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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. 

What are Maker Hours?

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. 

Why did we start Maker Hours?

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.  

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.

Your Real Competition Is The Last Best Brand Experience Your Customer Had

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.’

It’s Not A Single Facet Of The Experience—It’s Multiple Facets

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.

Customer Experience Is On The CMO’s Radar

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:

Map Every Touchpoint

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.

Compare And Apply What You Learn

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.

Question…Innovate…Challenge The Status Quo

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.

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:

1. Aim high. Brands that move people must operate at the highest, most inspirational level. You can always scale back but you can never go high again if you start low. It’s no accident that the Pledge of Allegiance, pithy though it may be, is emotive and rich in language.
2. Choose your stewards wisely. In the hands of the wrong brand manager or even the wrong celebrity spokesperson, your brand can suffer almost irreparable damage. 45? Enough said.
3. Consider your brand’s context. When this country was formed, our society and its norms were vastly different than they are today. Even enduring brands, like America, must evolve their expression and take an honest and sincere look at how they walk and talk to ensure that they are culturally and socially appropriate, relevant, and inclusive.

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