Jim Signorelli is the author of “StoryBranding“. I love the way he makes the distinction between the classic marketing idea of “unique selling proposition” and the modern meaningful branding concept, “unique value proposition”.
USP’s (a “plot line” in StoryBranding)
Continue reading “From USP’s to Shared Beliefs: The Next Stage of Branding”
As the media heated up before the Masters golf tournament, a Wall Street Journal piece noted that the PGA Tour is a non-profit organization “that turns over its excess cash to charity.” Last year, this amounted to $130 million, which is big money for any philanthropy. For comparison, total prize money for the 2013 PGA Tour season is $298 million.
I re-read the “excess cash” sentence about four times. The sport of rich white men, awash in corporate sponsorships, is giving big chunks of the money to those less fortunate. Who knew? Not me, or any of my friends who are deep into golf. I bet a lot of people who read that story had the same reaction.
We hear a lot that companies are struggling with creating the right strategies for socializing sustainability and to get employees even engaged in sustainability. One of the most common complaints is, “They won’t even read our sustainability report!”
If you want to run a successful business that leads with purpose, you had better be good at profit.
You have to know your business well enough to shred carbon out of it and inject humanity into it without blowing up the bottom line. Your company also has to be a star in whatever supply chain it’s in, because if you don’t impress your closest peers, customers and suppliers, then your sustainability programs probably don’t amount to much.
In short, if your company is succeeding with sustainability, it’s almost certainly well managed.
This seems so obvious, I started to wonder why we never hear it. Wall Street hammers companies that show evidence of bad management, and grants lofty premiums to the market value of well-managed companies. So why aren’t sustainable businesses taking advantage of this?
The reason is that it’s easy to say, but hard to communicate. We can easily deduce that sustainable companies are well managed, but companies can’t turn around and say that to customers and society and expect a warm hug.
Why? Because it sounds like bragging, or a con. If I say you should trust me, your BS-detectors go on full alert. If I tell you I’m good-looking, you immediately think there’s something wrong with my appearance, or that I need to get over myself.
This goes double in sustainability, because of the green-washing and double-speak corporations have wallowed in ever since Rachel Carson warned the world about pesticides. When British Petroleum changed its name to “BP” and hinted that the letters stood for “Beyond Petroleum,” snickers were heard around the world. Then came the horrifically bad management that cost the company billions from refinery explosions and oil spill disasters. The snickers would have become outright laughter, except that so many innocent people had to die for BP profits.
So there’s some skepticism at this point, even among those of us who believe that corporations are going save the planet in order to save their profits, while the government sector stands by wringing its hands.
Of course the status quo for many people in business is that profit and sustainability do not even belong in the same conversation. They believe that a company directing management attention to the environment or human rights, beyond the strict legal minimum, must be full of loose screws.
So if you want to communicate that your business has a purpose beyond profit – including being good at the profit part – how do you communicate it?
Emotively.
Logic and cleverness won’t work. You have to create a fusion of intellectual and emotional communication that links your values and aspirations to those of the people you’re talking to. Even die-hard fans of Milton Friedman (“The only business of business is profit”) do not desert Berkshire Hathaway when Warren Buffett goes all gooey on sustainability. They have bonded with Berkshire’s brand of patient profit-making so deeply that they willingly suspend their own logic when he talks about the need for corporations to protect the environment.
This is the power of emotive branding at work. It’s a wonderful thing, because it means that ideas about sustainability can infect non-believers like a virus and, eventually, kill the belief that purpose beyond profit is a mistake.
Maybe it’s not possible to become as influential as Berkshire Hathaway. But it’s possible to communicate authentically that your purpose beyond profit is proof of good management – using investor capital wisely, planning for the future, and demanding technologies and public policies that make the economy more sustainable.
As Dizzy Dean, a famous baseball pitcher, put it in 1934, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” Today we might say, “It ain’t bragging if you have an emotive brand.”
Image: Designspiration.net
Some brands are built around products or ideas that are inherently emotional.
But true emotional resonance happens when these brands recognize that their competitors own the same emotional space.
Brands seeking to rise above the fray dig deeper into the well of positive emotions that bond brands and people.
They build upon, complement, and extend that innate emotional “kick” they deliver with a set of ancillary feelings chosen to support the brand’s purpose beyond profit.
Continue reading “Going Beyond the Obvious Emotional Power of Your Brand”
At Emotive Brand our goal is to make brands truly meaningful through emotive branding. Emotive branding is about transforming the way a brand reaches out to people and the way people respond back to that brand. The key is meaning. As we add meaning to the things a brand does, the people vital to that brand’s success start to care, think, talk and do more for the brand. As a result, emotive brands thrive across all business measures.
And, perhaps more important, how do we add meaning to brands through emotive branding? We focus on meaning because we noticed the remarkable performance of a handful of notable brands including Virgin, Apple, Zappo’s, Ikea and Lego. At one level these brands simply sell airplane seats, consumer electronics, shoes, furniture and toys. But at the same time, they incite amazing behavior in the marketplace.
People line up to buy their products. Great people want to work for these brands. Partners, suppliers and distributors compete to work with these brands. Many of their customers become story-telling advocates that turn their family and friends into customers of these brands. The traditional press and the social media are friendlier toward these brands. Investors drive up the brand’s value.
Perhaps most interesting, people are hard pressed to readily name the competitors of these brands.
We were curious about what made those brands work so well, so we took them apart and saw what they did differently – beyond offering decent products or services. We saw that they “reached out” to people in an interesting way and created meaning at every step. They made themselves personally relevant and worked hard at becoming emotionally important.
How are they personally relevant? They know – and live – their “why,” their reason for being, what they’re on this earth to do, the contribution they aim to make. These brands make their reason for being evident to people through their way of doing business. People sync with the brand’s “why” because it is aligned with their personal interests, beliefs, values and aspirations. As a result they identify strongly with the brand on a deep and meaningful level.
How do brands become emotionally important? By zeroing in on specific feelings and evoking them consistently. Consumers may not be able to play back these precise emotions (as in “Virgin makes me feel sexy”) but consumers never forget that Virgin made them feel “sexy.”
In conclusion, we came to see that the meaning that differentiated these remarkable brands was generated by two factors: personal relevance and emotional importance.
To help brands become more meaningful we took the best practices of those remarkable brands and developed a way to introduce them to all sorts of brands, from B2C to B2B. Our method starts by defining a brand’s “Emotive Core,” which then is seen as the heartbeat of the brand. Within the Emotive Core we articulate the brand’s “why” and tap into personal relevance through what we call the brand’s “Driving Idea.” We also work with clients to hone down 301 potential positive emotions to just four that the brand will seek to own in a meaningful way. This is the way we help the brand achieve emotional importance through what is know as the brand’s “Emotional Space.”
The brand’s Emotional Impact becomes a lens through which everything you do becomes more meaningful. It is meant to inspire creative people to create more meaningful connections in every “brand moment” – that is, each time the brand interacts with people vital to the brand’s success.
These brand moments can be anything from the feelings evoked when a client enters the lobby of the brand’s headquarters, to the feelings generated through an advertising campaign – and everything in between.
To ‘juice up’ creative brand moments, we create specific creative briefs which integrate the Emotiional Impact into the brand moment’s marketing objective (e.g. sell more widgets). We show our creatives how the brand’s meaning can be conveyed through the four key elements of every interaction: Aesthetics – the look & feel; Discourse – the messaging & voice; Functionality – what is demanded; and Associations – connections made outside the brand.
Without this sort of precise direction, creative exercises often spin off in any number of directions, based on trends, personal preferences and what someone’s spouse thinks is a “good idea.” Through emotive branding, all brand moments start to align to the brand’s Emotional Impact. There is a lens through which every idea can be viewed to see whether or not it takes the brand closer to the meaningful connection it seeks.
The task of conveying personal relevance and generating emotional importance based on a brand’s Emotional Impact is an incredibly interesting and challenging creative task. It provides a richer playground for creative thinking. It is also gratifying in that creative efforts based on emotive branding change not only what people do (buy more stuff) but how they feel about themselves and the brand – and how they behave as a result of that.
By transforming how brands “reach out” to people (through kick-ass creative), emotive branding transforms the way people respond back. Who could ask for more?
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
Neuroscience is telling us that every “rational” decision is surrounded and influenced by emotions.
As such, brand decisions are neither rational or emotional – they are invariably both.
But how do you work with an insight like this?
How do you bring an emotional dimension to your brand, especially if today it is emotionally neutral?
Continue reading “Rational vs Emotional: With Brands, It’s Not “Either/Or” It’s “Both/And””
