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Tag: Agency Work

The Fusion of Strategy and Design

Posted on by Imri Larsen

The Best Branding Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Since its founding in the 1950s, branding has largely been divided into two distinct disciplines: strategy and design. Strategy’s traditional role is to research, understand the competitive landscape, distill the meaning, and establish the market opportunity into a well-formed creative brief. At this point, designers typically take the brief and visually communicate against the strategic objectives.

The handoff from strategy to design is not without its pitfalls. Oftentimes, key information gets lost. Strategists can work in intellectual isolation, sometimes forgetting how ideas can manifest and communicate non-verbally. Designers, on the other hand, have the challenge of breathing life into work they did not have a hand in creating. That’s a lot of potential to leave on the table.

Good Ideas Come from Anywhere

Strategy needs to be able to uncover ideas that clearly communicate the value of a brand in a way that can connect with audiences. Too much academic isolation can leave strategies flat, empty, and impractical (looking at you, Peloton). On the flip side, brand design void of strategy risks being received as an artistic expression without any clear purpose (remember the Tropicana redesign?).

In today’s complicated and fragmented world, audiences are more informed and aware than ever. Only brands with compelling creative and strategically-sound value propositions are able to cut through the clutter and connect with customers. In other words, only the best ideas can win.

In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From,” the author argues that “the trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” When it comes to branding, this means that design and strategy need to be working in tandem throughout the entire project.

The Approach in Practice

When design and strategy work hand-in-hand, strategists get to experiment immediately with new and different ways of communication earlier than they usually would. Oftentimes, discussion leads to powerful metaphors and concepts that can inspire design. Designers get first-hand experience with the raw data that is used to shape strategy.

More interestingly, there is space for those who sit somewhere between worlds. At Emotive Brand, we call these players Creative Strategists. During our recent work for Gantry, creative strategy played an important role in guiding the process.

“Very early on, in a collaborative meeting with strategists and designers, we came up with the concept that the emotional foundation of real estate should be just as strong as the physical one,” said Creative Strategist, Chris Ames. “This wasn’t really copy, it wasn’t exactly a brand idea, but it was a common language we all agreed on: emotional support as scaffolding. And while there were a million other vital strategic pieces and meetings, this common thread helped us stay in-sync in a language we all understood. It’s about the ability to structure thinking logically for non-writers and visualize big ideas for non-designers. That’s the magic.”

What’s the result of this integrated approach? Designs are deeply rooted in strategy. Strategy has vetted ideas for clarity and actionability along the way. Before the creative brief is even written, powerful ideas are being generated and the work moves forward seamlessly. This makes for better work that can be done in less time.

The Challenge of an Integrated Approach

Agencies and consultancies large and small have talked at length about the importance of fusing these disciplines, but few are able to deliver a truly collaborative approach. Self-constructed silos and the egos of leaders often become stumbling blocks. The heart of the matter is that working in this truly collaborative way can be uncomfortable, but the results are worth the effort.

Truthfully, getting strategy and design to work well together is hard for human reasons. It takes a lot of humility to check your proficiency and talent at the door to contribute to projects where you aren’t always the expert. When teams can exhaustively explore ideas and don’t allow themselves to be precious with ownership, then the best ideas will flourish.

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

Looking for a Better Client-Agency Relationship? Look No Further

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Sara Gaviser Leslie is a brand marketer, creative consultant, and former Emotive Brand employee. After years of thriving on the agency-side of the equation, she recently took an interim position at Course Hero to experience the client-side of things. If you’re looking to improve your client-agency relationship, here are her five tips to make sure every project is a success.

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The Client-Agency Relationship

Until recently, I’ve never experienced a brand creative project from the client-side. I was always the consultant. But, recently, when I took an interim but full-time role with a client, I was asked to run a creative project. I had expected mine would be the easier assignment; someone else was doing the work, right? What I learned, though, is that the client—and their relationship with the agency team—can improve the outcome of a project but also sabotage its success. I noticed some things that helped drive the success of these projects. Whether you’re working with an agency on a brand strategy, campaign, or video series, I am hoping they’ll help you, too.

1. Sharing Is Caring

Almost every project starts with a discovery phase. This is when the client shares all the materials that explain the company’s strategy and current brand. Your agency will likely give you a list of suggested documents. Don’t hold back! It’s your agency’s job to review the material; more really is better. And don’t worry if pieces are in draft form. Just send them along.

2. Make Yourself Uncomfortable—At Least a Little

One of the reasons that you chose the agency you did was because you saw the work they’d completed for other clients. It was clever, interesting, and maybe a bit unexpected, right?

I get that it’s easier to propose something unexpected when you are on the agency-side. I’d caution against clients playing things safe, however. As the marketing/brand representative from your company, your role is to ensure that the agency’s work is on-brand. The agency’s role is to create something different and memorable. Where these two roles converge is where the best creative work happens.

3. Chase Enthusiasm

Following from the point above, when you get to the point of choosing between different campaign options, as long as neither compromises the brand, choose the one that the agency likes best. You want to work on things that excite you, right? Your agency is no different. If they gravitate to a certain concept, take that cue. They’ll be more excited to work on that idea and you’ll get a better product.

4. Educate Them on What You Have Learned

One of the reasons I love consulting is because I love learning about new industries, business models, and technologies. My clients are great teachers. In a recent project, while our agency had original and interesting ideas for new social assets, they had less experience actually implementing these assets on different channels. You may also find that your agency is less skilled in performance marketing, content strategy, sales, or other execution work. Teach them! When you, the client, explain how you will use assets and what methods are most successful, your agency will be better equipped to meet your creative and implementation needs.

5. Lean on Them for Support

A campaign or other creative project is an investment. But it’s not worth pursuing this kind of project if you can’t implement it. If you have to move individuals in-house from one high-priority project to your high-priority campaign, your company loses. Similarly, if you are shorthanded on designers, copywriters, or videographers, make your needs known to your agency. Agency teams include full-time team employees, but most also have connections to freelancers in every possible area. Getting the right implementation team—whether internal or external—ensures that the creative work wasn’t in vain.

Instead of two parties on opposite sides of a negotiation, think about projects with agencies as partnerships filled with lots of possibilities. A growth mindset pushes you forward. What can you do together? What can each side gain? Agencies and clients are better when they work together.

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

Who Thrives at a Brand Strategy and Design Agency?

Posted on by Chris Ames

What type of person thrives at a brand strategy and design agency? Looking around our office, we have people from advertising, journalism, psychology, economics, sociology, sales, graphic design, media – and like any successful venture, a few restless English majors.

Is there a through-line? In our line of work, we privilege business acumen, technical fluency, big idea thinking, writing prowess, collaborative mindsets, passion, curiosity, empathy, and an obsession for the details. We get just as excited by an experiential brand launch as an exquisitely organized messaging matrix.

With our clients, we identify the full range of levers – rational and emotional, strategic and aesthetic – to create an impact across business, brand, and culture. It’s a holistic approach to solving business challenges that requires a little bit of everything.

In a roundtable interview with the Emotive Brand team, we’re attempting to connect the dots by asking: What initially drew you to branding? And what does your unique background bring to the table?

Kyla Grant, Director of Operations

To be perfectly honest, when I started with Emotive Brand, I had no idea what branding meant. I thought I knew, but little did I understand that what I had in my mind was the tip of the iceberg, the small sliver of what branding meant. It’s so much more than the superficial logo, it’s the heart and soul of what a company is. My background is pretty varied, but my strength lies is operationalizing things, in figuring out how to bring an idea, a concept, a strategy to life. My mind lives in the gaps of understanding that I look to fill in order to bring everyone along, without any missteps.

Carol Emert, Strategist

I’m naturally into meaning-making through insight, and branding lets me make a living at what would otherwise be a very passionate avocation. Brands sit at the very root of meaning for organizations, which means that they are absolutely critical for organizational well-being. Just as individual people seek meaning in our personal lives, it’s important for both organizations and for the people who are passionate about them to understand the organization’s meaning and its purpose. Then we can really live it.

Bella Banbury, Founding Partner

I started my career in sports marketing and was always fascinated by which brands were attracted to a specific athlete or sport, and those that were successful in lodging their brand into our hearts and minds often without us even knowing it. I loved brands that were creative and clever in their approach. Fast forward to today, we now sit on the front end of crafting those strategies. As an aside, I don’t think there is anything specific about my background that influences our work other than I am curious about how brands influence and shape our culture. I’ve always worked on the agency side and I never ever take clients for granted or forget this is a service industry.

Robert Saywitz, Design Director

I would say that branding sort of found me rather than me searching it out. When I was in art school, “branding” wasn’t the ubiquitous term it is today, and I found myself in a Visual Identity course where we were tasked with creating brand identity systems, a logo being at the center of it all. My background in drawing and painting, especially my sense of craft – draftsmanship, attention to detail, and visual storytelling – suddenly brought my design ability, and design thinking, to a higher and ultimately much more personal level when faced with the challenges of creating logos and expanding their story into a brand landscape. It wasn’t until working in New York did all of this crystalize into the more tangible world of branding but similar to my first epiphany in school, everything still begins with crafting an iconic logo and expands outward from there.

Jon Schleuning, Strategist

I grew up in Oregon and ran cross-country in high school. The early Nike campaigns struck a chord. There is no finish line. The sense of being part of something instead of just buying a shoe.

Thomas Hutchings, Creative Director

I am actually interested in the subversive side of what branding is: mass consumerism, the ability to use subliminal tactics to make people buy or feel something or just to provoke a reaction. To me, I actually have an ability to manipulate through something not everyone can do. I think in the early days, I was always fascinated by advertising, then somewhere along the way, I learned that I can use design with branding to make a more prolonged effect. Advertising is the 100m sprint, branding is a marathon. I may not always know what is right for the greater design world, but I know what’s right for the brand or understand it as a personality to know what’s right.

Chris Ames, Creative Strategist

I think that thing that I both love and hate about branding is the power of narrative to inform, sway, misdirect, or charm. Those who study the Humanities are often told that their skills will not translate to a “real job” after college. And then when you enter the job market, you find that most companies biggest problems – building a healthy and inclusive culture, telling a cohesive story, articulating their purpose, cutting through the noise – are humanistic disciplines. I try to bring a sense of empathy to this process and constantly remind myself that the best branding puts real people at the center, not glorified technology or embarrassing jargon.

The Only Prerequisite Is Curiosity

Regardless of background, it seems the unifying principle of brand strategy and design is a deep curiosity for how things look, feel, and influence the world around us. At its best, branding is an investigation into meaning. It’s engaging with the unseen and overlooked aspects of business, products, and experience. If you’re interested creative problem-solving, design-thinking, or the intricacies of brand strategy, don’t hesitate to contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd.

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

Mind the Gap: Bridging Strategy and Design

Posted on by Jon Schleuning

Here’s a simple truth I’ve learned working at both design-led and strategy-focused agencies. Strategy and design work best when they work together – from beginning to end.

The problem is that strategy and creative are often regarded as separate instead of complementary disciplines. They have separate teams, separate processes, different skillsets, different client interactions. They approach problems from different angles. They may sit on different floors, different buildings, or even different firms. And, typically, the biggest communication between the teams is a handoff from one to the next.

Great Strategy Doesn’t Always Lead to Great Creative

Sometimes, strategy is too cerebral. Sometimes, it tries to appease too many business needs. Sometimes, it just isn’t bold or incisive enough. And if strategy doesn’t strike a strong emotional chord, it often ends up sitting on a shelf­ as an academic exercise that people don’t know what to do with.

But when creative lacks strategic direction, although it may be beautifully designed and visually stunning, it risks addressing the wrong problem, the wrong audience, or the wrong objective. And if designers can’t find inspiration in the strategy, they will search for it somewhere else.

A Collective Endeavor

Bringing strategy and design together means thinking of it as a collective endeavor, not a linear process. It sounds easy in words, but putting it into practice takes commitment from everyone involved. As an agency who has been fusing design and strategy from the start, here’s how we do it.

  1. Bring design and strategy together, from the outset.
    We involve our design team in client interviews, workshops, and presentations, even when creative is far away from starting. Being integrated into early-stage strategic work helps designers understand the project and the process deeply. Our strategists work side by side with designers on creative – brainstorming, concepting, and elevating the design with on-strategy copy.
  2. One table, one team.
    We bring the entire team together around one table throughout the project. Each mode of thinking informs, respects, and challenges the other. A difference of perspectives and backgrounds elevates all of our work and challenges us to push our limits.
  3. Strategy guides, creative expresses.
    There’s a yin-yang to the process. Even when the two are in balance, we designate clear roles for everyone. We play to the strengths of each individual and build the team around people, not necessarily roles.
  4. Enjoy the journey.
    One of the great joys of a project is seeing a brand come to life strategically and experientially. Understanding how strategy and design build off each other to create that magic is energizing, and what ultimately brings us into work every day.

Smart Clients Want Both

For our clients, the results of this approach are energizing and empowering. Campaigns have a greater impact because they connect strategically and emotionally. Brands have a cohesive expression and articulation across every touchpoint. Identity projects, websites, and product launches are smarter because they tie together rationally and emotionally. When strategy and design both emotionally connect, great brands come to life in new, exciting, and surprising ways.

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