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Category: Employer Brand

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.

Good Leadership Character Leads to Good Brand Character

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Tough time call for strong leaders

As recognition sets in that the COVID-19 crisis will not be short-lived, companies must respond appropriately by communicating in ways that are empathetic and relevant, contextually aware, human and sensitive. Leaders, brand stewards, and their teams must be extremely focused, keep up with the new normal of uncertainty, and have the ability to rapidly re-evaluate what their company stands for, how it communicates, and why this matters now more than ever.

Leadership Character

An excellent post at IMD.org speaks to two attributes that the writers, Professors Stewart Black and Allen Morrison, believe are necessary for leaders of global organizations today: emotional connections and integrity.

I think this advice is great for any business leader, not only those operating at the “global” level. Here’s the section on emotional connections that talks about being sincerely interested in others, genuinely listening to others, and understanding different viewpoints.

Emotional connections

Global leaders need to establish personal, empathetic relationships with people from all backgrounds inside their company, and in the broader community. Doing this requires three distinct abilities: sincere interest in other people, a heightened ability to listen, and a strong capacity for understanding different viewpoints.

Sincere interest in others

Our research found that effective global leaders actually like people – all kinds of people. They enjoy talking with people and being around them. They care about people and want in some way to make their lives better. All of these attributes help them to form better business relationships, which are a critical part of doing business in many countries. “International customers buy a relationship, not equipment,” David Janke, Vice President of Business Development at Evans & Sutherland, told us. “We’re not selling equipment: we’re selling somebody’s career, because she’s got her neck on the line. She is buying something and making a large investment,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, everybody points the finger at her, so she wants to deal with a company and people…that she trusts.”

Genuinely listening to people

Being interested in people is not the same as genuinely listening to them. As one executive recently told us, “It can be too easy when you are in a leadership position to do all the talking.” Yet, for others to feel understood, leaders must excel at picking up verbal and non-verbal communications. They must also overcome the “everyone thinks the same” assumption, which suggests a superficial understanding of the aspirations, interests, and feelings of other people.

Understanding different viewpoints

Understanding people requires leaders to relate personally to the lives of their employees, customers, and others who are relevant to the business. It means understanding context and, more specifically, how to provide appropriate leadership within it. For example, how a 40-year-old American expatriate manager delegates to a 35-year-old Japanese subordinate with a U.S. MBA should differ significantly from her delegation to a 55-year-old Japanese subordinate with no U.S. experience. To succeed, the American manager should pay much greater deference to the 55-year-old Japanese subordinate.

Effective Leadership

Establishing emotional connections is an essential part of effective global leadership, but this is not the same as “going native.” Leaders who are interested in people, who are excellent listeners, and who are familiar with local conditions and traditions do not have to become like the people they are with. While they need to keep an open mind, they should never forget who they are or what they represent.

When leaders have character,c their behavior influences people throughout the organization. This impacts on every aspect of the business, including the way its brand behaves. When the organizational culture is built around character, a new way of being emerges that is far more appealing to people, both inside and outside the business.

To sum up: When you bring empathy to your leadership style, you win. When your leadership style makes your brand more empathetic, everyone wins.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Meaningful Millennials: In the Workplace

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

This is the second installment in our weekly series entitled “Meaningful Millennials”, where we interview millennials on a variety of different subjects that are top of mind for us in the studio.

As a brand strategy firm, we work with our clients to help develop strategies that enable their brand, their business, and their workplaces to be more meaningful. This year, there has been a lot of work in the studio around employer branding, improving employee engagement, shifting culture, recruiting top talent internationally, and understanding how to create a meaningful workplace for millennials.

So, as a millennial myself, I asked other millennials: What makes a workplace meaningful for you?

What makes us come to work each day? What creates purpose and drives productivity? What adds meaning to everyday work life?

I reached out to 12 millennials and the following are the top-line findings:

  • Human, one-on-one connections and relationships in the workplace foster feelings of support, belonging, and growth that are really important for millennials.
  • We don’t want work to be just work. We long for a work culture that encourages balance – a space for learning, growing, and risk taking.
  • Workplaces that share our values encourage this growth because they make us feel naturally connected to what we do.
  • Millennials want to care about the work we do and want the people we work with to care, too. We like sharing values with co-workers, but also enjoy independence and the freedom to be our authentic, unique selves within the workplace. This stimulates creativity and productivity, and adds meaning to each day.

Want more specifics? Here’s what millennials have to say.

mm9

“A meaningful workplace is one that helps you grow and achieve what you would not be able to independently. I hate the idea of work-life balance and clichés like ‘do what you love.’ Work is part of your life. Every aspect should be lived and enjoyed wholly.”

—Bryan Ku, Designer at SYPartners, CCO at Nerd Skincare, Creative Director at Hummock Island

 

mm2

“Levity. The opportunity to talk and joke with one’s co-workers.”

—Beau Sperry, Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Biomedical Ethics Research Program at Mayo Clinic

 

mm5

“Overflow of trail mix. Having morning meetings to chitchat, bounce around weekend plans, goals, and aspirations. Setting up silly monthly challenges like ‘squat challenge Mondays’ to keep the environment active and healthy, which in turn makes for a productive team. Setting up mandatory ‘social’ jogs around the office keeps the energy up and is an easy way to get to know your co-workers quirks, values, and vulnerabilities. Lastly, lots of photos! A bulletin board full of inspiration, families, friends, and funny office moments brings meaning to walking into the office every day. Oh, and a gratitude jar.”

—Sarina Karwande, Student of Physical Therapy, Western University of Health Sciences

 

mm8

“A meaningful workplace is one with smiling co-workers greeting you in the morning, as well as saying their goodbyes to you in the evening; colleagues patiently helping coach and provide the proper advice for all your unanswered questions; and, most importantly, laughter filling the room the majority of the day.”

—Lauren Rhodes, People Coordinator, Coupa Software

 

mm3

“Easy. One word: windows. And not the OS.

Employers, please, window your workplace. Go gaga for glass. Our brains thank you.”

—Nick Martino, Publications Assistant, Public Library of Science

 

mm13

“My idea of a meaningful workplace is somewhere where everyone is a team player and the idea is to be the most productive while having an enjoyable time at work.”

—Isabelle Hale, Interactive Accountant, Snipp

 

mm1

“My workplace has felt most meaningful in moments when our team is able to step back from the flurry of details and logistics to talk about the impact our work has on the world. To situate the sometimes-tiring work of email and spreadsheets within our real mission as an organization is invaluable. I am lucky enough to have landed in a workplace with mentors who encourage this sort of ‘zooming out”’that makes the day to day consistently inspiring.”

—Nicole Stanton, Program Coordinator, Aspen Words

 

mm11

“Work/life balance is a high priority to me. A meaningful workplace is also somewhere where you are able to enjoy your co-workers on a deeper level, rather than just as colleagues. You spend more time with your co-workers than you do with your family and friends, so it’s important that you have a strong and supportive team.”

—Shannel Singh, Senior Staff Accountant, Riaz Inc.

 

mm7

“The ability and opportunity to take risks and have support from those in your workplace to those risks is meaningful to me. If you’re lucky enough to work in an environment that allows you to express the love you have for whatever craft you are passionate about, then allowing yourself to expand your interests with the support of others is one of the best situations you can be in.”

—Axel Cubias, Freelance Grip

 

mm4

“I think the relationships I build make a workplace most meaningful for me. Even if you absolutely love what you do, the people you do that with are what make your experience fulfilling. Beyond that, good working relationships are what foster support, creativity, personal growth, and just overall positivity! I also think having a deeper motive or goal makes a workplace meaningful. It would be really hard for me to work somewhere where people just go through the motions or don’t feel at least some connection to what they do.”

—Avery Geisler, Strategy Associate, Initiative

 

mm12

“Being comfortable in the workplace is huge. I don’t mean that I have to wear a T-shirt and jeans, but comfortable as in ‘I like the people I work with and enjoy what I’m doing.

Tech is so huge around San Francisco and start-ups are on every corner. They all do a good job of trying to create this “sexy” look to bring in employees with arcade rooms, events, and fun perks. For me, that sounds like fun, but it can easily distract from what is really important. For me, that’s a company’s values.”

—Alex Hanepen, Information Systems Intern

 

mm10

“I’ve spent countless hours slaving away in the service industry as a butcher and cosmetologist to realize I’m not a magician, but a killer with a knife. Now, I’m a writer for an awesome company producing work that’s not only important to me, but has a positive impact on my life. I’ve found that if you want your work to be more than a job, and instead be a positive force in your life, you need three things:

  1. self determination: being in control of your own choices
  2. complexity: being able to master new skills and grow
  3. direct connection between effort and award: seeing the payoff—whether financial, spiritual, or personal

The combination of these three things made my work meaningful.”

—Lauren Padia, Technical Writer, Salesforce

 

mm6

“In my opinion, the center of a meaningful workplace is the creation and focus on a cohesive workplace culture; a culture in which there is an understanding of work/life balance, an understanding that life outside the office comes first, and an understanding that we no longer live to work, but rather work to live.”

—Joshua Goldsmith, Brand Manager, Mark Miller Subaru

 

Here’s what we learned this week from millennials.

  1. Relationships within the workplace matter.
  2. Open the windows. Take a walk. Sunlight and lightheartedness are essential.
  3. Balance is key. Work/life balance, feeling comfortable enough to take risks, being supported to succeed, and the ability to constantly grow and learn.
  4. Focus on the greater impact of your work and your core purpose as an employee. This adds meaning to everyday and makes millennials feel like they are making a difference and doing work that matters.

Next week, we will continue our “Meaningful Millennial” series, discussing what drives brand loyalty for millennials.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design consultancy

The Key To Better Engaging Your Employees

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The workplace is in crisis. And engaging your employees is not easy.

Workers are not engaged. Productivity is down. Morale is low. Many employees obviously don’t see the point of what they, or their employer, are doing.

How can a business turn the tide of employee dissonance?

How can it become fit for a future that’s bound to be more competitive, complex, and commoditized?

How can it connect with people who are no longer blindly accepting corporate propaganda — people who are more “we” than “me” focused? People who are more discerning about the ideas, products, and brands they buy into, the businesses they buy from, and the companies for whom they work?

Tomorrow’s most successful businesses will have shifted their workplace to a more meaningful employee engagement platform. Using meaning as a springboard, these winners will have built places in which people want to work, are proud to work, and excel at their work.

What makes something meaningful

In the course of a day, our senses open us up to millions of stimuli, each of which presents itself and demands our attention. To cope with the avalanche of input, our system quickly decides which stimuli are significant enough to be acknowledged, and which are so significant that they must be remembered.

In other words, our system decides what matters — and what doesn’t.

The stimuli we remember can be significant in two ways. On a primal level, some of our memories help us survive against danger. On a higher-order level, some of our memories are cherished because they are relevant and emotionally important to us. These memories are meaningful because they directly connect us to what we hold to be important: our needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations.

When something remembered is meaningful to us, it resides with one foot in our brain and one in our heart. When a situation provokes us, we rapidly bring the memory to mind as a thought wrapped in emotion.

Being meaningful – the key to engaging your employees

The resulting feeling often spurs us to action and re-engagement with the source of the memory. Assuming the second experience is in the same vein as the first, there is a compounding effect that makes the memory even more meaningful.

For a business looking to better engage its employees, being meaningful by doing things that matter is the key to being cared about enough to be remembered and cherished.

Creating a meaningful workplace is about establishing a high-order connection with employees and benefiting from the compounding effect that comes from a constant stream of meaningful experiences tied directly to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of employees.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Strong Brands Give Employees an Idea to Rally Around

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

 

How to give employees something to believe in

Take a moment to think about the employees working for your brand right now:

They are in elevators, at desks, in conference rooms,  in home offices,  on the phone.

They are in cars, on planes, in taxis, on a teleconference.

They are closing deals, answering questions, presenting ideas, pitching prospects, processing orders, producing goods, answering phones, inventing products, serving customers, designing packaging, building factories, budgeting projects, balancing the books, convincing investors, meeting community leaders, hiring recruits and wiring networks.

But are they working in a purposeful, fulfilling and satisfying way – or are they “just doing their job”?

Are they inspired and motivated by what they do, the people they work for and the people they work with – or are their attitudes and behaviors coincidental?

Do they collaborate – or work at cross purposes?

Are they restless and innovative – or resting on their laurels and letting the competition pass you by?

Does their behavior build your brand – or render it meaningless?

The best way to make employees feel their work is meaningful and worthwhile is to develop a “reason for being” for your brand that resonates with the needs, beliefs, interests and aspirations of your employees.

At Emotive Brand, we call that a “Brand Promise” which we believe strives to be:

  • A memorable thought focused on the emotional outcome the brand seeks
  • A brand destination that sets a credible and noble ambition
  • A source of inspiration, guide to change, filter for consistency
  • A thought that comfortably enters your employee’s minds throughout the day

A carefully and thoughtfully crafted Brand Promise will help focus and engergize your people.

It will also leave them feeling far more satisfied with what they do, the people they work with and the brand that employs them.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.