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Category: Narratives & Storytelling

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

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

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

Why are Messaging Frameworks useful?

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

When are Messaging Frameworks not what the doctor ordered?

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

What’s a better option?

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

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

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

What Is a Brand Idea?

Posted on by Chris Ames

How do people make business decisions? Whether you’re debating a specific word choice or overhauling an entire brand, there’s always a tension between the rational and emotional, the aesthetic and strategic. It’s easy to have a gut instinct over the things that inflame your curiosity, but what about the minuscule? As decision fatigue sets in, how do you ensure your choices are aligned, consistent, and ultimately laddering up to something greater than the sum of its parts?

This is where the concept of brand idea shines. A brand idea is an essence or embodiment of what you stand for. Think of it as a stake in the ground that is used to guide your look, feel, and voice. It gives an emotional dimension to your brand, demonstrates what it’s like to do business with you, and serves as a shorthand for how your brand shows up in the world.

A brand idea is not a tagline. It’s not necessarily something that people would ever see. It’s more of a guiding principle that people feel from your brand experience as a whole.

Examples of Brand Ideas

Let’s look at Starbucks. For years, their brand idea was to be the “third place” in your life. Popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, the third place is a social setting that’s separate from home and work. According to Oldenburg, third places are “anchors” of community life “where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces, and make new acquaintances.”

For Starbucks, “third place” works as a call to action for people to engage on a much deeper level than just getting properly caffeinated. Because as they say, life happens over coffee. And given that they have nearly 30,000 retail shops, the idea of serving as an anchor to community life is one they can legitimately occupy.

Decision-makers at Starbucks aren’t always going to agree on the latest holiday cup design, or exactly how much adult contemporary to include on their playlists, but if they are aligned at the highest brand level, every decision will be in service of a greater purpose. That top-level consistency is felt across the board, even if there are individual variations in look and feel.

When Brand Ideas Become Taglines

Obviously, Starbucks would never make “third place” an external message. People would be like, “Your coffee won third place in a coffee contest? I’ll pass, thanks.” But sometimes, brand ideas are so compelling and succinct that they become external taglines.

As brand consultant Will Burns says, “True brand ideas are insulted when you call them taglines. And for God’s sake, don’t call them ‘slogans’ or the brand may unfriend you on Facebook. The best taglines rationalize everything a company/organization has done and inspire everything it will do.”

Most of the time, taglines are simply rational facts communicated well to an audience. They want you to know a piece of information that is very specific. When we think about Nike’s “Just do it,” Apple’s “Think different,” or Kaiser Permanente’s “Thrive,” something much bigger is happening. No one is talking about product-level specifics, they are appealing to a higher state of emotion, purpose, and meaning. These are inspirational, aspirational brand ideas.

LEGO, a brand that has celebrated creativity since 1932, is sublime. Their idea, “Inspiring the builders of tomorrow,” is felt throughout every manifestation of their brand. The company’s retail outlets are designed spaces for family “building” events and kid-friendly exploration areas. LEGOLAND encourages kids to open their imaginations at construction sites that dot the theme parks. Even LEGO movies inspire and encourage the act of making.

GEICO’s “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” has seared itself onto the public’s subconscious, but it doesn’t really evoke an emotion or communicate anything about the types of people who use their product. We just imagine a vaguely Australian gecko and move on.

Beyond campaigns, beyond marketing jargon, a great brand idea establishes a common way of seeing. It’s a viewfinder for observing a brand’s unique place in the world, the industry, and most importantly, in people’s hearts.

So, what’s your brand idea?

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

The Role of Voice Technology for Brands

Posted on by Chris Ames

Voice Technology Is Older Than You Think

Voice is the newest technology platform on the block. And like all seemingly new things, it’s actually much older than you think. In the early 1960s, IBM introduced the Shoebox, an early effort at mastering voice recognition. This bulky little machine could recognize 16 words spoken into its microphone and convert those sounds into electrical impulses. Basically, it was a voice-operated calculator. Dressed in a tuxedo at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, developer William C. Dersch performed the miracle of turning your voice into a search engine.

Since those formative days, voice technology has advanced exponentially – and so has demand. By 2019, the voice recognition market will be worth $601 million. And by the end of 2022, voice commerce will be a $40 billion industry, while 55% of American homes will own at least one smart speaker.

Finding Our Voice

And while there is an undeniable demand for voice technology, it still feels like people and businesses are discovering the best way to tackle the vocal landscape. On this blog, we’ve written about how voice will alter the future of SEO, and it’s a great place to start if you’re new to the technology.

But beyond the nitty-gritty of formatting for mobile, creating rich snippets, and writing long-tail keywords that mirror natural speech, we’re interested in something bigger. How do you make your brand stick out in the world of voice? How do you provide unique experiences that fit the medium? And is there a role for voice in the world of B2B?

How to Stand Out in the Chorus

Something to consider right off the bat is how much more emotive a voice is than a block of text. As outlined in their article “To Read Emotions, Listen,” Psychology Today explains how an isolated voice may be the truest signal of a person’s inner experience. As opposed to visual cues, “the most reliable way to read someone may simply be to listen to their voice.” And it makes sense. How many arguments have you been in that started not because of what you said, but how you said it?

This same space of heightened emotion can be leveraged to create a stronger connection between brands and people. When crafting text for voice, brands should aim for something conversational, human, and warm. If you have a technical or lengthy offering, consider making an alternate script for voice that is more succinct and approachable.

As Ilker Koksal writes, “Voice shouldn’t just be about making a sale. It’s about being useful to your customers and being ready to help when they need you. Brands using Alexa and other voice-first experiences both create opportunities for customers to engage – and then help those customers become used to engaging on a regular basis, perhaps in a daily routine.”

Usefulness is where voice currently excels. Things like directions and recipes are thriving with voice search because it’s the perfect combination of needing an answer in a hands-free environment. The challenge for other brands is figuring out exactly how you can be useful.

  • Start with a persona and a question. In this customer journey, what search queries are your customers using early and late in the purchase process?
  • What content is helping them answer these queries or informing their opinion?
  • In a conversational way, what would these questions sound like through voice?
  • How could short-form audio content answer these questions succinctly?
  • Consider creating an “audio logo” or noise that’s instantly recognizable by ear, so customers have an aural way to know they are interacting with you.

How Can B2B Companies Sing Along?

When it comes to voice, the path for B2C companies is much clearer. In the U.S., Domino’s has already seen promising results since making its one-click Easy Orders option available through Alexa. Two months after launching, 20% of customers signed up for the service. I mean, what’s easier than saying, “Alexa, I want a pizza” and it magically arriving at your door?

Similarly, PayPal now supports transactions via Siri, allowing users to send and request money in 30 countries around the world with voice. As easy as saying, “Send $30 to my brother,” Siri pulls up a custom sheet with details of your transaction for authorization. Identifying opportunities for “one-click” interactions in your sales cycle is key, as voice search is all about immediacy.

Perhaps a more interesting use-case for B2B companies is that of Saint Louis University. Earlier this year, they announced they would be the first college or university in the country to put Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, prepped with university-specific information, in every student living space. So, all the questions a student might have – What’s happening on campus tonight? Where is the student center? When does the library open? – are easily accessed and organized in an interactive way.

Voice Lends Itself to Employer Brands

Think of how this technology could be used for an employer brand, or even onboarding a new employee. In one device or app, a business could have an interactive way to educate their staff on upcoming events, benefits, meetings, opportunities, or even storytelling from team members. Missed the last all-hands? Listen to a recording of the meeting. Curious about the vision of the company? Listen to the CEO explain the upcoming acquisition strategy. Looking to engage with the mental health benefits? Listen to stories from people who have taken advantage of the free therapy program.

The role of voice in brand is still being defined, but that’s the most exciting part. The immediacy and emotion of voice is yet another tool in our arsenal to transform the way people reach out to brands and the way brands respond back. To learn more about voice or our partnership with Voicify, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Renaming Your Business? Here’s the Low-Down on Emotive Naming

Posted on by Carol Emert

The first time a shopping buddy suggested I visit Pottery Barn, I declined – imagining a rustic space filled with hippies and rust-colored earthenware.

Why would my friend recommend such a place? I wondered. Pottery Barn – as if!

Pottery Barn is lucky. It succeeded with a name that’s disconnected from both the functional and emotional truths of its brand. The experience of the brand – beautiful stores, upscale products – dominates brand perceptions. Nobody even thinks about the name bespeaking a cow shed with a kiln in the corner.

For companies considering a name change today, few, if any, will be able to withstand that big of a miss. Unless your business model includes 1,000 mall stores to imbue your name with meaning, it’s critically important to get it right.

CEOs Lead Renaming

Because a company’s name is its single most important brand expression, naming decisions fall largely on the shoulders of the CEO. The stakes are high, and yet naming is not an area where CEOs typically have much expertise.

Whether a new name is in order because the company is changing, the marketplace is changing, or an evolving product architecture requires a different container, it’s important that a new name actively support the CEO’s vision for organizational transformation – in whatever direction she or he is leading.

The Opportunity of Emotive Naming

Many CEOs lean toward functional names that clearly state what their company does in the world. That’s a logical approach – but it’s rarely possible anymore. The fact is that nearly all of the straightforward names have been taken for years.

It’s no wonder, then, that companies today are liberally borrowing words that might be only very distantly related to what they do, like Tesla, Goop, or Bluetooth. Or they’re making up words, like Etsy, Spotify, Magoosh, or Zynga.

What made-up names lack in functionality, they can sometimes more than make up for in emotional impact – something we at Emotive Brand consider central to effective branding.

The dearth of functional names might seem like a business challenge, but we believe emotive naming is a great opportunity.

Zynga sounds zingy and lively ­– feelings that the company’s mobile games might create in a player’s otherwise mundane day. Etsy is reminiscent of Betsy, an old-fashioned woman’s name from hand crafting days. If someone had an Aunt Etsy, she would almost certainly be a knitter. And it’s easy to imagine Eddie Redmayne playing a bespectacled bookseller named Warby Parker in a movie set in 1930s London.

Emotive Naming Creates Emotional Impact

The great thing about emotive naming is that names like these create a distinctive feeling that can actually be more impactful than an obvious name like Handicraftsite.com or Mobile Gaming Inc. or Millennial Glasses Online.

People don’t need to think about what emotive names mean. People intuitively feel what they mean.

Creating or choosing the right emotive name starts with knowing how a brand should make people feel – what we at Emotive Brand call a brand’s emotional impact.

Emotional impact is a crucial part of brand strategy development at Emotive Brand and the foundation of our creative efforts.

Understanding how a brand needs to make its target audiences feel informs visual identity and other design, including critical touchpoints like the website. It also informs the logo and, of course, it informs naming.

If your company would benefit from a name that creates emotional impact, reach out to Emotive Brand to learn about emotive naming.

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

How CMOs Can Control Their Brand Message in the Age of Digital Sprawl

Posted on by Chris Ames

The New CMO

What does a CMO do? Just a few years ago, that was an easy question to answer. You focused on building a brand. You managed your channels: press, radio, a TV spot, maybe even an outdoor installation if you were feeling ambitious. Like a conductor, you could orchestrate your brand message with Mozart-like precision. Marketing, itself, was a pure sport, clearly defined.

Flash forward to today, and the blurred lines between technology, marketing, and sales are harder to discern than ever. Fluency in digital transformation has gone from a specialty to a requirement. CMOs need to be able to speak social media, big data, analytics, machine learning, voice technology, and a myriad of other mediums that were just invented halfway through this sentence.

Should you zero in on customer experience? Are you basically a CIO now? And with the mass proliferation of channels — website, blogs, newsletters, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. — how can you possibly control your message when it is at the fingertips of consumers?

If You Love Something, Set It Free

It may seem like now more than ever, CMOs are terrified of losing control of their brand message. The truth is, they lost it a long time ago — and that’s actually a good thing. Because with the right brand behavior and understanding of the customer experience, CMOs can get consumers to do their job for them.

When was the last time you bought something based on an “About” page or press-release boilerplate? Chances are you read product reviews, consulted your community on Facebook, or clicked a targeted ad while scrolling through Instagram. Social media has led to the commodification of trust, turning an opinion into a competitive advantage. Just look at Yelp.

Embrace the Sprawl

Instead of fighting the digital sprawl, CMOs should focus on making their brand strong enough to speak for itself. Make your brand a clear, well-defined, differentiated tool for people to use. The truth is, you’ll never be able to fully control consumers. But if you present your brand unequivocally as a hammer, chances are people are going to start driving home nails. Your brand should:

  • Behave in a manner that people expect, driven by a core-defined positioning which is reinforced throughout all messaging.
  • Have a purpose (beyond profit) that people can rally behind.
  • Avoid trying to be everything to everyone.
  • Be differentiated. We don’t have to tell you how crowded the marketplace is. Don’t just add blockchain to your name and hope for the best.

Consumers are smarter and more educated than ever, meaning they are at least halfway through the buying cycle before they even contact you. (If they ever contact you.) The key then for CMOs is creating a consistent and high-quality experience across this wide network of mediums. You may not be able to control online communities, but you can engage them, earn trust, and turn them into your biggest advocates.

Above All Else, Brand Drives Reputation

That may seem tricky, but it’s no less daunting than trying to create a blanketed ad in this day and age. Brands and their robust marketing teams spend billions of dollars every year rocketing researched, workshopped, and thoroughly-tested ads straight into the void. In 2014, Google reported that a staggering 56.1 percent of all digital ads go unseen. There’s just no such thing as one-size-fits-all anymore. CMOs simply have too much information at their disposal to not meet customers where they are.

So, needless to say, CMOs have a lot on their plate. They have to wrangle data, sift through technology, create relevant content, understand an ever-shifting customer experience, and influence the influencers. But having more gadgets on the tool belt is not a bad thing. In giving up some control, CMOs have the ability to gain exponential growth. As long as you can endure the memes, down-votes, and battles in the comment sections, the digital sprawl can be your best friend.

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

Brand Strategy Trends: What These Shifts Mean for Businesses and Brands

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Looking Back, Looking Forward: 2018 B2B Brand Strategy Trends

Any new year brings up the opportunity to reflect on the year that’s been – and what’s to come. As Emotive Brand’s Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, I talk to individuals in different roles, at companies of every size and maturity. I am truly lucky – it puts me on the frontline as B2B brand strategy trends develop in real time.

Here are some of the most interesting trends I observed in 2017 and what’s on my mind as we move into 2018:

1. Messaging That Can Flex

Whether it’s short attention spans or Twitter’s influence, our clients are asking for a new type of messaging. For years, traditional product marketing and brand-level messaging fit in the same schematic box: target audiences, pain points, proof points, key messages, etc. But priorities shift. Now, clients want a brand story in 10 words, 50 words, 100 words, 500 words – and also in a long-format narrative. It’s all about stretching and articulating the brand story while keeping it on strategy, whether in a tweet, on a website, or in a proposal. Businesses want messaging that can flex to all platforms, moments, and media, and still stay on brand.

2. To Create a New Category or Not? Proceed With Caution

In 2017, many clients came to us and said, “We’re creating a new category. Help us define it.” A new category is one path to differentiation. The thing is, few companies have the budget, business strategy, or team to do it properly – and they have no idea what developing a new category entails. In most cases, category creation is the wrong strategy. But we want to cure what ails you so, first, we listen. Then we help clients dig into the real problems that plague the business, look for better ways to address those issues, and then move their business forward.

3. Embracing the Non-Linear

Project timelines compressed this year. Some agencies might see this reality as a total bummer. I don’t. Shorter cycles pushed us to find more agile ways to solve our clients’ most pressing business problems. It’s made us fast. We’ve developed a strong arsenal of tools, frameworks, and workshops that we apply to every business and brand issue. I admit, most of the work we did last year seemed out of sequence compared to our normal brand strategy methodology. But throughout the process, we learned we are great problem solvers. When we deliver a smart solution and solve pressing business problems – quickly – clients come back. And that’s a good business model.

4. Sales-Led Positioning Strategy

More and more, our positioning projects include our clients’ sales leadership teams. It makes sense – when you make a change in positioning, you almost always impact the sales strategy. We’ve created value propositions and messaging for subscription sales, sales kickoff presentations, and training materials, and everything needed for solution selling. We don’t just focus on marketing deliverables. Good positioning aligns marketing and sales and drives sales enablement within sales organizations. These projects produce measurable, and almost immediate, ROI and provide great case examples of our work. It’s a win-win for everyone!

5. Greater Investment in Research

We’ve seen an uptick in tech companies who are willing to pay for research  – and we’re helping them get the information they need. Companies recognize the value in conducting research to benchmark the sentiment of both internal and external audiences before they launch a positioning project. Research helps set the bar. Then, once the positioning work is done, further research helps businesses test both the effectiveness and the efficacy of the brand in meaningful and tangible ways, year after year.

6. Architecture and Taxonomy

Clients are asking us to help build their brand architecture and taxonomy projects. Heavy M&A activity is likely one reason they need this kind of help. Both at the brand and product level, clients want simplification. Well-defined, meaningful brands and product offerings drive customer understanding, accelerate the sales cycle, and create customer loyalty.

7. Focus on Internal Audiences

One of the most exciting trends I’ve seen this past year is growing investment in projects geared towards internal audiences, an area we think companies have neglected. We’re being asked to create employer brand strategies and employee communications campaigns, facilitate shifts in corporate and brand strategy, and share employee benefits offerings in unique ways. We are seeing momentum here – and we like it. Brands are built from the inside out, and those that are investing internally, in their employees, will reap the rewards of their work.

Keep posted for more of our thoughts about B2B brand strategy, 2018 trends, and what they mean for businesses and brands today.

Emotive Brand is a B2B brand strategy and design agency.

 

Early Warning Signs You Need a Brand Refresh

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Brand Presentation Counts

Presentation is everything. It’s the way a gourmet meal looks on the plate, what you wear for a job interview, or the tidiness and odor of your hotel room when you open the door.

The same rings true with a corporate brand.

Your brand is who you are. When your brand presentation is clear, people understand who you are and what you stand for in the world. On the other hand, when your presentation doesn’t make a great first impression, you must prepare to deal with the fallout.

This is why when we work with clients, we often need to stress that how you present your brand externally is different from what you say internally. Externally, you speak to shareholders, partners, and customers.

We believe external messages must address these four questions:

  •      Who are you?
  •      Why do you matter?
  •      What do you do?
  •      How do you do what you do?

You communicate these same ideas to your internal audiences — your employees, foremost, and, secondarily, your board of directors. But you have to tailor them for each audience. Not only does the way you communicate your brand connect your stakeholders to your strategic goals and objectives, it also affects your ability to be a sought-after employer and great place to work. You’ll attract and retain great people when you socialize and operationalize corporate strategy in a way that employees can understand and relate back to why it matters to them.

So how do you get to a place where you can communicate simply, strongly, and boldly?

You create the right message for the right audience and the right message for the right time.

Recognizing The Need for a Refresh

First, ask yourself, “Can we easily articulate who we are and why we matter?” More specifically:

  •      Is our story simple?
  •      Is it externally focused? Internally focused?
  •      Is it easy for people to know everything we offer?

Or try some more tactical, capital investment questions:

  •      When is the last time we invested in a brand campaign?
  •      How is our lead gen?
  •      Are we investing in content?

Maybe the easiest question to answer is this one:

  • “Can everyone in the company, even outside of the sales organization, give the pitch with confidence? Can they do it in 10 slides? Would it be consistent overall?”

Time for Change

If you don’t like the answer to these questions, you need to change how you present your brand.

It’s time to bring someone from the outside in to freshen up your story and your presentation so you can to start the new year in full alignment.

We’re here to help.

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

Mastering the Art of Emotive Writing

Posted on by Carol Emert

Emotive branding works because it connects with people on a very real and personal level. But brands have multiple target audiences who are often very different from each other. They may be easily relatable, or they may not. So how does a brand speak in a way that truly resonates with each diverse audience? From an agency point of view, how do we at Emotive Brand approach emotive writing?

This question relates mostly to messaging – communications aimed at key stakeholders who are very different people with different relationships to the brand. A typical audience mix might include employees, investors and prospective customers with widely varying styles and needs, like Fortune 500 companies and SMBs, or Millennial and Boomer fashion shoppers.

In this post, we’re lifting the lid on Emotive Brand’s approach to emotive writing. All of our ideas are designed to maximize empathy with target audiences because – here’s Tip #1 – you can’t talk to them meaningfully if you don’t care. Effective writing requires that you get out of your own head and into a place of true, heart-felt empathy with the audience.

Emotive Writing Starts with Emotional Insight

To connect with each audience, you need to truly understand them – not just intellectually, but emotionally. What are their greatest fears and highest aspirations that relate to your brand? What are their met and unmet emotional needs in your category?

Audience interviews are ideal for getting the emotional juice flowing and helping brands start feeling into their audiences. When that’s not possible, interviews with clients who interact directly with each audience can be a good substitute. Often we talk to successful sales people who really connect with their customers and help solve their problems.

The key is to ask questions that get their emotions going. What makes their day truly great when they’re helping a potential customer? What’s the biggest difference they’ve ever made for a customer?

Then ask emotionally-geared questions about the customers: What are their greatest challenges and opportunities? Ask for stories about specific favorite customers to help put a face on the customer audience. Get a sense for their history, their career or life trajectory, their passions.

As interviewees start to emote, it’s time to flex your empathy muscle and feel in. Notice what language they use, their cadence of speech, the “feeling tone” of the experience. Record the interview, if possible, to remind yourself of the emotions at play when you sit down to write.

Feel Into the Emotional Impact on Your Target Audience

When feeling into your target audience, it’s useful to have a lens into the key emotion your brand wants to stimulate within them. Is the ideal end result of the brand interaction a feeling of support, relief, empowerment, enlightenment, freedom, abundance, joy or something else entirely?

At Emotive Brand, we identify an Emotional Impact for each of our brand’s key target audiences. It provides clarity and focus, so when we (or a client) are crafting communications for that audience, it’s easy to feel into that emotion and let the words flow.

Stimulate the Flow

Sometimes the act of sitting down to write and facing a blank page can be enervating – the opposite of emotive. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to stimulate your way into emotive gear.

If you are working towards creating joy in your target audience, listen to music that brings you joy.

If your brand has a clever edge, listen to a standup comedian or read an author who has a similar tone.

B2B audiences may be less represented in pop culture, but there are plenty of interviews and panel discussions online that can help a writer get into the right emotional space.

Art, music, film, lectures, fiction, non-fiction – any of these can get you in gear for heartfelt emotive writing.

Nothing Sells Itself: Why Storytelling Should Drive Demand Generation

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotive Brand Expert #1: Greg Howard

As a brand strategy and design agency, we have the privilege of being able to visit innovative companies from a myriad of fields. From global law firms to burgeoning start-ups, we get to pull back the curtain and observe how brands are built, from the inside out.

Drawing on our ever-growing network, we’re excited to launch our Emotive Brand Experts series. In these posts, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else – and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today.

In this post, we speak with Greg Howard, who is currently working on an exciting new company that’s operating in “stealth mode.” Formerly, Howard ran marketing at Kenna Security, a fast-growing cyber security company. Before that, he ran marketing at AppDynamics, where he helped the company grow to a $100 million run rate and become a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in only a few years’ time.

Nothing Sells Itself

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: “I don’t care what it looks like, I just need it to work.” So often in business, especially when it comes to B2B companies, there’s a misperception that if your technology is good enough it will sell itself. After all, if you’re selling software to developers, why would you use your limited time and resources on aesthetics?

“Not only do I believe that the product sells itself is dead,” says Howard, “but I don’t believe it ever really existed in the first place.”

From Howard’s point of view, people underestimate just how much energy it takes to get someone’s attention in this crowded marketplace. Silicon Valley alone has more than 23,000 startups. By the time you finish reading this sentence, it’s quite possible someone has just created another Uber for x.

“Buyers are constantly inundated with messages, so getting your messaging and brand identity is absolutely key,” continues Howard. “There’s simply too much noise out there. If you don’t do it right, you’ll never get through.”

You’re Only as Strong as Your Story

Take it from an expert: even if your technology is running theoretical circles around your competitors, you still need a compelling brand story and visual identity to match. Technology without a story is like shopping in the canned food aisle without labels. You might have the best tasting dish out there, but the customer has no way of discerning that information. Maybe you’re delicious mulligatawny soup. Then again, maybe you’re dog food.

“If you want to be successful at demand generation,” says Howard, “it all starts with emotion. You need to dive into the mind of the buyers and figure out what they do on a daily basis.

What does their world look like? What is their pain? From there, you can craft a compelling story, and everything else – testing, campaigns, iterating – comes from that story.”

So, if story and brand strategy are so crucial to the success of a company, how come it’s often viewed as a low priority? According to Howard, it might be a matter of definition. In the B2B world, phrases like “brand strategy” and “narrative” are dirty and misunderstood.

“People tend to think of ‘the brand’ as this overarching thing – this separate, high-level, expensive endeavor,” says Howard. “The truth is, when you’re small, everything you do is brand strategy. Every interaction with a client, every email, every coffee meeting, that’s brand building.”

In Marketing and Demand Generation, Pain Points Are Starting Points

For the story-adverse, Howard suggests another way in – pain. What’s the most frustrating part of your developer’s day? What’s that thing they’re missing? When companies begin to truly understand the life of their prospect, the story will form out of their common frustrations. Your job as the storyteller, then, is to solve those problems through the vehicle of your technology, product, or service.

Even still, it can be tricky to identify or focus a brand story down to something manageable. How big should you cast your net? What if you solve multiple pain points for multiple audiences? And when you’ve been sinking 12 hours a day into a company for the last five years, how can you begin to see the forest for the trees? Based on Howard’s experience, that’s when it’s time to bring in an outside source.

“I’ve grown brands with and without outside agencies. I can say it’s always better if you can utilize another perspective,” says Howard. “The key is finding the right people who can bring something new to the table. If you can find someone who knows your brand well enough to articulate your vision but has enough distance to see the holes in your big picture, that’s the sweet spot.”

Emotive Brand is a B2B brand strategy and design agency that helps leadership teams build strong brands, drive growth, and develop compelling marketing programs that align with business goals and objectives.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this post on Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy 

Naming a New Brand Category is Harder Than it Looks

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Failed category labels are laughable. Before there were snowboards, there was snurfers. PDA phones preempted smartphones. Charga-plates rolled out before credit cards took their place. It seems obvious now why each current category name is so much stronger than its predecessor. But missing the mark with category naming is a mistake that’s easy to make.

In our last post about how to define a new category, we left off with what is most commonly considered the fun part of strategy: naming. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve identified that your existing category isn’t serving your brand’s needs. You’re ready to make a shift and have accepted the risk of creating a new category. And, you’ve appropriated the time and budget necessary to do so.

What’s in a name?

Category names make it easy for people to familiarize themselves with products and brands. They help people make choices and create loyalty. They set expectations about why brands belong. When a category name resonates, it paves the way for brands to develop meaningful connections with people.

When developing a new category, it’s tempting to come up with a catchy, quirky, or unique category name. Everyone wants to differentiate and make a mark. It can seem, understandably, that developing a category name that grabs attention will help your brand stand out too. But that’s not the case. Names that aren’t recognizable create confusion and uncertainty for customers. When the category name isn’t immediately clear, the brands and products it represents become muddied in those waters.

As we described in a previous post, people need context to grab onto something new. The framework your category creates sets the stage for your innovative product to become the category leader. But that also depends on the name being something that people understand without explanation. What the heck is a snurfer? No one knew. But snowboard is easy. Anyone who surfs or skates immediately gets it. And, it was no coincidence that when Burton coined “snowboard” they were going after surfers and skaters as a target audience.

Simplicity is Key

When it’s time to create your new category name, choose one that’s simple and recognizable. There are a few ways to go about it:

  • Two Known Words: Credit Card, Data Center, Sports Drink
  • Compound Name: Automobile, Bicycle, Laptop
  • Derive a New Word from an Existing Word: Browser, E-commerce

The timing of a category launch should influence which direction the name should go. If your product is truly innovative — with nothing on the market that compares — the category name should be a riff off an existing product. In this case, using two known words or joining them into one would be ideal. But if your brand is joining a group of products that are currently on the market, the category should confirm and validate behavior (people were already browsing the internet so coining ‘browser’ made sense).

When there isn’t a dominant category name, different labels make it difficult for any brand to gain traction. Most people stay within a comfort zone and too many options lead people to ignore the category all together. A name represents the ‘rules of membership’ — the specific characteristics that the products within the category must have in order to belong to the category. Once a name achieves dominance, people know what to expect and the brands within its umbrella follow suit. In our next post on defining a category, we’ll share tips on how to get buy-in on your new category name with important users, innovators, and industry commentators to help ensure a successful roll-out.

This is the 3rd in a series. Check out When to Create a New Brand Category, How to Create a New Brand Category, and what goes into Launching a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.