are done by brands that already have established brand equity. It’s not possible to hearken to the past if that past isn’t well known, recognized, and remembered with fondness. Brands that look to the past need something of value to look back on.

Emotional Storytelling

At Emotive Brand, we know that emotive brands thrive. No matter your audience, people want to buy into brands that make them feel something. Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion, some would argue, one of the most powerful of emotions. It is also a complex emotion. Adding feelings of nostalgia into your brand story can make it more powerful, personal, and meaningful to the people who truly matter to your brand’s success. These brand champions are the ones that make your story their own. Nostalgic campaigns are often successful because they hold such strong emotional impact. They make people remember the past with joy, delight in old memories, and remind them of the “old days,” and these positive feelings are quickly associated with and connected to your brand.

The most successful nostalgic campaigns use the past to make people feel joy at remembering those times and simultaneously excited and ready to invest in the future of the brand. They take their audiences on a journey with them, and people delight in the brand as a result. A brand’s nostalgic triggers helps it connect in meaningful, momentous, and memorable ways to the people who matter to their business: past, present, and future.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

 

Could Your Brand Ever Command as Much Loyalty as a Sports Team?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Sports Fan Loyalty

Brand Loyalty – a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

At least once a year, my good friend wears the 40 year-old T-shirt of his favorite sports team. It’s too small. It’s faded and threadbare in places. It’s garish color looks terrible on him. It has a hole in the shoulder. But he loves it. It represents something that matters to him. His team.

40 years ago they won an NBA championship. Who knew at the time that it would take 40 years to get another chance? Over the decades, even though the team had highs and low, he still held out the hope that they could be great again. And he is so proud of his team right now.

The amazing thing is how attached we become to our teams. How does this happen? How is it that we become a dyed-in-the-wool Badger, or an Old Blue, or a fan for life?

Wouldn’t it be great if your brand could earn such unswerving loyalty?

To find out, let’s break down how it happens with sports teams.

Geography – When you live in a town, it’s hard to escape noticing the local team. Brands that have a consistent presence over time get noticed. And when a rival team invades your town, when it’s us against them, you automatically line up on the side of the locals, even if you’re just a casual, fair-weather fan.

Parents – You grew up listening to games on the radio with your dad. You grew up watching games on TV with your mom. Their deep feelings for the team became your deep feelings. Your brand loyalties were embedded early on through osmosis by the people you respect the most.

Friends – It’s contagious. If your friends are huge fans, it’s hard not to get caught up in their excitement. The example of their engagement, commitment and strong emotions rubs off on you. After all, it feels good to be part of the team, especially if it’s with your friends.

The Monday morning coffee break – “Hey, that was some game on Saturday, right?” When people talk about the team on Monday morning, you want to join in. You want to have a point of view. So you get pulled into the conversation, and into fan-hood, without really trying.

Creating Meaningful Connections

So what can a brand that doesn’t hit home runs or shoot three-pointers do to inspire a loyal following? It’s not so different from sports. It’s really simple. It is all about creating meaningful brand connections, as often as possible, to inspire people to go out of their way to support the brand.

Done consistently, that’s how a brand can hit a home run.

  • Geography is like community. If your brand pays close attention to your community and respects their needs and wishes, it will create consistent, meaningful experiences and stick in their minds and connect to their hearts.
  • Parents are like thought-leaders. When a brand leads from a purposeful belief, it can connect with people who share the same ideals. When your brand truly matters, people change the way they think and feel about your brand and you create a long-lasting relationship that can withstand the test of time. Some even call it loyalty.
  • Friends are like word of mouth. A positive word from someone you know is the strongest endorsement. If your brand behaves with emotional integrity and respects each individual customer every time in every brand experience, it can earn the kind of loyalty that friends share with their friends.
  • The Monday morning coffee break is like a conversation with a group of informed colleagues. If your brand performs consistently well with everyone it encounters, the weight of public opinion will be on your side, even when people are from different levels or walks of life.

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty has always come by emotional engagement. Creating meaningful connections and differentiation is where loyalty happens.

Your brand may not inspire fans to get tattoos or wear 40 year-old T-shirts. But it can form a strong emotional connection with people by learning what matters to them, by understanding their feelings and by behaving in a way that shows that you care about them.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Bay Area-based brand strategy firm with an emotive approach to branding.