Verbal Branding Archives

Creating a Brand That Resonates: 3 Grammy-Worthy Lessons from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.”

Posted on March 5, 2024October 1, 2024 by Nick Ott

Is your brand telling a story for now or a story forever? Take a lesson from pop music and learn how to create a brand that lets your customers feel like they “can be someone.”

Imagine a slightly different 2024 Grammy Awards. In this one, there’s still a comeback performance from a reclusive 1980s star, but instead of Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” alongside Luke Combs, it’s Billy Ocean singing “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.” Can you picture Taylor Swift singing along rapturously to his lyric: “Lady driver, let me take the wheel”?

Probably not, but why? Both “Fast Car,” and “…Get into My Car” were released in 1988 and Ocean’s was the bigger single that year, number 15 on the year-end singles charts versus 76 for “Fast Car.” So, why was it Tracy on the stage in 2024 instead of Billy?

Emotional resonance
While Billy Ocean still has his fans (I’m one), his singles are largely characterized as novelty hits: bright, catchy, quick hits of dopamine. If “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car,” were released today, we’d say it was written with engagement in mind. It could inspire a TikTok dance.

“Fast Car,” on the other hand, has only grown in popularity, becoming a staple cover of artists spanning generations and genres, all of whom want to do what that song does uniquely well: connect emotionally with their audience. It communicates the eternal human desires for escape and rebirth—desires that are universal and enduring. It gives a voice to people with those desires. In this respect, Tracy Chapman is capable of speaking for them on an emotional level.

At Emotive Brand, we create brands that aspire to deliver the emotional resonance “Fast Car” delivers, and believe there are a few things that any company can learn by connecting the songwriting process to the brand-building process.

1. Consider the emotional needs of your customers (not just their material needs)
“Fast Car” is a song with a story: its protagonist is a woman stuck in a cycle of poverty and struggling to care for an alcoholic father. While many people can empathize with that, not everyone can see themselves in it. “Fast Car” feels universal because it tells us the emotional needs of its protagonist, not just her material ones: wanting to belong, wanting to “be someone.” Nearly everyone knows what that feels like, regardless of circumstance.

Brands should do this too, regardless of industry or offering, because one way or another, to some degree or another, every buying decision is an emotional one. No matter how rational or materialistic your customers may seem at the moment of decision, they are human beings with human needs, goals, and emotions. If your offering helps your customers cut costs or make a business process more efficient, perhaps your brand is helping them advance their career or gain the respect of their peers. As we’ve recently said to one client, “even CFOs have feelings.”

2. Make your story timeless
A good story can always grab attention, but to endure, it needs to resonate beyond the moment. Tracy Chapman’s own brand was that of an “activist” singer (her second single was “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”). She could have written “protest songs”: straightforward stories about the specific political and social issues of her day, but songs like “Fast Car” offer a different perspective, framing social issues through the lens of perennial, emotional desires.

Similarly, while your product or service may be meeting a need that is very much of the now, your customers’ most important needs are their aspirations: longer term goals that are often both primal and enduring. You do your brand an enormous disservice if you don’t identify those aspirations and connect your offering to that distant horizon. If you make plain to your customers how you can help them reach their goals, your brand can truly resonate.

3. Share the spotlight
As we’ve seen, for most listeners of “Fast Car,” the song isn’t about Tracy Chapman, or even about an unnamed protagonist; it’s about them. Instead of putting the spotlight exclusively on the singer of the song, “Fast Car” lets listeners hear themselves within its lyrics and makes them the hero of a shared narrative.

There are few more important lessons for any brand to learn. Even with a truly revolutionary, world-shaking offering, a brand is almost always better off being an enabler of heroic change than the hero or heroine making that change. Iconic consumer brands (and iconic musicians) have understood this for decades, but many B2B brands still struggle with it.

Today, many brands are built like a Billy Ocean hit, with more hook than pull. Whether that means confusing their product with their brand, or hyper-focusing on the tangible benefits they offer at the expense of the needs of their audience, they tell a story exclusively about themselves, and one their customers can’t see themselves in. But if you can create a brand like “Fast Car,” tapping into near-universal desires for things like belonging and significance, you’ll forge emotional bonds with your audience that will endure beyond that first attention-grabbing moment.

Telling Your Story of Growth: The Power of a Strategic Narrative

Posted on February 13, 2023November 4, 2024 by Jamey Aiken

One of the most important goals of a brand is to drive growth. Focusing a start-up on carving out market share. Positioning a fast-growing tech company to lead its category. Providing a foundation for product or portfolio innovation as a company seeks to reach new audiences. Or helping a global corporation expand its footprint into new geographies. Whatever your aim, brand can accelerate results.

But one of the biggest (missed) brand opportunities is engaging individuals in your organization to see their role in creating the future. When growth is a generic goal, people can assume that someone else is leading it. Disconnected from purpose or vision, growth can feel like a performance driver that serves only the goals of stakeholders. For companies to grow sustainably, positively, and strategically, people in the organization need to feel excited about what growth brings.

The key to framing growth for your organization is making sure people see business as a process, not an entity. No matter where you are on a growth trajectory, success depends on behaving more like an organism than an organization—continually adapting to changes in the marketplace, the industry, the economy, and the culture. But when change and uncertainty prevail, most businesses are poorly equipped to communicate this distinction to their employees. Conventional objective-setting tools tend to be reactive rather than responsive. And typical brand building blocks tend to define what’s come before rather than guide people to consider what lies ahead.

A new approach for engagement

Emotive has a different approach to helping businesses fulfill their greatest ambitions. Growth is the goal. Emotion is the strategy.

When clients need to realize important outcomes, we work side-by-side with executive leaders to co-author a strategic narrative of how—and why—they want to grow. We call this a Growth Manifesto, and it serves as a powerful tool for cutting through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization. It connects major initiatives—corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture—in a single, coherent narrative that aligns everyone behind the promise of the brand and the actions required to support it.

Why create a strategic narrative?

Because narratives are fundamental to how human beings share meaning. Stories have the power to move and transform people both intellectually and emotionally. Unlike a traditional plot line—which tends to be self-contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end—this narrative is open-ended. It asks people to see themselves in the situation. It calls on them to imagine what they can do to pursue a higher purpose. It gets people into action by helping them understand the role they need to play on the journey ahead.

Why do you need a Growth Manifesto when you have a business and brand strategy?

How often does your organization engage in substantive dialogue about what lies ahead? Our experience is that growth conversations begin in past actions, which can be limited by strategies that communicate what you already know—or what you’ve already got—rather than how you intend to do business tomorrow. We also see many organizations that undermine success by planning in silos, despite their best efforts at cross-functional thinking. (Can a marketing team develop an effective go-to-market plan in isolation from the deep thinking poured into a product roadmap? Nope. But it happens all the time.) And a “set-it-and-forget-it” mindset often tanks the desired effect of corporate mission, vision, and values statements.

The Growth Manifesto does three important things:

It establishes a clear point of view that will influence, guide, and help create your organization’s future. This isn’t a PR exercise. This strategic narrative will have an impact only if it’s deeply felt and true to your business culture. It requires expanding your perspective beyond the products or services you offer, connecting your brand to the broader context of your customers’ lives and to their aspirations.
It ties everything together. All businesses, whether big or small, have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional, people will start quilting their own. The result is multiple, individual narratives in pursuit of different end states—in other words, brand confusion.
It creates structure, not stricture. For employees to be truly invested, your narrative must invite some level of co-creation and adaptive thinking. You must give everyone the tools and direction they require to do their jobs well, without being so prescriptive as to limit their tactical freedom to execute. You must ask every employee to use their imagination as they help build and reinforce your brand.

The Growth Manifesto isn’t meant as a one-and-done alignment activity. It’s an integrative tool that sets a deliberate direction for your business at a given moment. It’s intentionally designed to flex in response to change. To be revisited and updated over time. To adapt in the same way that your business must adapt to the world.

We know that as competition intensifies and companies experience mounting performance pressure, time horizons tend to shrink and most organizations adopt tunnel vision to focus on their most immediate needs and concerns. The Growth Manifesto allows everyone across your business to keep their heads up, with eyes fixed on the horizon, holding both near-term and long-term goals in clear view. More than just selling products, or seeking this quarter’s profitability, a clear strategic narrative gives people the ability to see, believe and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary.

Verbal Branding: Because Words Matter

Posted on December 1, 2022October 14, 2024 by Jim Humes

If you were to open up a brand and look inside, beneath the logo and colors and typefaces, the images and illustrations, the interactions and experiences, you’d find language. It’s because the basic building blocks of brands—the ideas, emotions, aspirations, values, and promises that create value and differentiation—emerge from the words we use to express them. And for a brand to truly resonate, it needs to embody a coherent set of language (verbal branding) designed to create meaning.

So, what is verbal branding exactly?

Verbal Branding is the practice of using language to focus and amplify how brands create connections. You might think of naming and nomenclature as the tip of the Verbal Branding spear, with messaging, copywriting, and your outward-facing communications following along (here’s more on what goes into a Verbal Identity). These are all part of the practice, but the roots of Verbal Branding reach far deeper. In the same way that the brands are inside-out representations of an organization, Verbal Branding considers the language an organization uses to either fortify a position or drive change. (A wonderful distillation of this idea resides in Paul Pangaro’s classic piece on language and organizations).

For example, when a company undertakes the work of articulating its Purpose, it’s engaged in a verbal exercise where mood, tone, associations, nuance, culture, and historical context all inform language choices. Some words can ignite change, while others maintain the status quo. Some words can make people angry. Or apathetic. Or inspired. It’s not the actual word they’re responding to, but the meaning they bring to it. The same thinking goes for articulating the Vision and Mission of a company or codifying its Values. These discussions about language establish the source code for how a brand should show up externally.

Verbal Branding can make an impact on even more mundane parts of your brand. Employees at a healthcare company might be confused when attending a meeting in a conference room named “Mike Tyson.” Organizations that prioritize lasting customer relationships might think twice about branding their SKO “Piranha Week,” as it’s only a matter of time before the metaphor of being skeletonized in a murky river makes its way to prospects.

Why it Matters

What makes Verbal Branding so critical to brands, and also challenging, is that language embodies both literal and emotional meanings. “Sunlight” and “Sunshine” both refer to rays of light, but we tend to measure sunlight and feel sunshine. Writing code gives a set of instructions for what action you want a CPU to perform while writing narratives gives people instructions on how to embrace the feeling, beliefs, and possibilities underpinning your brand. Maybe most importantly, Verbal branding creates the linguistic framework for the stories your brand gets to tell—the metaphors and allusions, the voice and imagination. And stories, more than messages, are what people remember and repeat. Code gets executed. Stories live on.

Verbal Branding can be a secret weapon for a brand because, when done well, it connects everything you say internally with how you show up externally. It builds internal alignment around language, which reinforces your external positioning. It helps everyone tell the same story about what you do, how you do it, and why it matters—which, when you’re trying to reinvent a category, offer up a compelling vision, or break through to a new set of customers, is essential to creating clarity, focus, and trust.

How to Tune-Up Your Bullshit Detector 

Posted on October 20, 2022November 4, 2024 by Emotive Brand

In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, “Bullshit is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some way, infused with bullshit.”

As a brand strategy and design agency, we live in the intersection between people and brands. This is perhaps one of the most fertile, organic spaces for bullshit to thrive. The speed of technology has created a sizable gap between those who know what they’re talking about and those who don’t. Our job, to the best of our abilities, is to eradicate the nonsense, the fluff, the jargon, the overpromising and under-delivering.

The truth is, brands have real meaning in our lives and there is some art in strengthening that connection. The inherent tension here is wanting to create something useful, authentic, and emotionally resonate in a space that is and always will be about profit. Some say that’s impossible. Others say that challenge is the very thing that motivates them to produce better work.

Two Ads, Two Approaches in Authenticity

A micro case study: Last month, I attended Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” event that features storytelling, animation, music, and just like a real magazine, ad-breaks. It’s a tough space for sponsored content; these commercials are sandwiched in-between authentic and beautifully produced journalistic pieces.

The first ad-break was for Google’s project, BikeAround, which pairs a stationary bike with Google Street View to take dementia patients on a virtual ride down memory lane. Patients input a street address of a place that means something to them—a childhood home, for instance—and then use the pedals and handles to “bike around” their old neighborhoods. By combining mental and physical stimulation, scientists think this can affect memory management in a profound way. When the ad was over, there was huge applause and even a few teary-eyed audience members.

The second ad-break was for CHANEL, a fast-paced, noir fever dream that beamed messages like, “Seize beauty, all the time, everywhere you go, in a Venetian church, in a boutique of white camellias, in a baroque angel, because it is a vital necessity” straight into our dull, unperfumed brains. When it was over, several people laughed and one person booed.

Is Honesty Just Another Gimmick?

Both Google and CHANEL are trying to sell us something, yet one ad was happily digested and the other spit back. The difference in tone and subject matter here is stark, but it isn’t always as easy to detect. Sure, Google looks like the victor here, but soon after, they were in the news for updating the privacy language for Nest. We all braced for the usual legalese of a terms and conditions manifesto, but were stunned to see a surprisingly transparent document. The text was breathable, there was white space, there was even tasteful, edge-to-edge photography. Do we buy it? Or is this another marketing ploy in the nefarious long-game to pool our data?

The Mirage of Digital Transformation

The first wave of Bay Area entrepreneurship was largely about pitching a vision of digital transformation that was so luminous, so hyperbolic, you couldn’t help but buy in. It’s that classic scene from Silicon Valley, where over a minute-long montage, startup founders pledge to “make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols,” or to “make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints.” No matter how small your product, it was going to have a colossal impact on all of mankind, forever and ever.

I believe we’re in a different era, one that rewards radical honesty (or the illusion of it), utility, and a touch of humility. When I think about my favorite brands right now, they are building products that aim to make a notable difference in people’s lives, as opposed to trying to be their whole lives. We want brands to tell the truth, provide value, and then get out of the way.

People are more skeptical than ever, and with good reason. In a world overrun with fake news, seamless sponsored content, and media scandals, it can be difficult to know what to believe. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, today only 52 percent of global respondents trust businesses. The figures are even more dramatic in the U.S., where a mere 48 percent are similarly trusting, down from 58 percent the previous year. Brands clearly need to re-evaluate their messaging strategies if they are to regain the public’s confidence.

An Incomplete Checklist for Avoiding Bullshit

1. Can you describe it in one sentence?
Brevity is the soul of wit. If you can’t explain what you’re doing in one clean sentence, chances are you’re trying to be everything to everyone. A fantastic exercise is the 100 – 50 – 10 – 5 experiment. The challenge is to describe your company or product in increasingly tighter word counts. Think of this as a sieve for filtering out everything inessential about your brand and the value it provides.

2. Does your mom understand it?
Perhaps the hardest test of all: do your parents understand what you do? Beyond brevity, being able to describe yourself in plain language is key. My parents don’t know what a “global p2p marketplace for homestays and experiences” is, but they understand renting out a spare room to a tourist.

3. Can it be translated into another language?
You know what doesn’t translate well? Buzzwords, jargon, the word “unicorn.” Google Translate is one of the most underrated writing tools at your disposal. It forces you to consider your language in a global context, which you probably should be doing anyway.

4. Does a public service already provide it?
For all the disruptors, innovators, trailblazers, and game-changers out there: if you are working on a slightly modified version of an already-existing public service, you’re not revolutionizing anything. That doesn’t mean you don’t have value, it just means the language you use to describe yourself should be reigned in. It’s tempting to say you’ve “solved commuting” or “transformed how cities move,” but you have to remember: a tech bus is still, first and foremost, a bus.

5. Who is it really for? Who does it exclude? What does the world look like without it?
Who are you really “making the world a better place” for? Can something be revolutionary if it isn’t inclusive, accessible, affordable? Maybe your product isn’t for everyone—and that’s fine! But then your communications shouldn’t be either. When brands veer out of their lane into “universal good” territory, that’s when people call bullshit.

Like death and taxes, bullshit is inevitable. But we don’t have to let brands get away with it. Let’s enter the era of honesty, humility, and transparency—or at least the closest thing to it.

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

Brand Salience Is the Lifeline Between You and Your Customers

Posted on September 27, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

How Are Purchase Decisions Actually Made?

Let’s say you need to buy a toilet brush. You’re at the store with your partner, and they say, “The brushes are just down that aisle, do you mind grabbing one?” Suddenly, you find yourself in front of a wall of toilet brushes. Never in your life have you actively thought about toilet brushes, toilet brush brands, or the state of the toilet brush market. But now, somehow, you find yourself in the position of trying to form an emotional connection to an object that arguably has the worst job in your house. Do you grab the cheapest one? Or maybe just the one you recognize?

The Magic of Brand Salience

Enter brand salience, the unsung hero of indecisive buyers everywhere. In cognitive psychology, “salience” refers to what is most prominent or noticeable. The term describes how “our attention is drawn to intense stimuli such as bright lights, loud noises, saturated colors, and rapid motion.” For marketers, salience is the degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation.

Not to be confused with top-of-mind awareness, which is simply the link to the name of the product category and depends on a single, specific cue. Salience extends far beyond brand awareness. It’s the probability of a person noticing, recognizing, and thinking about your brand when it matters most.

Emotion-led Decision Making

Why is this important? Because as much as we’d like to believe that people make purchase decisions based on rational, utility-maximizing thought, we don’t. According to a study by Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight and consultancy groups, “Consumers rely on mental shortcuts or heuristics when they make their brand decisions. One such heuristic is to assign greater importance to things that have ready mental availability, the effect of which is to choose the most salient brand.”

All this to say we’re flawed, tenderhearted creatures making most choices based on feeling, experience, or precedent. Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science have done research into brand salience, and they’ve found that it’s largely a function of the quantity and quality of the consumers’ memory structures.

Quantity of Memory Structures

In buying situations, consumers are often driven by mental cues that trigger their thoughts around brand consideration sets. For example, if I’m thinking about finding affordable healthcare coverage that allows me to thrive, I’m likely to consider Kaiser Permanente. Since 2004, their ubiquitous “Thrive” campaign has been a staple across TV, radio, online, print, and outdoor platforms in markets throughout the country. The more memory structures your brand is linked to, the more salient your brand, the more likely it is to be thought of during a buying situation.

Unfortunately, what people remember about brands isn’t always the same across buying decisions. Even if you’ve seen the same ads as me, you might have a completely different association to the word “Thrive.” Quantity alone isn’t enough.

Quality of Memory Structures

Romaniuk and Sharp argue that the quality of brand salience is a function of the strength of the association and the attribute relevance. As a former resident of Oakland where Kaiser is based, I’ve seen countless “Thrive” executions, so the linkage is very strong. Additionally, if affordability is important and relevant to me because I’m on a budget, this further increases brand salience.

The quality of brand salience speaks to that classic ad adage: “When I needed a mattress, I saw mattress ads everywhere. Then after I bought one, they all disappeared.” Your need and desire instruct what you see in the world. What you don’t need becomes invisible. At the end of the day, brand salience is a function of a) the quantity of memory structures your brand is linked to; b) the quality of these structures, as defined by the strength of association and relevance of the structure. Your job as a brand is to stay permanently visible by being exactly what your customer needs, right when they need it.

How Do You Increase Brand Salience?

Increasing brand salience is a real estate battle for taking up the most space in your customers’ heads and hearts. Brands can build their brand salience by developing a number of different memory links in buyers’ minds. This can be done a myriad of ways, whether through differentiation, storytelling, or creating meaning. Whatever you implement, maintaining customer share-of-mind depends on consistent and quality advertising. Deployment of the same distinctive assets is what will help your brand win in the marketplace over time. Here are three actionable measures your brand can take to increase its brand salience.

Lead with emotion to create distinctive, memorable assets. Could you pick your content out of a crowd? Is your design unmistakably yours? How can you make your look and feel unforgettable?
Take a bold risk to get noticed. When we talk about memory, we’re talking about that special signal that cuts through the noise. Who do you remember from the last party you attended? Was it the person quietly minding their own business in the corner? Probably not.
Go out of your way to continuously reach potential buyers. There are new ways to form memory structures with your target audience every day. Whether it’s podcasts, newsletters, or mixed reality brand experiences, every leap in technology is another tool to build a new emotional connection.

The Best Thing To Be Is Remembered

Byron Sharp, author of “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know,” says that the pursuit of differentiation and segmentation is not as useful as “creating memorable and consistent brand assets that trigger an instinctive response when they’re seen or heard at critical purchase moments – in other words, they should focus on brand salience.”

There are so many things to consider when building your brand. Of course, brand salience is not the only factor, especially in B2B situations where the journey to purchase is much more complicated than a single point of sale. Regardless, if you can create memorable and distinctive brand assets that trigger an instinctive response in a purchasing situation, you’ve already won.

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

Storytelling Is the Best Bridge Between Customers and Solutions

Posted on September 6, 2022November 22, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Once Upon a Sales Deck

Salespeople want to sell. This much we know. Often, in our conversations with clients or in our perusing of sales decks, we hear a similar refrain. How do we cut to the chase and get to the meat? We don’t blame them. In today’s millennial-influenced age of purpose, you could sit through a narrative, a manifesto, a history lesson, a personal testimony, and a video on corporate social responsibility all before learning what someone is actually selling you.

That’s the balancing act. You’re only as strong as your story—but if your story goes on too long, meanders, or doesn’t naturally bridge to your solutions, people will read something else. When done properly, a story is the shortest distance between what your brand does and why people should care.

The Cost of Confessionals

Consider this study conducted by Origin/Hill Holliday. They asked 3,000 online panel participants between the ages of 23 and 65 about the perceived value of various listings. In every case, the addition of a story—whether it’s from a customer, an origin story, or even short fiction—increased the value, sometimes up to 64 percent!

We hate unnecessary front-matter in sales decks more than anyone. But when you look at the numbers, it becomes clear that storytelling isn’t trite, it’s a trenchant tool. In a short amount of space, stories can do the heavy lifting of connecting your vision to your portfolio. As much as you might want to dive directly into the organizational prowess of your cloud infrastructure, it’s worth pausing to discuss the transformational outcomes of your product. What happens when everything works like it’s supposed to? Picture the worst day of your customer’s life—how does their experience change when they interact with your brand?

In a Crowded Marketplace, Far, Far Away …

Take the stylish and digitally-minded luggage brand Away. In an incredibly crowded marketplace, they’ve been able to differentiate themselves through their sleek design, cost transparency, and use of storytelling to elevate their solutions. Their blog isn’t about the intricacies of wheel design—it’s a travel magazine designed to activate your wanderlust. (And then, of course, buy their products.) As they say in their narrative, “If you’re looking down at your dying phone and broken bag, you can’t see up, out, and ahead to the world in front of you.”

By using storytelling to articulate the highest possible value, they take the customer on a journey from product to benefit. A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product. As goes the saying, people don’t buy features, they buy better versions of themselves.

This is in no way limited to B2C—B2B brands can be emotive, and should be. According to research by Google in partnership with Motista and CEB, 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy if they can connect emotionally with your brand. It starts with your goals, objectives, mission, and vision. But beyond that, it’s being able to communicate the professional, social, and emotional benefits one experiences in addition to the actual product. Storytelling can go a long way in bridging that gap.

The most important thing to remember in crafting your story is authenticity. Away sells luggage, they tell travel stories. Lenovo sells computers, they tell stories about people doing innovative things with computers. “When authenticity is put forward as the priority,” says Taj Forer, Co-founder & CEO of fabl, “the emotive stories will generate themselves as the organic byproduct.” In other words, you’re not allowed to airlift some emotional story into your brand if it doesn’t make sense.

Equipping your sales team with the right library of emotive stories gives them even more arrows in their quiver. So, they can do what they do best: sell.

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

Your Verbal Identity Has Never Been More Important

Posted on April 6, 2022October 27, 2024 by Chris Ames

If I’m doing my job right, this first sentence should jump right out and ring the little bell in your heart. Margaret Atwood once said, “A word after a word after a word is power,” and how brands utilize that power is often the difference between cutting through the clutter or simply adding to it. So, how can you wield communication tools to supercharge your business, crystallize your strategy, and foster conversations that create deeper, more meaningful connections? The answer lies in your verbal identity.

Words in a Sea of Pictures

Here’s something people love to say: show don’t tell. We’re visual creatures. We crave stimulation. I’m bored already, aren’t you? Verbal identity has traditionally taken a backseat to visual identity due to the mono-directional nature of conventional advertising. That is: brands talk to people, mainly through pictures. But with the rise of social media, smart speakers, chatbots, and other environments where there are no images whatsoever, that visual-led monolog has shifted entirely. People talk to brands — and they expect brands to talk back in impactful, human ways. As copywriter Kady Potter says, “This ability to engage in an ongoing dialogue with customers provides an opportunity for companies to more firmly cement their products and services into the consumer consciousness, but doing so successfully requires a consistent, well-defined approach to the use of language.”

What Is a Verbal Identity?

As simply as possible: it’s thinking about what you say, how you say it, and where you’re saying it as a unified system. Or another way: the articulation of your brand through the use of distinct, intentional language. At first blush, this sounds pretty obvious. A brand should speak with “one voice.” But when you start to think about the number of use cases (web copy, ad copy, whitepapers, social posts, even internal communication tools like Slack or Zoom), and how context shifts the tone and reception of each touchpoint, things get messy real fast. Just like humans, that “one voice” must adjust with modulations and variances to read the room while still being authentically ourselves. As with visual systems, verbal identities are pre-structured through phrases, ideas, and tones.

Why Do You Need a Verbal Identity?

This is sort of like asking, “Why shouldn’t you change your company logo every single day?” Through all the static of our modern era, brands need consistency, clarity, and strength of message to separate the signal from the noise. As our pals over at Siegel + Gale say, a strong verbal identity “cuts down on confusion, increases familiarity, drives loyalty and preference among consumers, shareholders, among people who might work for that company, across a whole host of audiences.” Moreover, as Branding For The People say, it:

Infuses your brand’s personality in messaging, including voice, attitude, sense of humor, and more into your actual content and copy.
Aims to distinguish your brand from competitors.
Creates a consistent personality and voice of the brand across all communication channels.

What Are the Components of a Verbal Identity?

Okay, so how do we begin to up-level “copy” into a system of language that drives unmistakable value for your business and brand? Let’s dive into the component parts.

Naming: A brand name is the shortest unit of storytelling you have. A brilliant name provides a glimpse into what a brand stands for and gives audiences a preview of the experience to come. It must be original, memorable, relevant — and here’s the real kicker — available. As our partner and naming expert, Anthony Shore says, “That’s what words do. They create a frame of reference, setting the stage for how your company is differentiated and how it should be perceived.”

Tagline: While not as fashionable as they once were, taglines are still an extremely economical use of language. As the good people at Prophet say, taglines can be deftly utilized to “showcase your reason for being, reposition your company, create a whole new category, or stand out and inspire loyalty.”

Architecture & Nomenclature: Thankfully, not everyone is naming or re-naming their company every day. But almost all organizations, especially those in growth mode, run into the Sisyphean challenge of managing product, service, or feature naming. This is only exacerbated by today’s climate of mergers, acquisitions, and rapid innovation, where portfolios across categories have become complex and inconsistent, ultimately creating a confusing customer experience. Architecture & nomenclature creates order and hierarchy around offerings so people know what they’re getting and how it works together as a whole.

Brand Voice: This is your brand’s personality, come to life. How would you describe the way your brand communicates directly in its content, copy, and overall language? Are you genuinely off-kilter and irreverent, like Skittles? Are you vaguely visionary but also heavily workshopped to the point of never being able to offend anybody, like every tech company ever? Think about the unique turn of phrases and attitudes you showcase when communicating.

Brand Tone: Not to be confused with voice, your brand tone is constantly changing. Just look at Starbucks’ creative theory: you can see on a nifty slider how their copywriting shifts. Adjust your tone based on the audience you’re targeting (devs are different than sales), the emotion you’re hoping to evoke (pain points are different than moments of delight), and the medium you’re delivering the message through (whitepapers are different than TikTok).

Brand Narrative: This is the story of who you are, what you do, who you do it for, what you stand for, and why it matters. It showcases not only the philosophy of your business but also the voice and personality of your brand. It should read like a manifesto and hit like a gut punch.

Brand Grammar: There’s a reason some companies call their workers partners instead of employees. There’s a reason some companies call it emotional well-being instead of an employee assistance program. The words we choose, and why we choose them, are charged with meaning. Especially in sensitive political climates, revisiting your language is crucial. As Focus Labs reminds us, “Your customers are in a new story. If you want them to also be a part of yours, you have to tell a new one.” This cascades from vital topics like gender-neutral language all the way down to your nitty-gritty philosophy on acronyms, capitalizations, and emojis.

Content Strategy: Here’s your plan of attack. Where are we going to be speaking, who are we speaking to, and how often are we going to be bothering them? (Pro tip: less is more.)

Messaging Matrix: Remember, messaging themes aren’t copy — they guide copy. As a high-level communication tool, it’s a way of ensuring flexible, cohesive expressions rather than static, repetitive ones. Delivered as a table, this matrix spans the context/challenge, idea/claim, value/benefit, and proof points for each message — all of which can be adapted for different internal and external audiences. If you hand this to a copywriter on their first day, they should be able to start producing smart stuff for you. You know, after a coffee, at least.

Copywriting & Campaign Development: And finally, mercifully, copywriting. This is where most people’s minds jump straight to: big sexy words on a homepage, baby. But if your language isn’t distilled by the strategic framework of your verbal identity, the words will be hollow. Please, as someone who has written 10,000 puns on data, I’m begging you: never, ever confuse surface-level wit for bone-deep value. Real copy solves problems, makes connections, and is derived from a system that means it’s much more than right — it’s right for you and you alone.

Anything But Ordinary

What happens when this all comes together? You have a name, a descriptor, a structure, a voice and how to use it, a story and what it stands for, a language and where to employ it, and modular, easy-to-understand guides for generating copy that is specific, accurate, trenchant, delightful, hard to ignore and impossible to mistake for anyone else.

When David Walsh, professional gambler and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art, finally hired a Director of Communications, he said, “This is probably the start of our drift to the middle. Make mistakes if you have to, fail if you can, but just stop us becoming ordinary.”

I’ve always loved that. And that’s basically the assignment here, folks. Words are the most powerful currency we have. Use them with conviction, with purpose, and with intention to create a verbal identity that is anything but ordinary.

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

Kick the Door Down with Your Brand Manifesto

Posted on May 21, 2020November 22, 2024 by Chris Ames

Building a successful brand can feel like building a ship in a bottle. There are so many delicate and interlocking pieces to monitor and keep safe within a defined system. It’s a process that rewards research, meticulousness, measuring twice, and cutting once.

Yet in nearly every project I’ve been part of, there comes a time when the kid’s gloves come off. People get restless, get sick of being extra careful, and want to kick the door down with their idea. Maybe everything feels technically right, but nothing is resonating in an impactful way. The fact is, when it’s time to go to market, brands can’t afford to be a ship in a bottle. Eventually, they have to break out and stand for something – even if that means being vulnerable and inviting waves of criticism. Invariably, someone says, “We need a manifesto.”

What is a Brand Manifesto?

If a vision and mission steer your organization in the right direction, a brand manifesto is the incandescent energy source propelling you forward. It’s inspired, creative, motivating, an appeal to pathos. It infuses the emotional “why?” into a brand. Why do you matter? Why should we care?

As Chris Langathianos writes, “The manifesto is a versatile tool designed to clearly articulate what the brand stands for – what is it that gets its employees out of bed every morning and motivates them every day to deliver on the brand’s vision. It is explicitly not about a brand’s product or service, but rather speaks to the heart of why they sell it in the first place.”

It’s Apple saying, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” It’s Nike saying, “If greatness doesn’t come knocking at your door, maybe you should go knock on its door.” The brand manifesto is a cultural cornerstone for the brand that resonates in a personal way. It should lay the groundwork for why employees should work hard to deliver upon the brand’s value proposition and create an exceptional customer experience.

In Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk “How great leaders inspire action,” he suggests that if your brand truly wants to inspire an audience to follow you, your core message should focus on your organization’s purpose. “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it,” he says. “If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.”

Internal vs. External Manifestos

Traditionally, a brand manifesto starts as an internally-facing document. But more and more, companies are using manifestos as external glimpses into the cultural mindset of the organization. Not only does this help potential customers connect with their values and beliefs, but it also attracts top talent to join a purposeful, inspired company. Think of it as manifesto marketing.

And it makes sense! If you’re able to distill everything your brand stands for into one concise, emotionally resonate paragraph, why wouldn’t you leverage that? Through advertising, communications, and packaging, brands are tapping into the values of their target personas and letting them know they stand for something real.

How to Write a Manifesto

How should a manifesto look and feel? I love this abstract checklist from Mark Di Somma, where he says it should have:

The anger of a placard
The commitment of a doctrine
The beauty of a story
The hope and excitement of a vivid dream
The sense of a philosophy
The call to action of a direct response ad

Obviously, every company is different with its own unique way of expressing itself. But in general, brand manifestos speak in a collective voice, an active tone, and are prompted by a burning desire to change the status quo. If you need help getting started, an easy fill-in-the-blank exercise is, “We are A, we believe in B, and that’s why we C.”

This is something that should be able to be read aloud with verve. The implicit danger here, of course, is sounding too hyperbolic, too chest-beating, too self-important. Why is a software company talking like they are about to storm the beaches of Normandy?

The key is to ground your manifesto in the reality of what you do – then examine the highest-level emotional impact of why that matters. What does the world look like if you realize your company’s vision and mission? It’s still ownable, it’s still you – it’s just the best, most impactful version of you possible.

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

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

Posted on February 25, 2020November 22, 2024 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.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor

Posted on January 29, 2019November 22, 2024 by Chris Ames

Battle of the Brands

Even for people who spend most of their time online, there are still those moments that remind you just how surreal our current technological moment is. Earlier this month, while mindlessly browsing, I suddenly realized I was six comments deep into a Twitter argument between the social media managers of Wendy’s and Steak-umm. Participating in #NationalRoastDay – an annual tradition of lightly making fun of people and brands – the playful hashtag game quickly turned aggressive when the two companies started vehemently attacking each other’s brand voice and products. Just think how little sense that sentence would make to someone in the olden times of 2006.

How did we get here? Traditionally, creating a strong brand identity online meant ensuring consistency across your various assets – logo, typeface, taglines – and developing a brand voice. As we’ve spoken about before, your brand voice is the purest expression of your brand’s personality. When used consistently, your voice reinforces the emotional impact you’re trying to create with the people most important to you. Just like a human voice, it sets you apart from others and creates a sense of familiarity that people need in order to form a long-lasting connection.

IRL vs. URL

For years, the dissonance between a brand’s voice online and in the real world was pretty slim. And that makes sense because one of the core tenets of brand building is consistency. Yet as time has passed, more and more companies are viewing their online voice as an absurdist off-shoot from their main brand. Denny’s, Wendy’s, Netflix, Chipotle, and MoonPie are classic examples of brands that have fully embraced the surrealism and nihilism of millennial humor.

Though often misunderstood, millennial humor is not so different from the Neo-Dada movement of the 1950s and 60s. The use of collage, assemblage, and found materials is in the same spirit as brutalist meme culture. Dada was formed in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the first world war, so it’s not too difficult to imagine why young people today are responding to a violent and nonsensical world with more nonsense.

Brands are People, Too

The fact that companies are tapping into this vein of humor signals our changing expectations of what a brand is, how it speaks, and what we demand of it. It’s not enough for a product to simply work. The market is way too crowded for that. No, even a flawless product has to be attached to a brand that is whip-smart, well-designed, socially-conscious, purpose-driven, and fluent in the ever-changing language of the now.

When it works, you get something like this:

Using the structure of a meme where people share the most common misconceptions about their careers, Netflix treats their product like a profession and lists the biggest stereotypes about the platform. It’s self-deprecating, funny, and most importantly, 100% related to their offering. In the comments, the dating app Tinder replies with, “Honestly your Tinder bio looks amazing.” Again, clever, playful, related to their offering.

If you’re still freaked out by the spectacle of corporations pretending to be people for imaginary points on the internet, you’re not alone. But at the end of the day, whether you’re B2B or B2C, every business is human to human. At least until the robots take over, the end result will always be people. If you can find a way to win hearts through humor, they’ll pay you back by voting with their wallets.

Comedy and Marketing: The Best Idea No One Asked For

So, if every brand is human to human, does that mean traditional B2B brands can join in on the surrealist fun? That one’s a bit more complicated. The other day, I enjoyed reading Craig Beadle’s blog post, “Four reasons to avoid comedy in B2B marketing (and how to use it anyway). Beadle is a copywriter at Velocity, a content marketing and strategy firm that clearly doesn’t mind embracing humor. They describe themselves as “an odd bunch of international misfits, huddling together for warmth in a cold, indifferent world,” so it’s clear they can take a joke.

In brief, the post talks about how comedy and marketing are antithetical at the core. Comedy tends to be singular, divisive, and puts the punchline last. Marketing tends to be consensus-driven, direct, and tells you everything upfront. Yet they share a common goal of communicating information in a human, delightful way. There is a sugar-hit of recognition when you “get” a clever ad, in the same way that jokes and riddles are entertaining. As famed ad-man David Ogilvy said, “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” So, let’s look at some funny-thinking B2B brands.

Zendesk

Zendesk makes cloud-based customer service software and support ticketing systems. Are you laughing yet? Nothing about what they do should be inherently funny, but they were able to drill down to one value proposition with real comedic potential: relationships are complicated, and Zendesk improves the relationships between customers and companies. Represented by an astronaut and a deep-sea diver, they created a series of 16-second videos exploring relationship tensions.

MailChimp

Like many businesses in Silicon Valley, MailChimp is a great company with an awful name. That’s not a value judgment, it’s something they know and have actively leveraged into a massive, self-referential campaign. The “Did you mean MailChimp?” campaign centered around nine ways you could possibly mess up their name, each with its own faux product. The results were brilliant and bizarre creations like FailChips, KaleLimp, and MailShrimp. If humor is about following through on a joke, you’ve got to hand it to them. The FailChip leg of the campaign featured a web page, product packaging, and a distribution strategy for the pre-crushed chips.

Slack

Slack’s mission is to change the ways teams communicate. There is a lot of comedy in the minutia of office life and working on projects – just look at “The Office.” So, it only makes sense that they went super meta, producing a video about the process of making a video for Slack. Throughout the spot, we see all the points of friction their product solves. The end result is a clever case study, showing a reluctant client slowly falling in love with Slack.

What a Time to be Alive!

In conclusion, it’s a super strange time for brands, technology, comedy, and honestly just being alive in general. We know there will always be stakeholders to appease, risks to be assessed, and reputations to manage. But if you find something genuine and funny about your core offering, don’t be afraid to inject your brand voice with a little life. People will forgive a lame joke, but they’ll never forgive a boring brand.

To learn more about how to improve your brand voice, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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