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Category: Visionary Reinventors

Business and Brand Strategy: Separated at Birth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Peanut butter and jelly. Abbott and Costello. Disco and dancing. Some things in this world simply go together. So why is it that business strategy and brand strategy don’t always get invited to the same parties?

Growth is the Goal
We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning business and brand strategy. Leaders intellectually get this, but many organizations fall into ways of working where business and brand strategy represent two different schools of thought. Delivering on financial goals (business) versus understanding customers and their needs (brand). Defining winning through the lens of revenue, profit, and market share versus winning hearts (and then wallets) through engaging experiences. Economics versus Psychology. Science versus Art. The truth is, these are just different sides of a bigger conversation (we call it a Growth Manifesto) that revolves around how an organization drives growth.

The lack of alignment between business and brand strategy results from not having this shared vision of growth. Without it, the business side of the house will identify, quantify, and prioritize growth opportunities that most readily deliver on an organization’s financial goals. Brand and marketing teams will develop new and better ways to meet their customer engagement goals. Product teams will develop roadmaps and pursue innovation based on how they see user needs and technology evolving. Sales teams will go to market with tactics that drive immediate wins. HR leaders will attract and retain talent based on what each silo needs. Everyone will hope (assume) they are marching to the beat of the same drummer.

The reality: situations that resemble a three- or even six-legged race. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Aligning leaders around where the business needs to go begins with getting clear on ALL the ways an organization can or will deliver value—for customers, employees, stakeholders, and its communities. When you’ve aligned on the value you can create and the impact you want to deliver, getting brand and business strategy working together is a far easier task.

When was the last time you brought your leadership team together to discuss how you create value and for whom? A workshop that gives everyone a platform to discuss opportunities for creating new value through the lens of brand, product, customer engagement, go-to-market strategies, investing in employees, and supporting causes and communities can give you a bigger picture of the opportunity landscape. And it creates a conversation that brings business and brand strategy into the same arena.

What Your Business and Brand Strategy Should Answer Together
Once you’ve brought people together with a shared vision for creating new value, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Answering these questions can take you a long way toward building a plan for how every part of your organization gets aligned on growth:

  • What are the short- and long-term goals for the business? Is there an exit strategy? A merger or acquisition in the future? How does your brand need to support these efforts?
  • What are the revenue and growth expectations? Are there specific target revenue goals the board is looking for? Your investors? Wall Street? Are your goals based on revenue, profitability, market share, or something different? How does your brand need to behave to support that strategy?
  • What is the growth strategy? Is it based on selling products or solutions? Innovating new products and offerings? What role does your brand play post-sales?
  • What’s the human capital plan for achieving your desired business goals? Does that involve recruiting a different team? How can your talent acquisition team become an extension of your brand team?
  • What is the product roadmap? Are you entering into new markets? Developing new products? What are you building vs. buying to enhance your product offering? How can your brand open doors for you in adjacent markets?
  • Is your business structured to accelerate the progress toward goals and objectives? Do you need to shift your organizational structure? Are you ready to bring new members into the C-suite? Do you have a brand leader who is also a business leader?
  • How should you allocate resources to accomplish these goals?

These questions are integral for shaping both your business and brand strategies. By looking at brand and business together in the same set of questions, you’re ensuring alignment is in place before you start to execute.

Clear Goals Enable a Clear Brand Strategy
With a clearer picture of where you want your business to go, the brand strategy will answer:

  • What category do you fit into?
  • How do you define product-market fit?
  • What is the competitive landscape?
  • What is your positioning in the marketplace?
  • Who are your top target audiences?
  • What is the value proposition?
  • In what ways is your brand unique?
  • How does your brand look and feel?
  • What voice does your brand speak in?

By having the conversations required to make business strategy and brand strategy work together, you’re creating your own competitive advantage (in our experience, most companies don’t commit to the discipline of doing this type of collaborative exploration). As a result, you will not only find more opportunities to differentiate your brand in ways that create value, but because the organization is aligned, you’ll be able to do it with far less friction. And this is how you drive short- and long-term growth in any market condition.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland-based brand strategy and design agency.

You may appreciate the following post on Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy.

Market Insights That Come from the Heart

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Asking different questions can reveal new insights about your market.

No matter what your company sells, the markets where you operate change constantly. One day the sun is (metaphorically) shining, and the next day a tanker gets stuck in a canal, there’s a virus outbreak, a prominent bank fails, a fragile aging musician opens fire on a twelve-pack of beer, or some other event happens to change our collective outlook.

Reading the tea leaves of market dynamics is both art and science. There is no shortage of brilliant people putting advanced technology to work to uncover patterns and make predictions for all types of scenarios. At Emotive Brand, we believe that in addition to market analytics, there are emotional insights that you and your team can gather that can help you paint a fuller picture of how your world is shifting and the role your brand can play in keeping your business in front of these changes.

Emotion Is Critical to Your Peripheral Vision

In their book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company, Wharton professors George Day and Paul Schoemaker wrote, “You must ask the right questions to identify what you don’t know so you can explore the edge of your business… You must identify new sources of information or new ways of scanning to unveil important but hidden parts of the periphery.”

Emotions, while harder to quantify, offer critical insights into your market opportunity. From the macro to the micro levels, emotional information can explain the synaptic connections between what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in your business. While emotions don’t answer everything, they do provide a critical layer of context that makes market behaviors seem less arbitrary and a little more “human.” And as you get more attuned to how the emotional landscape contributes to or detracts from your success, you gain the confidence to speed up decisions, make better bets, and deploy your brand in the best ways possible.

Below are a few lenses you look through to develop market insights that will expand your peripheral vision as a business:

Macro Forces

The economic outlook, employment and wage trends, the regulatory environment, political and cultural currents, public health issues, environmental issues, social trends, and other top headlines—these primary ingredients create the bouillabaisse of market dynamics. But how often do you look at these macro forces as waves of emotion moving through the population? Looking at the feelings generated by the headlines that impact your market gives you insights into opportunities for the role your brand needs to play in the world. And having this conversation with your team every week keeps your brand in tune with the world.

The Category

There’s a baseline, meat-and-potatoes narrative that defines the category where you compete. Many of our clients in the enterprise technology space discover that they default to telling a category story, which in general is pretty generic. Differentiation comes down to products and features—your “what” and “how”—rather than the articulation of “why” your company exists. Categories drive sameness for the sake of making easy comparisons, and the safe players tend to hold to the center. Emotion gives you a fulcrum to break out of the box, or better, expand it, to see and understand what you see as possible. And when people connect with your vision for how you can change the world, there’s a high likelihood they’ll be rooting for your success.

The Competition

As your competition grows more sophisticated, they will look to claim a specific emotional territory. Branding in consumer packaged goods is where you find true expertise in using emotion to claim specific turf. How else can you choose from the 27 different toothpaste brands on the shelf? For longer sales cycles, once someone is in the consideration phase, it all comes down to the emotional cues your brand delivers that elevate the decision-making from rational analysis to the emotional moment of commitment. By understanding the emotional space your competition is trying to own and ensuring your emotional space is better defined, more compelling, hyper-relevant, and executed with originality, you’ll gain the upper hand as you compete for the same customers.

Your Customers

Do you look at your customer as the person with the budget and purchasing authority? Or, as someone driven by human desires and motivations? Seeing customers as people you can make successful allows you to engage with them on a deeper level. You tap into their ambitions and their fears. You ask different questions that give you insight into how they want to succeed, instantly deepening the relationship. And when you think of the customers you have today as the leaders of tomorrow, it pays to invest in building their loyalty early. When a brand builds deep, meaningful connections with customers, you earn the permission to innovate in new ways and lead your customers to new destinations. The trust you build inspires them to come along for future journeys.

Users or Consumers

B2B. B2C. B2B2C. B2H. We like this last acronym because we believe the best brands are Business to Human. The humans could be the people buying and consuming your product. Or they could be your partners, channels, or resellers you depend on to bring your brand to different audiences. No matter where you sit in the value chain, the question to ask is, what emotions do users or consumers count on you to help them feel? The mechanics are different when selling hand soap versus a SaaS platform, but it still comes down to delivering an experience that communicates emotion across the entire value chain. Creating emotional bonds with people turns them into true advocates and evangelists. Having a great product is key to connecting with consumers. But having an emotionally-driven brand accelerates your ability to increase market share, galvanize a tribe, or lead a movement.

Your Company

Your company is a system of functions that work together to deliver a product, service, or offering. But how connected is your company to the emotions that your brand stands for? Do people proudly wear your swag? Do they consistently engage customers and partners in ways that convey a clear set of emotions? When your company is clear about the feelings behind your experiences, you can stand out in any market. Because it’s the companies who own the emotional experience inside and out who claim a stake in the ground and are genuinely different. And according to the people working inside them, truly better.

By looking at each aspect of how you go to market through the lens of emotion, odds are you’ll uncover some white space you haven’t considered and some insights that can sharpen what you’re already doing well. And if you ever need a partner exploring emotion-driven market insights, that’s what Emotive Brand does every day.

Infusing a Brand with Big Heart Begins with Big Thinking: How Small Design Cues Can Generate Great Big Feels

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

“We need to make our brand feel human. It needs to reflect our people and our customers. We need to tell a human, emotive story.”

 

This is how a lot of our conversations about brand design begin. If we were designing for packaged goods that sit on a shelf and give people a tangible representation of your brand, we’d have a well defined experience to address. But most of our work takes place behind the scenes in the B2B and tech space. There are no shelves or stores mediating the process, no physical objects or packaging. There’s sparse or no direct interaction with the end-user. And the technology itself is invisible which increases the challenge of crafting a bespoke visual identity that evokes emotion.

Curating a distinct visual style is table stakes when developing design systems. But we’ve seen that in B2B branding, sometimes the smaller, more nuanced design moves can transform a smart visual identity design into a deeply evocative brand that evokes just the right feelings. Because these design moves don’t hit people over the head, they may not fully register at first glance, but over time, they shape the response people have to a brand.

A sense of (e)motion

Motion elevates the game. While static logos aren’t going away, just about every brand needs to move in some way, shape or form—whether it’s a dynamic logo or a kinetic design system that pushes the limits. And it’s often the little moments that spark delight—the sudden blink of a circle, the anthropomorphic smile in a lowercase ‘e’, or a subtle twinkle of light to punctuate a moment in the story. It’s these moments that draw people deeper into the brand story in the same way that physical packaging might speak directly to a consumer with an elegant serif font or bespoke illustration.

Our recent work to rebrand Katapult—an AI platform behind the e-commerce scenes that gives customers a fair way to pay for their purchases online—was an opportunity for our team to bring all the heart, feeling and optimism of the customer to the forefront of the brand. Sure, the photography needed to capture the heart and goodness underlying the brand, but we had to go deeper. So we used their name as our launching-off point, or catapult, if you will. Rather than trying to force all of our storytelling into a logo symbol, we crafted a wordmark that evokes the feeling of the human hand signing for a bill of goods. That calligraphic sense of motion led our team to develop something more emotive than just a symbol—a brand feeling of being uplifted and elevated. This feeling—which came to be known as “The Bounce”—comes through at every turn, from the upward curve that literally bounces off-screen, guides storytelling in infographics, or connects images, words and ideas together. Ultimately, “The Bounce” became more than a visual component—it became a deeply felt personality trait of the brand—and something the client could really get behind as an emotive representative of the brand, something much greater than a traditional logo symbol.

Sonic branding

Just like the barrage of visuals that we experience every day, our world is filled with sounds (a lot of it noise). In addition to motion, sound has a similar capacity to evoke feelings and brings another dimension to what a brand—and more specifically, a logo—can do. Sonic branding adds a richness to the brand experience, often creating a more bespoke and lasting imprint on how you experience (and recall) a brand. The Disney+ logo that introduces their content is a good example of a small moment that adds a big feel to how you interact with their identity. Now, it may be that I’ve seen/heard their identity more times than I care to count while watching with my 7-year-old, but there’s no denying how seeing AND hearing that magical beam of light swoop over the wordmark makes a deeper impression. It puts viewers into a state of curiosity and preparation for what’s about to come on screen. The ability to generate that lean-in feeling is a mark of a truly successful logo experience.

Our recent rebrand project for Pindrop included a sonic dimension to the brand. Because Pindrop is a pioneer in the voice technology space, creating a sonic brand was a strategic imperative. It was exciting to work with our partners at MusicVergnuegen to craft an audio component that brought Pindrop’s invisible, future-forward technology to life with a sound of a safe unlocking. Similar to Disney+, it’s hard not to smile when their logo symbol transforms and resolves on an audio crescendo. It’s the little things that often make the most impact.

Design needs to solve problems and deliver on the goals of the client but also has the great potential to unlock new ways of seeing, hearing and experiencing a brand. See (and hear) more of our work here and let us know if we can partner together to help solve your branding challenges.

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

Posted on 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward. 

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it.

At Emotive, we believe that companies need more responsive tools to adapt to the future—whatever it holds. They need ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And they need to equip their organizations not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. 

When you understand the emotional state of your organization, you can move forward. Faster.

How do your employees feel? Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation?

The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

We use the lens of brand to audit the emotional state of an organization and identify alignment opportunities that can reduce friction, create efficiency, and drive growth. Our approach recognizes that businesses are more than just a collection of employees working towards a common goal. They’re complex networks of people with myriad emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When you actually know what’s animating people’s behavior—the critical emotional drivers—you can craft more resonant, engaging stories about what you’re all working toward. 

Emotional understanding only makes a difference if your growth story is clear.

While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future.

All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. 

We’ve created a wonderfully simple approach to helping businesses fulfill their ambitions. 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.

Your growth story can’t be separated from the quality of storytelling.

In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To grow in times of uncertainty, you need to understand how your people are feeling. You need to address their emotions with a story of how you plan to grow. And you need to get them focused on a future that they are empowered to create. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Challenger Creative

This post is the last in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read a general primer to challenger brands or a deep dive into B2B challengers right here.

Previously, we chatted about the power of adopting a challenger mindset, how to compete against your category, and what the B2B world can learn from B2C disruptors. In these examples, most of the strategies were internal. It was a question of knowing how to recognize the pressure for change, creating a shared vision, having the capacity to execute, and building out a realistic work plan.

But still, the question remains: what does this actually look like in the real world? Today, we’re going to dive into some examples of challenger brands that use design to disrupt. While there’s no one definition for challenger creative, you tend to know it when you see. Most recently, it’s an aesthetic that incorporates clean branding, catchy names displayed in modern fonts, bright pops of color, and sleek packaging. It’s unapologetically bold, playful, and unafraid to subvert the expectations of the form. It’s a design that knows how to transform positives into negatives and creates a lasting impression.

Thanks for the Warm-Up

Sometimes you’re fighting against the market, and sometimes you’re fighting against people’s perceptions. From a marketing and viewership point of view, the relationship between the Olympics and the Paralympics is a contentious one. As we all know, the Olympics airs first, and garners much more attention and ad-budget. So, how do you respond when everyone thinks of your offer as secondary?

With a bold commercial that repositions the Olympics as merely the “warm-up,” this commercial asserts that the Paralympics is where Super Humans do battle. Even the way the commercial starts—leading the viewer from the firework show to a tunnel underground—demonstrates that this is an alternate, grittier world we are entering. It sets the tone for the whole games. Anyone can run on two feet—come see a real show.

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Paralympics

The Perks of Being a Couch Potato

In a world of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Overstock, is there anything gutsier than trying to sell furniture online? Burrow, a sofa startup, is up to the challenge. Incorporating gorgeous photography, cheeky copy, and a deep understanding of millennial behavior, they have created a campaign that is capturing attention. Their tagline, “Good for Nothing,” is a perfect self-deprecating turn of phrase that speaks to their sense of humor and willingness to disrupt the status quo.

“‘Good for Nothing’ positions Burrow as the sofa brand that’s serious about leisure,” says Red Antler Co-founder and Strategy Chief Emily Heyward. “And the goal of our out-of-home campaign in New York is to remind everyone who’s rushing by and commuting in the busiest city in the world that it’s OK to go home tonight and do absolutely nothing. Hopefully on a comfortable Burrow sofa.”

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Burrow

Repairing the Male Ego

Challenging giant corporations is one thing, but using design to challenge stigma and vulnerability is another. Hims, a personal wellness brand, is fueled by one challenger belief—men are allowed to want to take care of themselves. The question is, does the market agree? Well, by March of 2018, Hims had already sold roughly $10 million in product and reached $200 million in valuation. (They only launched in November 2017.) So, that’s a big yes.

“These brands have an aesthetic that appeals to millennials,” said Allen Adamson, Brand Consultant and Co-founder of Metaforce. “It’s smart design without being ostentatious or too snooty. All these products are stylish, and they don’t necessarily pick up on the cues of the category. They pick up on the design language that surrounds young people today.”

Hims’ product line reads like a short list of things that should be difficult to market to those who are uncomfortable talking about it—hair loss, erectile dysfunction, skincare, and vitamins. Instead of shying away from stigma or taboos, they’ve turned it into a massive business opportunity.

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Hims

Bird Is the Word

E-scooters are a controversial business, but don’t expect Bird’s founder, Travis VanderZaden, to back down from a challenge. Bird was named Inc’s business of the year, and with good reason. In 14 months, they have expanded to 120 cities and notched a $2 billion evaluation.

The design of Bird feels both professional and whimsical at the same time. The black and white look of the scooter is sleek and clean, but the animated landing video on their website looks like something out of Pixar, full of color and imagination. They seem to capture the childlike freedom of riding a scooter and the Uber-like vision of transforming how a city runs. Their design leaves them poised to take on anyone, whether that’s fellow e-scooter brands, ride-sharing, or even automobile makers.

“He told me the idea of adult scooters and explained how riders would just leave them on the sidewalk, and I was incredulous. I thought he was crazy,” says David Sacks, an early PayPal executive who invested in the company’s seed round. “Once I went to Santa Monica, I realized it was magical,” he says, after he scootered to his destination, without waiting for a cab or sitting in traffic. “I started thinking about how big this idea could become and realized that it’s transformational. You could have millions of these, and start displacing car trips for commuters—and eventually redesign cities.”

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Bird

Time to Face the Challenge

Now that we’ve covered strategy, mindset, and design, it’s time to adopt a challenger mindset for your own brand. Every year it gets harder and harder for brands to stand out from the pack. Meaning, there’s never been a better time to be bold, fired-up, and willing to take a risk to differentiate yourself.

To learn more about how your brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Continuing the Challenge

This post is the second in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read part one, “Challenger Brands: A Primer,” right here.

Previously, we spoke about adopting a challenger mindset. It’s one defined by ambition, agility, and a willingness to take risks. Most importantly, we noted how businesses are no longer competing against each other – they are competing against the category they are in and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

At a glance, these personality traits naturally lend themselves to the B2C world. Ask anyone to rattle off a few challenger brands and you’ll invariably get the same answers: Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb—and it makes sense. When you’re trying to rewire people’s preconceived notions, B2C is, by definition, the shortest path to the customer.

But it is by no means the only path. The worlds of B2B and B2B2C are being transformed by challenger brands. Just look at ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Slack, or even Salesforce. If you can’t see it on the surface, it’s most likely occurring behind the scenes in their business strategy.

B2B Challengers

Founder of 500 Startups, Dave McClure, notes that 

“The next bubble is not in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply. Rather, the real bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep up awake at night.”

Many legacy B2B companies end up following a similar lifecycle. They start off small and hungry, build a legacy off of their early innovations, ride the wave for as long as possible, then go out and acquire innovation when they start to stagnate. The daily churn of operating a business makes it very difficult to ignite the same innovation that got you started. So, you import. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it’s a strategy that ultimately puts your future in the hands of other creators.

Homegrown Innovation

Regardless of size, if B2B brands want to truly adopt a challenger mindset, they need to take active steps to continually foster their own innovation. Famously, Google has a 20% rule. Implemented by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, it’s designed to give employees one full day per week to work on a Google-related passion project of their choosing or creation. It’s the same strategy that created Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google News, AdSense, and many others.

The point being, words like agile and innovative don’t have to be words that are only synonymous with startups. B2B companies can instill a challenger’s sense of agility through the behaviors and culture they nurture. If you’re wondering how a B2B brand knows if it should adopt a challenger mindset, there’s a wonderful diagram created by Michael Hay, a business leader with fifteen years at IKEA, that can help. Outlining four essentials for driving a successful change of strategy, it acts as a checklist for recognizing and delivering change.

need for change

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

At the end of the day, there are many lessons that B2B brands can steal from the challenger world. Are you leading with a strong story that unequivocally answers the question, “Why do you do what you do?” More than meet a singular need, are you meeting the needs of today and tomorrow better than anyone else? Are you talking with lead adopters at the front of the innovation curve and making them evangelists for your brand?

Perhaps the most important lesson that B2B brands can glean is in how they hire. As Adam Morgan writes,

“Employees at challenger brands require different qualities. They need to be mission-driven. They need to know why they get out of bed and go to work every morning and they need to be passionate about the problems the company is trying to solve. Being a maverick is also of far greater importance at a challenger, the opposite of at a larger organization where dissent is considered a flaw. Employees need to ask the provocative questions and not just take risks themselves, but also to be tolerant of risks that others might take.”

To learn more about how your B2B brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

To finish reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part Three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

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

Challenger Brands: A Primer

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Are you up to the challenge?

Starting today, we’re launching a three-part series on challenger brands—who they are, how they behave, and why your brand could benefit from adopting their disruptive mindset. As this is the first blog in the series, let’s start with the basics. The beginning, as they say, is always a good place to start.

What is a challenger brand?

“A challenger brand is defined, primarily, by a mindset—it has business ambitions bigger than its conventional resources, and is prepared to do something bold, usually against the existing conventions or codes of the category, to break through.” —The Challenger Project, by eatbigfish.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “challenger brand,” you’ve certainly experienced its narrative cousin: the underdog story.  It’s David and Goliath. It’s Rocky. That oft-romanticized vision of a plucky innovator running a business out of their garage and taking down the big guys. Think of Ben & Jerry’s vs. Haagen-Daz, Sam Adams vs. Budweiser, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Category is the new challenge

While in the beginning being a challenger brand often meant slaying one particular dragon—Pepsi vs. Coke—modern challenger brands are more focused on what they are disrupting instead of who. It’s not about me versus you; it’s about me versus the category, the industry, and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

From Airbnb to Blue Apron to Warby Parker, challenger brands are redefining the ways we travel, eat, shop, and more. As Adam Morgan says, “Being a challenger brand today is less about business enmity, and more about an often mission-driven desire to progress the category.”

Criteria for challenger brands

To be clear, there are no rules set in stone about what makes a challenger brand. By definition, it’s a fluid position. You might start out a challenger and be so successful at taking out the competition that you become the next target on top of the hill. It’s a Shakespearean cycle of ascension and dethronement that leaves only the most innovative companies standing.

“A challenger brand can take many forms; it’s more of a mindset than a specific set of rules,” says Kohlben Vodden, founder of StoryScience. “These brands tell stories that by proxy make us feel empowered. They tell us real success lies in breaking away from the pressure of social norms, challenging authority, and being disagreeable. These brands represent character strengths that we humans universally hold up as positive and admirable qualities—bravery, perseverance, fairness.”

In essence, to be a challenger your brand needs to:

  • Be somewhere in the middle of the market. You’re not first, but you’re not last. You have enough experience and validity to get in the ring and start punching above your weight.
  • Have an insatiable hunger and big ambitions that go beyond hitting your numbers. You and your employees need to share a fundamental belief that you are unlike any other company on the planet.
  • Understand what it takes to close the gap between good and great. When you talk about something as aspirational as a company’s vision for the future, you should never limit yourself to making something merely good. This isn’t a task to work on; it’s a shared vision to work toward.

Culture is the lifeblood of challenger brands

All things considered, this is as much about emotion and personality as it is about strategic priorities. If there’s a straight line through challenger brands, it’s the infectious culture they cultivate and maintain through the ups and downs. And how do you shape culture? Through your mission, vision, beliefs, and behaviors. “Clarity around what a business believes in, and what change it’s trying to bring about, acts as both inspiration and filter for the kinds of disruption it will pursue,” says Mark Barden. “Without that clarity, disruption becomes chaos pretty quickly.”

To continue reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part two—Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers & Part three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

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

Emotive Brand and Emotive Branding: Our Origin Story

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands for the Better

The idea of emotive branding—and the creation of our agency, Emotive Brand—flowed from our desire to make a positive difference in the way people and brands interacted with each other. These were our goals:

  • Bridge the gap between commerce and civility.
  • Create brands that people appreciate, respect, and actively seek out.
  • Help employees of brands feel better about their jobs.
  • Make partners and suppliers vie for the opportunity to work with our clients.
  • See communities welcome our clients’ brands with open arms.

As a result of all of this goodwill, our clients’ brands would thrive and prosper.

Realizing the Value of Meaning Something More

We came to those goals through two major realizations:

First, as consumers ourselves, we noticed that only a handful of brands really went out of their way to mean anything to us. When they did make a connection, wow, it was love! We’d go out of our way to interact and engage these brands. We even felt disappointed when we had to settle for something less. We’d get excited when other people started talking about these brands and chimed in with our most recent, “I can top that!” story. These brands had come to mean something to us because they had a clear reason for being and made us feel something good time and time again.

On the other hand, zillions of brands never really hit our emotional radar. These brands meant almost nothing to us–even though we’ve heard about them or even bought and used dozens of the brands regularly.  

A Problem in the “Brand Decks”

Second, as brand experts, we saw firsthand why so many brands fell flat–lackluster and bland–in the minds of customers. As designers, copywriters, and strategists, we work on virtually every aspect of communication from identity to websites to advertising to point-of-sale to employee recruitment and beyond. Behind each piece of work, there’s always a brief, and often attached to the brief is a two-hundred some page PDF titled “About the Brand.”

Reading through many of these so-called “brand decks,” we quickly recognized a problem. In fact, the “brand decks” were the problem.

Traditional brand thinking results from business people from branding agencies talking to business people within client organizations. The language they use is full of industry jargon, client-speak, and solely rational thinking. Everything is expounded upon, nothing is simplified, and little is made human. And after several rounds of review, the final documents show the scars of compromise.

And what do these documents lack? The brand’s meaning as defined by its reason for being (why it does what it does) and how the brand wants people to feel (how the brand connects emotionally with customers). Brand decks, on the whole, left out what matters most to us as consumers and businesses and what we admire most in the great brands out there.

So we asked the question: What if meaning was the entry point into brand thinking rather than an appendage at the end? And that, folks, is how Emotive Brand was born.

Learn more about our methodology emotive branding, how our approach challenges convention, and why emotive branding is a next generation brand strategy.

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

Adopt a Growth Mindset to Drive Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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.

Growth Mindset Is Key

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.

Adopt a Growth Mindset to Drive Business By:

1. Seeking out learners

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.

2. Allowing employees to step out of their daily work

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.  

3. Building a culture that is willing to take risks and accept failure

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.

4. Driving commitment, determination, and innovation

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]