Here we explore the brand narrative as a key element of brand strategy, by explaining what constitutes a brand narrative, demonstrating how it supports the overall brand strategy, and showing the brand scenarios which call for a strong brand narrative.
Continue reading “Brand Narrative is a Necessary Part of Brand Strategy”
Surviving – let alone thriving – in today’s uncertain economy is hard. Successful companies share one unifying factor: they are purpose-led companies. Purpose is the driving force of thriving business today, a key mobilizer for employees, and the key attribute for well-built and sustainable organizational cultures that can grow, thrive, and shift with the times.
Research shows that people are demanding and craving more from the businesses, brands, and companies they work and buy from, and leading with purpose is not a bonus but an expectation for business in 2022. A good product or service is just not enough to stand out, guide your business forward, or recruit the people you need for long-term success.
Purpose needs to penetrate more than just marketing or branding. It should guide how a company conducts itself. Authentically purpose-led businesses use purpose to drive innovation, and as a guide for how the business sells, sources, recruits, hires and fires. It’s easy to lead with purpose in your marketing, but far more meaningful to lead your company with purpose that rings true through behavior and business decision making. And developing strategies for how to “live purpose” is the difference between purpose-led marketing and purpose-led business. A guiding aspiration (your purpose) gives people something to believe in and work towards. And in today’s business world, a strong, unifying purpose has a strong ROI.
Because of all the talk around the importance of purpose over profit, “purpose-led” has become a buzzword in the business world. And like any buzzword, confusion accumulates around what it really means, why it matters, and how your own business can authentically and successfully lead with purpose.
So how do you insure that your business is genuinely purposeful and not just another marketing facade that your customers will see right through?
An authentic purpose needs to flow through your company seamlessly. It needs to drive your company’s way of being, the experience of dealing with your company, and your company’s presence in the marketplace. This includes how your brand behaves internally and externally.
Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani, gave 2,000 of his full-time employees’ ownership of a stock worth about 10% of the company that employees will receive once the company goes public or is sold. Valued at about $3 billion dollars, this is no petty decision. The earliest employees could be given more than $1 million dollars. Ulukaya wants to share the wealth that his employees have helped grow since the company’s inception. The future of Chobani and consequently, each individual’s own future, now lies in their hands. Employees are empowered to continue building and share the prosperity of the business. Everyone has involvement, interest, and ownership. And this makes working for Chobani all the more meaningful. Imagine how much more inspired, driven, and empowered employees now are to see Chobani succeed in the long run.
Staying true to your purpose even when your business has to sacrifice more immediate profits will drive business in the long-term. Unilever CEO, Paul Polman, assured that the company’s carbon footprint would be cut in half, while simultaneously focusing on doubling revenue. Even though sourcing 100% of its raw materials using environmental, social, and ethical principles meant sacrificing some short-term profits, the Unilever leadership understood that this choice would actually drive profits. Similarly, CVS stopped selling cigarettes, taking an estimate $2 billion loss, to lead by purpose — helping people on their path to better health. Purpose-centric businesses understand that how you do business should be dictated by why you do business.
Genuinely generous brands give in a way that aligns with their purpose. Google, a thriving company, has a major philanthropic mission. Google helps “innovators around the world who are using technology to combat humanity’s biggest challenges.” By helping accelerate and scale the work of others who share their same purpose, Google reinforces its own purpose with each act of generosity. This makes the Google purpose more authentic, genuine, and impactful. For example, recently, the company gave a 1 million dollar grant to Unicef engineers who are working to fight Zika virus. On the cutting edge of technology, Google makes sure the way it gives is always towards the future.
Because of our work with UPS, Emotive Brand learned first-hand that efficiency is the DNA of a vast logistics company. Scott Davis, UPS Chairman and CEO asked the right question: “How do we meet the needs of the many in the most efficient, responsible way possible?” Asserting that “such a challenge requires continual innovation, a global perspective on what matters most.” UPS’s sustainability reporting shoes that they are “committed to more.” The company is more than just a transportation giant. In every aspect of business, they work to “help customers pioneer more sustainable solutions”— delivering more efficiently, creating global connections, taking action, and giving back. Similarly, Salesforce makes sure to point out that sustainability is more than just a buzzword, and considers the environment to be one of its key stakeholders.
So if you are looking for a purpose-pivot for your business, be sure to create a strategy that moves beyond just marketing and branding. Take stock in why you matter. Develop a purpose-led strategy that aligns to your business. And then use that strategy to make the necessary shifts to ensure you are actually leading with purpose. Live and breathe it internally, while creating the right brand experiences externally so that people really feel it throughout all that you do.
When you lead with purpose in this way, your customers and employees will feel more invested, engaged, and loyal to the brand and your business will be positioned to thrive.
If you are in need of formally articulating your corporate purpose, learn more about Path to Purpose.
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
Growth vs. Fixed Mindset
We believe an organization that adopts a growth mindset can position itself to thrive. But what exactly defines a growth mindset?
At Emotive Brand, we define a growth mindset as a set of attitudes and behaviors that reflect the belief that an individual’s talent is not set in stone. Talent can be developed. Intelligence can be fostered. Creativity and innovation can be strengthened. Leaders can emerge. People hold potential.
This means every employee within an organization has to have the ability to develop, grow, and learn. And organizations who believe this seek out individuals who show a capacity for such growth. And we believe that the companies who work to help each of these individuals progress, advance in their roles, take on more leadership capabilities, and constantly evolve their skills and thinking will thrive as a whole.
Strong leadership, continual learning, and innovation are key to thriving business today. And not just amongst the C-suite or those in designated leadership roles. Leadership and learning must be fostered throughout an organization in order for that organization to really progress. Although this often starts at the top, it must ring true throughout an entire business.
A fixed mindset – unlike a growth mindset – does not encourage any of these ideals. Nor does it allow employees to grow and new leaders to emerge. And less risk-taking, less freedom, less collaboration, and less acceptance of failure – all behavioral symptoms of a fixed mindset – can be detrimental to business.
Often times, in business, as expertise increases, individuals struggle more and more to see new solutions or ideas. Learning stalls and this leads businesses to get stuck in their thinking.
In order to adopt a growth mindset that can fuel your organization forward, you must focus on people’s capacity and not their pedigree. As such, recruitment should value people who show a real commitment to learning. These people will help build a learning culture, develop independently, collaborate successfully, and be able to adapt to whatever challenges arise.
Individuals that value learning, and show a capacity and passion for continual knowledge have a natural growth mindset that can move any business towards success.
Creating a growth mindset means enabling each individual’s work to be more than just their job. Developing new skills – even if they shift outside of someone’s current daily work – is always valuable.
We believe that understanding and learning other roles than your own can help promote empathy, collaboration, and encourage new ways of approaching things. And setting aside time to build skills such as collaboration and leadership is key to making your people more productive and inspired at work.
An inevitable part of growth is failure. And adopting a growth mindset means accepting the chance that, in the end, you might fail. But innovation, creativity, and fueling a business forward wouldn’t be possible if people weren’t willing to take risks.
And often, this starts at the top. Leaders should set an example but also allow all employees to take on leadership roles – giving individuals the independence and freedom to try things, fail, and learn from their mistakes.
Taking on challenges is key. And organizations who view their people as capable of taking on challenges – even if it means failing – position themselves for success.
Employees at growth mindset companies feel more committed to their work because they feel they have the potential to grow, learn, and thrive within it. They also feel more motivated to do their best because they know that their personal development and hard work is valued.
In fact, research has shown that employees at growth mindset organizations pursue more innovative projects. They also behave more transparently, cut fewer corners, and work more collaboratively. And these authentically motivated people will drive innovation and fuel business. Goals and Objectives
Any business that wants to position itself to meet goals and objectives, set new ones, continually move forward, and advance needs to adopt a growth mindset to succeed.
It’s all about developing, advancing, expanding, and seeing the opportunity and potential in every moment, individual, failure, and success. A growth mindset will move your business forward and position your business, its brand, and its people for growth, profit, and success in the future.
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
Adapt. Modify. Restructure. Sometimes, it feels like these three words are all anyone in the workforce has been doing since the pandemic started. We adapted to working from home, we modified our work schedules to include a hybrid of in-office and at home, and we restructured our workdays to allow all of us some flexibility in the chaos.
As an agency, we’ve gotten pretty good at navigating unknown, potentially convoluted problems and finding actionable, savvy solutions. We’re in the business of turning straw (complexity) into gold (opportunity).
At Emotive Brand, one of the good things to come out of the pandemonium — I mean pandemic — is something we call Maker Hours. What are Maker Hours? Great question. We sat down with members of the team, including one of our founders, Bella Banbury, to talk about the origin of Maker Hours and why we love them.
Maker Hours are blocks of time that allow us as individuals, and as a team, to dive headfirst into our work. They are also periods of time for us to bring some flexibility into our workdays. This can mean we take a couple of hours to really focus on a project for a client, go for a midday workout, or spend a little more time working on new design skills.
Most importantly, Maker Hours allows us to continue to find a balance between our work lives and personal lives. Even if that just means blocking off time to watch the kids, walk the dog, or log off Zoom for an hour. The key word here is flexibility.
It all started in March 2020 with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of our projects were either canceled or put on hold within the first few weeks. Bella Banbury notes that, like many businesses, we went through a round of layoffs and had to ask everyone on the team to take a 20% cut in salary. Knowing what we were asking of our team, we went to a four-day work week. As the line between work and home blurred a bit with remote work, we realized that the extra day off was incredibly valuable to everyone on the team. It gave us some time to step away from screens especially when we were all constantly worrying about health, financial security, and our families.
Within the next couple of months, business began to bounce back. Projects that were previously on hold had started up again and we were able to go back to full pay for all of our employees. Bella Banbury says, “We had come to realize that we needed something different. Not necessarily, a four-day workweek, just more flexibility in how and when we did the work. People wanted heads down space to do work or time to get away from constantly being on screens.”
Sometimes, the best work is done when there are no distractions and we can build out the structure of our day regardless of meetings. Maker Hours allow space for deep, uninterrupted thinking. We get to dive into a project in ways we haven’t been able to during the regular workday.
“I use Maker Hours for getting things off the ground. I find that the distance between Nothing and Something ends up being much greater than the distance between Good and Great. Our brains are natural editors and if something exists, we can’t help but refine it,” says Chris Ames, Creative Lead.
Additionally, it’s all about trying to find a balance that will help keep us productive, sane, and level-headed with this new way of working. Rob Saywitz, Design Director, notes that, “something we lost in the pandemic is there is no commute or hard demarcation between home life and work life. There’s no natural balance. It all bleeds together.” Now, our ‘commute’ looks a lot like carrying coffee from the kitchen to the dining table. It’s so hard to find the line between work and life when we actually bring work home with us every night.
Maker Hours doesn’t necessarily make us more productive than we were before the pandemic. The benefits are that we found a way to give ourselves the space to separate work and home in a way that allows us to be there for our clients, but also be there for ourselves. Saja Chodosh, Strategist, says, “Before COVID-19 when we first started working remotely, you only worked 9-to-5. Now, it all blends together. Balance doesn’t have to fit a certain equation or schedule. Maker Hours helps you find your own way to nourish yourself and find balance.”
Maker Hours gives us the space to create, take a step back, recharge, and do what we need to do to make sure the work we put forward as a company is the best it can be. During these hours, the main objective is to give ourselves autonomy over our time with the understanding that we have control over how and when we get the work done. Finding a sense of renewal when the world is working at warp speed can be tough and we are always searching for new ways to improve how we approach the work we do and how we create the best product possible for our clients. This is equally about our clients as it is about the wellness of our team. Creating that work/life balance is a work in progress, but Maker Hours has been a great step in the right direction for all of us at Emotive Brand.
As a brand strategy and design agency, we’re deeply immersed with what’s happening in the brand world. Sometimes, we are so focused on building the best solutions for our clients that we have to remind ourselves to take a step back and assess the big-picture challenges facing brands today.
Emotive Brand, did just this and attended the Design Gurus Summit and the Digital Design & Web Innovation Summit in San Francisco. Four days, many talks, panels, and iPad notes later, here’s what David learned:
Nailing experience design is what may make or break a brand moving forward. Read what it is, why it matters, and how to get it right today.
It’s clear that experience design has evolved. Historically, experience design was all about building a single, compelling experience. It was focused and neat.
Now, experience design is evolving into a way of thinking. Using brand as a compass, experience design can identify and build experiences around differentiated value. This way of thinking considers how all products, services, solutions, and people play a role in delivering that value over time.
Every stage of the customer journey becomes an opportunity to provide further meaning to customers. Complementing innovation, this framework can help brands explore where to push beyond the traditional guardrails. Bringing in the challenge of time, it considers the implications and interdependencies of all touchpoints at all moments.
Brands today are complex eco-systems. What we think of as the original customer journey (something linear, trackable, and controllable) is harder and harder to pin down. Customers are taking greater control of the brand experiences they want to drive and how and when they want to drive them. This means that brands that fail to deliver the ultimate experience at every point will be left by the wayside.
“From social ads to clothing labels to the welcome screen in your car, we are engaging with more brands than we can even keep track of,” notes David.
“But no matter where we choose to engage, we all want the same thing – a good experience. This changes the game for companies who must design for every moment, every scenario, every interaction, possibility, and new relevant channel to compete.”
As that ultimate brand experience becomes more important to customers, so does nailing experience design for businesses looking to compete.
It’s critical that experience design be informed by brand. Having a clear, differentiated, relevant brand is what is going to bring every brand touchpoint together into one cohesive, emotive, and meaningful brand experience.
Without a clear idea of your positioning, how you want to make people feel, and what differentiated value you offer, you can’t begin to design the right overall experience for your customers. Leveraging your brand strategy to keep you on course can help your whole experience flex to customer’s needs while still staying true to the heart of what makes you different.
Often, companies aren’t structured to consider the whole experience and this is a problem. Design isn’t talking to marketing and marketing isn’t talking to HR and HR isn’t talking to customer service and sales isn’t brought to the strategy table…Everyone’s living within their silos, on their floors, and no one’s talking.
Businesses are structured like disparate pyramids while customers are operating like villages. It’s not neat or siloed. It’s messy, chaotic, and people are entering and exiting all over the place. Everything is in flux and organizations must be able to ebb and flow accordingly.
As new digital channels pop up and old channels shift, businesses will have to become more more agile, more flexible, and more able to see the big picture at play – breaking down walls and bringing everyone around one table to assert the question: what experience do we want to design? And how can we design it together?
Reconsidering the importance of experience design today means reaping the benefits for your business. Higher loyalty, more meaningful engagement, greater relevance – that’s what positive experiences build.
“I think smart organizations might reconsider its power. I am,” says David.
“Businesses that nail experience design will be the ones that learn to navigate the most efficient course, keep their passengers the happiest, build engines faster, all while keeping the plane in the air. That’s the potential, and it’s big.”
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.
Like anybody who’s worked in the industry for longer than two decades, I’ve enjoyed my share of deeply satisfying client engagements across multiple industries. There is one engagement in particular, however, that I will never forget, and not for the right reasons. It will actually go down in the books as one of my worst professional experiences. And this is why. We got fired for being dishonest. Let me explain.
I was working for a large branding firm at the time. The kind of branding firm that everyone in the business knows and respects. Not one that often gets fired. We engaged with a large technology firm and began our work, meeting with multiple stakeholders, trekking back and forth for meetings, workshops, and presentations. As the engagement progressed, a pattern began to emerge. We would present strategy and our clients would ponder our recommendations, then chip away at them, slightly watering them down, innocuously at first, more insidiously as time went on. We knew it wasn’t right but the client was fairly insistent and for some reason (fear? intimidation?) we let it go. Until it was too late and the final brand strategy was so incongruous, so off-point, and so entirely useless that the client was left with no choice but to fire us for a poor outcome. Ugh.
The culprit here? No one particular individual, no one particular meeting, but a bad case of dishonesty between our team and the client that prevented us from saying “No, we don’t agree with what you’re saying, we think you’re making some poor choices, and this is why.” This dishonesty cost us the assignment.
Honesty in branding is critical. Not just because honesty is the common basis for relationship-building and the development of trust, but because honesty gives agencies the runway they need to develop the most trenchant and compelling brand solutions. Being honest shows up in a variety of instances and includes asking tough questions, pushing back on embedded assumptions, challenging executive consensus, and saying no more often than you may be accustomed to doing.
Allow me to tell a modern-day success story to demonstrate this point. We recently engaged with another technology client. At our kickoff meeting and subsequent briefings, our client regaled us with stories about how much better they are than the competition because they provide a better and fairer solution for their customers. We investigated more deeply, conducting interviews with some of these customers, and what we learned caused us to suspect that this company was not necessarily providing a better solution, but perhaps a different solution to a persistent problem. Emboldened by the belief that honesty was our best policy, we ran a workshop with our client and told them exactly what we thought was going on. We presented several opportunities to truly change the paradigm in their industry and to help them to stand out from the competition in a meaningful and groundbreaking way. In our client’s words: “Emotive Brand brought us a not terribly flattering series of findings and challenged us to think more deeply about our brand. We discovered a disconnect between how we saw ourselves and how our clients and prospects believed we delivered on our promises. [Emotive Brand’s] unique combination of strategy and creative pushed us in a direction that was truly bold.”
Not only did we not get fired for disagreeing with their point of view, but our clients were delighted that we had shed new light on their business and the opportunities it could afford. We knew we had done something right when after making our case, the company’s founder started a slow round of applause that took hold across the full client team. Definitely a proud moment. And a personal vindication for the travesty that had occurred earlier in my career!
There is a weird perception in the client service industry that in order to satisfy the client, the “service provider” must do what they’re told at every turn. The truth that both parties need to keep top of mind is that while the client holds the purse strings, they are hiring not a “service provider” but a consulting body that can provide valuable expertise and experience that the client lacks. To simply “do as one’s told” is undermining the basis of the relationship.
I’ll end with some key things to consider before hiring an agency to transform and elevate your brand.
Are you looking for a team to execute the vision you already have, or are you hoping to uncover new thinking that may challenge you and your team’s existing thinking?
Not everyone is on board for honesty. Will your team be uncomfortable or delighted by honest input from an outside body?
Before you hire an agency, let them know where you stand and what you would expect from them. They should be allowed to enter the relationship with their eyes wide open.
If you say you want honesty, be prepared to hear the truth. It may make you uncomfortable as you work through notions that you previously held sacred …but it will be so worthwhile.
There is a positive correlation between the degree of honesty that you invite into the process and the incisiveness of the brand strategy that you can expect to see at the end. Decide what you want the results to look like and proceed accordingly.
Please feel free to get in touch with us for some honest conversation.
When creating a brand strategy the competitive landscape audit is an essential part of the process. You must know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and understand consumer perceptions in order to effectively differentiate your brand and create a compelling brand experience. A competitive audit of your immediate competitors only tells half the story.
While your customers will always compare your products and services to your direct competitors, they’re also constantly comparing the experience they’re having with you to something else: the brand experiences they’re having in other parts of their lives. Or, as Paul Papas from IBM Interactive Experience once said: “The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.”
It can be argued that this has always been true, but in recent years, technology, advances in logistics, and the ability to craft increasingly more personalized, relevant, and need-predictive brand experiences has raised the bar on what defines a ‘great customer experience.’
Here’s an example that may resonate with anyone who has raised children over the last couple of decades. The other day I walked into my kitchen to find my normally even-tempered college-aged daughter glaring at her laptop.
Attempting to lighten the mood I asked: “What’s up?”
She replied: “Remember that field bag I bought online? The one that took over two weeks to arrive? It’s fine, but they sent the wrong size and it took me half an hour on the chat bot to get them to issue me a return authorization. Now I have to print the label AND pay for the return. Can you believe anyone still does business that way? I’ll never buy anything from them again.”
In her (and perhaps my) defense, she is not spoiled or high-maintenance, but she is a Digital Native. She expects the brands she chooses to ship as quickly as Amazon, deliver Zappos-level customer service, and create products that are as easy and intuitive to use as Apple’s are.
The younger generation not only expects more online, they also expect excellent brand experiences in-store. And these expectations aren’t limited to a single generation. Gladly’s 2021 customer expectations report found that 63% of consumers fall in love with brands because of great service; 62% will recommend a brand because of great service, and 45% will never shop with a brand again after two bad service experiences.
Today’s CMOs are well aware that customer experience is a critical differentiator: 75.3% of all CMOs surveyed in the 2021 CMO Survey ranked ‘Strong Customer Experience’ as one of their top three investment priorities for 2021.
How can CMOs and their teams influence customer experience? Here are some suggestions to get you started:
Build a 360° map to identify where your customer interacts with your brand. Include every step of the customer journey, from awareness, to consideration, purchase, billing, delivery, installation or first usage, ongoing usage and maintenance, independent troubleshooting or problem solving, and live support. Next, determine where the most important interaction points are along the customer journey. Focus there first.
As previously mentioned, your brand’s competition isn’t your direct set of competitors—it’s the last best brand experience your customer had. This is beginning to emerge in the consumer health care market. One Medical realized that individuals in urban areas had come to expect a higher level of service than was being offered by traditional medical groups. In response, One Medical implemented online appointments (possible inspiration: Open Table; Apple Genius Bar Reservations); the ability to have an online dialogue with one’s medical team via email, etc. The net result: One Medical patients were overwhelmingly more likely to stick with One Medical, and recommend the service to their friends.
Look for opportunities within your industry to disrupt the status quo when it comes to the expected experience. Case in point: Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters. If you’re unfamiliar, Alamo Drafthouse provides a premium movie experience: reserved seats, tasty food, drinks delivered to your seat. It’s an experience designed to appeal to people who were frustrated with the status quo movie experience (bad food, uncertain seating)—and in doing so, Alamo created a new standard for the urban movie-goer. This is but one example of how a company looked at what was missing, and subsequently attracted fierce brand loyalists!
If you’d like to chat more about our approach to creating brands and customer experiences, please reach out. Emotive is an Oakland-based brand strategy and design studio.
Our studio works with a diversity of clients, but most come to us in evolution: at pivotal points in their growth, maturation, and offering. For instance, we’ve worked with Series A companies that want to go to market with a compelling brand but don’t yet have a fully realized product, companies looking to emerge out of stealth who have a big vision for tomorrow but want to focus on their current product to prove results today, and maturing organizations at pivotal points in their trajectory who are facing existential decisions about how to evolve their products or build new ones. We also work with organizations who have built credibility around a certain product and/or product suite that now need to shift due to market changes and outside forces, or corporations who’ve grown via merger and acquisition and now find themselves with a complex product architecture and a diluted position in the market.
Whenever they are in their maturation—from startup to legacy—the tension between today and tomorrow can be a challenge when it comes to brand positioning, especially when what a company offers is changing or plans to change. Some worry that if they stand for something too big and too far away, the brand might overpromise on what it can actually deliver to people today. On the flip side, for many in growth mode, positioning solely around what you can credibly deliver on right now means outgrowing that position—and quickly.
It’s important to remember that product positioning and brand positioning are not one and the same. Your Brand Positioning sits on top of your product or offering, elevating the features and benefits, and value of what you offer to new heights of meaning, differentiation, and relevance in people’s minds and hearts. Ideally, a Brand Positioning should last more than several years (investing the time and resources in a brand positioning is not something you want to undertake every time what you offer evolves slightly), acting as the North Star not only for brand marketing decisions, but for product decisions, sales decisions, recruiting strategies, brand experiences, and beyond.
So, the question becomes: how do we position a brand in evolution for success today? And tomorrow? Do we own a position that speaks exclusively to what our product can offer our customers right now, or do we go big and position for the future? Or, somewhere in between? What’s the right balance?
Enter what we call a Progressive Positioning Strategy. A brand positioning strategy that can move and evolve as your business, product, and culture does…which, for those in growth mode, it’s bound to.
No compelling positioning is built in a vacuum. Our process always begins with examining trends and forces, both within your industry and in the world at large. For many clients, it’s easy to get stuck in your own thinking, rules, and expectations. Opening the aperture to what’s happening around you can change the game in terms of what’s possible.
We work collaboratively with our clients to uncover what we call evergreen truths: foundational tenets that are baked into the DNA of what you do, how you do it better and uniquely, and why it matters—focusing on uncovering the truths that are true today…and will be true tomorrow. Starting here can enable relevance right now and in the future.
Brands in growth mode have a vision or aspiration they are growing towards. They can envision what they want their brand to be five or even ten years from now. Aligning around this ultimate aspiration can ensure that the product decisions you’re making today are getting you step by step towards that ultimate ambition.
Ultimately, any powerful brand has a blend. We work with our clients to find that perfect mix of today and tomorrow to create a brand that is both future-forward and visionary, while delivering and proving results and building credibility today. No brand requires the same balance. That’s why we dive deep to understand the nuance of the perfect blend for your brand, business, and culture.
Building a community of “believers” who not only believe in what you do today, but what you have the potential to mean to them and the world in the future is critical. We help identify who those people are and what they care about, rationally and emotionally. We brand build to evoke immediate trust and credibility, while letting customers into your vision and helping them feel like they are a part of it is something bigger: your future.
If you want to chat more about our approach to Progressive Positioning Strategy or how to build a brand for today and tomorrow, please reach out. Emotive is an Oakland-based brand strategy and design studio.
There are endless reasons to celebrate Black History Month. But following last year’s civil unrest due to decades worth of racial inequality and blatant injustices faced by the African-American community on a daily basis, we feel a huge responsibility, especially as an agency based in Oakland, to not only speak out and show up for the Black community but be intentional with our actions at every touchpoint. And for us, this meant celebrating Black History Month was an absolute imperative.
This month, we’ve chosen to highlight the careers of Black creatives within branding to not only honor them but emphasize the importance and impact of having their voices active and present in professional, predominately white spaces.
In case you missed it, here’s a recap of all nine features:
Bill Howell was the first African-American Art Director of a chain department store, J.M. Fields, on the east coast in the 1960s.
Bill began his career in graphic design through apprenticeships that gave him the exposure he needed to jumpstart his career in advertising design.
Although met with discrimination and limited opportunity, his desire to reframe the negative depiction of African-Americans in commercial advertising fueled his perseverance and career trajectory.
Barbara Gardner Proctor was the first African-American woman to found an advertising agency, Proctor & Gardner Advertising, in Chicago in 1970.
Barbara began her career at Vee-Jay records, a Black-owned record label in Chicago where she wrote publicity material for album releases—soon playing a significant role in the release of The Beatles first studio album in the U.S.
After moving on to work for multiple advertising agencies, she would soon be fired for refusing to work on a demeaning haircare ad targeted for Black women which pushed her to start her agency working with clients like Kraft, Sears, Gillette, & Jewels food.
Tom Burrell was the first African-American man to climb the corporate ladder at an all-white advertising agency in 1961 at Wade Advertising in Chicago pitching his way from mailroom clerk to Junior Copywriter.
Tom spent years ghostwriting for accounts like Robin Hood All-Purpose Flour and Alka-Seltzer having little to no contact with his clients to hide that he was Black.
Seeking to spread his wings, Tom went on to found his marketing communications firm, Burrell Communications, in 1971 that became a groundbreaking agency in the African-American and urban youth markets creating campaigns for clients like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.
Clarence Matthew Baker (known as Matt Baker) was one of the first successful African-American comic book illustrators in the 1940s and 1950s.
Matt was responsible for creating “Voodah” the first-ever Black superhero, in Crown Comics #3. After its original publication, the character’s appearance was changed to appear White.
Towards the tail end of the Golden Age of Comic Books, Matt shifted gears from superhero illustrations to illustrating titles for romance comics—an emerging genre that began to attract a primarily female audience.
Gail Anderson is an award-winning NYC-based graphic designer, writer, and educator at the School of Visual Arts.
Gail has worked for many design firms, magazines, and publishing companies throughout her career, but she is most known for her 14 years worth of illustrations and typographic work at Rolling Stone magazine where she eventually held the title of Senior Art Director.
Having illustrated famous magazine covers and posters for well-known Broadway plays, Gail is most proud of her 2013 USPS postage stamp design commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Thomas Miller was a graphic designer and visual artist in the early 1960s-to-late-1970s and one of few African-American’s in Chicago to lead multiple identity redesigns for well-known consumer brands.
Thomas began his career working at Morton Goldsholl Associates, a design and film animation studio—one of the first progressive advertising studios in Chicago known for hiring people of color and women in a professional capacity.
As a key designer at the renowned firm, Thomas led identity rebrands for clients like Motorola in the 60s, designing the batwing “M”, and 7UP in the 70s, introducing the bubble formation logo.
Steve A. Jones is a Jamaican-American graphic designer and educator based in Oakland.
Steve pursued his bachelor’s degree at the California College of Arts, where he experienced professors who consistently disapproved and rejected his artwork—realizing they wanted him to dial back his cultural approach to art.
Shortly after graduating, Steve realized the power in his cultural approach to art becoming a designer at YSB (“Young Sisters & Brothers”) magazine at B.E.T, where he worked for an all-Black art department for the first time, later starting his design studio, Plantain Studio, and becoming an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at San Francisco State University.
Sylvia Harris was an African-American graphic designer and design strategist most notably honored for her commitment to remove barriers through designing human-centered public information systems.
Slyvia, having grown up in the south in the 1960s, witnessed and had a clear understanding of how a lack of accessible social systems could affect people in their daily lives.
Her expertise in design strategy led her to work on projects for high-profile clients including the government, where she was responsible for the redesign of the 2000 Census Bureau—presenting an opportunity to increase participation and change the perception of the Census brand.
Maurice Woods is an African-American graphic designer, youth mentor, & Bay Area native.
Maurice began his career as a professional Basketball player, having played around the globe, before making a transition into design full time—working on identity projects for clients like Nike and Google.
In addition to his current role as Principal Designer for Microsoft, Maurice is the Executive Director and Founder of Inneract Project (IP), a design education organization that focuses on helping underserved BIPOC youth channel their creativity and explore opportunities in design professions.
Not only do we acknowledge and disapprove of the lack of Black representation within Corporate America—we understand that we have a responsibility to not only educate ourselves but use our platform to educate others, create space for and honor the Black professionals who have and continue to break down barriers and pave the way for a more equitable future.
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.
I’ve not always been American. I moved to the United States at the age of 13, reluctantly at first, because who wants to move anywhere at age 13? But in a very short time, and especially by the time I started college, I was fully bought into the proposition of America. At the tender age of 17, my friends back in the UK were finishing their A-levels and already having to close the aperture on their future careers by declaring what they would study at University. I, on the other hand, was looking at a veritable smorgasbord of classes and majors offered by Barnard and Columbia Colleges—two massive educational edifices flanking Broadway in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
Options and choices. To me, this defines the American offering—the choice of what to study, who to spend time with, where to live, what to believe in, when and how to talk, and the freedom to live out one’s choices and their natural consequences, as long as they fit into the framework of the Law and good citizenship. I freely availed myself of the choices I was offered, charting my own course, creating my own options where I didn’t like what already existed, certainly abetted by my white, middle-class privilege, and limited only by constraints of my own making. And it was good. America was good.
Then 2016 happened. Then 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. And just two weeks ago, January 6th happened. And I’ve been disgusted. Disenfranchised. Ashamed. Embarrassed. One man, his supporters, and his scared, beholden party took practically everything about the American proposition and turned it on its head. And I lost myself in my assumed home country. The American flag that my husband insisted we fly outside our home had become wretched to me.
No one was more surprised than I as tears flowed freely down my cheeks as I watched Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take their oaths and assume their place of national leadership this morning. I rejoiced as I watched the National Mall and Capitol festooned with American flags, Lady Gaga choking back her own tears as she sang the National Anthem, J Lo bedecked in suffragette white, and Hillary Clinton in the purple of bipartisan unity. I imbibed the significance of Latina Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor swearing in the first woman of African American and Asian descent to the office of Vice President. I lapped it all up—the rampant and unabashed paeans, symbolism, Americanism, and historic significance that made up this morning’s ceremony.
And as I reflected on my reactions and emotional state, it slowly became clear to me. America is an enduring brand and I am completely beholden to it. America has a clearly defined value proposition and set of values and beliefs. And no matter who assumes the role of “brand manager”—in the case of the last 4 years, Donald Trump—those values and beliefs are evergreen. Further, we, as target audiences and consumers of Brand America have only the original brand strategists, the Founding Fathers (and their wives, one presumes), to thank for having the clarity of vision and foresight to set the brand bar high, to ensure that it would and could withstand the slings and arrows it would have to endure over its lifetime.
And so, herewith my humble offering as a consumer of Brand America, and also a student and sometimes teacher of brand strategy:
For now, I rest. Tomorrow brings a new day for this brand I’ve appreciated for several decades. As we all know, brand stewardship today is a two-way dialogue between its creators and its consumers. I for one will be happy to participate in Brand America’s revival and rediscover its relevance and message for myself and my fellow Americans.
Image Source: Getty Images
